Every so often, Canada Reads introduces you to a book that you absolutely needed to read, it opens the world to a new voice and story and gives a book that needed a wider platform that boost. Jonny Appleseed is one of those books.
it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman.
The East Side of It All draws on Joseph Dandurand’s first-hand experiences of life as a drug user and single-room occupant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and of the ongoing process of healing through reconnection with family, the natural world and traditional Indigenous (Kwantlen) storytelling.
Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence is the second collection of writings by Palmater. In keeping with her previous works, numerous op-eds, media commentaries, YouTube channel videos and podcasts, Palmater’s work is fiercely anti-colonial, anti-racist, and more crucial than ever before.
Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.
Some books are there to offer the kinds of stories that can light on our paths and help us figure out a way forward. The North-West is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation by historian Jean Teillet has been that kind of book to me. I’ve been writing about the life of …
Taylor’s two-person play Cottagers and Indians was inspired by a years-long dispute between cottage owners on Pigeon Lake in Ontario and an Anishnawbe man seeding manoomin (wild rice) in their waterways. In the play, Maureen Poole, a white woman at her lakeside split-level ranch house, and Arthur Copper, an Indigenous man in his canoe, face …
In this extraordinary and inspiring debut memoir, Jesse Thistle, once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, chronicles his life on the streets and how he overcame trauma and addiction to discover the truth about who he is.
Barbara Radecki’s sophomore novel, Messenger 93, opens with a flutter of information. A mind-bending conversation with a crow kicks off the absorbing thriller, and cryptic messages, hidden clues, and uncertain instructions become the norm in M, the narrator’s, life. M feels compelled to investigate the disappearance of a girl named Krista, and her movements over …
[dropcap]Mark[/dropcap] Bourrie has written a classic Canadian historical biography. The best-selling author, and award-winning journalist, lays bare the mottled myths of colonial settlement. He weaves a compelling, sometimes lurid, but always enlightening narrative of the legendary adventurer, scoundrel, Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Bush Runner chronicles Radisson’s adventures from exploiting the expanding fur trade to finagling European imperial …
Joan Thomas’s GG-award winning fourth novel, based on actual events, is mainly set in the 1950s in Ecuador. In 1956, a group of American missionaries set their sights on a group of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian rainforest with the intention of converting them to Christianity.
Penn Kemp’s River Revery came to me just before Christmas. It FELT like a present; the cover – Mary McDonald photo, Mike O’Connor design – a copse of evergreens reaching, waving, to an avian line, all in reverential shades of aquamarine.
Independent bookstores shouldn’t exist. Brick-and-mortar bibliophile havens are retail models waiting to be business school case studies, “Why These Can’t Work.” TV narcissi could bleat indefinitely as to why they’d never invest in such ventures. But they do exist. And despite every reason why they shouldn’t, they thrive.
[dropcap]The [/dropcap]Sgt. Windflower Mystery series is a series of cozy mysteries set in the small Newfoundland town of Grand Bank where Sgt. Winston Windflower is the top cop in the RCMP detachment there. The latest instalment in the series, A Tangled Web (2017, Baico Publishing), has just been released. It begins innocuously enough: “Life doesn’t …
Editor’s note: there is a more recent interview with Rick Revelle here. It was by sheer happenstance that I came across Rick Revelle and his two historical novels: I am Algonquin and Algonquin Springs (2013 and 2015, Dundurn Press). I was in Kingston (Ontario) visiting family when an article in that day’s edition of the Kingston …
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
