My review copy of The Great Lunenburglary arrived with a handwritten note from the author, “Please enjoy this silly book.” Clearly, author Bryn Pottie has no literary illusions. In fact, on a recent podcast he describes his target reader for his debut novel as anyone who’s “read less than a handful of books since high …
Astrid, Aghast is the sixth book by Ottawa-area writer Ian Roy, his third collection of short stories. It’s a substantial volume containing thirty stories, a beautiful edition from Gaspereau Press, made to feel all the more substantial by the Zephyr Antique Laid stock it is printed on. The book is given a classic feel, which …
Acclaimed author and English professor Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, Lords of Serendipity, is set between Sri Lanka and the United States, and follows two ambitious young women whose dreams of elite higher education expose a much larger world of parental sacrifice, global inequality, institutional gatekeeping, and the complicated moral economy surrounding modern universities. Both sharply …
In Billie Builds a RoboCorn, the debut picture book from Toronto filmmaker José Lourenço, Billie and her father must move when her father gets a new job, and Billie must go to a new school, which is “very unfair.” Not to be kept down, the “relentlessly resourceful” Billie has a plan: she will build her …
The title of Jaclyn Desforges’s new book of short fiction, Weird Babies, is absolutely appropriate. These stories are about childhood and motherhood, and they are strange. Strange and delightful, that is: the characters and their experiences are situated to one side of what we might consider normal, ranging from speculative fiction to something close to …
Featuring Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Jo-Ann Roberts, Jacqueline Halsey, and Marjorie Simmins
You hear it often enough: the past clings and refuses to let go. Or how it echoes into the present with the crippling fear of repetition. It’s almost like condemnation, scorn and a warning all wrapped in one. Too much reminiscing about the past leaves you blind to the present, but forgetting leaves you susceptible …
Complex female characters? Check. Historical revolution? Check. Challenging themes of race and class? Check. Opera? Check! The World So Wide by Zilla Jones is a beefy read in more ways than one, spanning decades, countries, nationalities, lovers, and stages. It really has everything, but most importantly it has Felicity, the main character. Felicity Alexander, the …
In Stephanie Makes a Scene, we meet her decades later and Rory takes the back seat. It is thrilling to connect the stories and see her develop into a promising older playwright, returning to Landers Cove, Nova Scotia at sixty-seven years old.
Part Harry Potter, part Nancy Drew with a steampunk aesthetic, and weaving in elements of women in STEM, Briarwood is a typical middle school novel about what it feels like to be the odd one out (both at home and in school), only to find where you do belong in a new place with new people.
Featuring Alex Boyd, Brent van Staalduinen, André Narbonne, and donalee Moulton
As a Neo-noir Neo-pulp (to coin a term), The Longest Death impressed and entertained me.
Though focused on Muslim Pakistani Canadian women, there’s some DNA of Bushnell/Star in Sima Qadeer’s story collection, Brown Girls, Grown Up.
In Tyson Stewart’s debut novel, themes of broken family ties, reconnection, and ethical dilemmas are explored within an Anishinaabe family in northern Ontario.
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