Lindy Reads and Reviews

Beauty Plus Pity by Kevin Chong

2012-01-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Beauty Plus Pity: the title comes from Nabokov's definition of art, reminding us that beauty is fleeting and that "the world dies with the individual." Malcolm Kwan's world collapses around him when two life-changing events happen in quick succession - his father dies and his fiance leaves him. Malcolm was born shortly after his parents immigrated to Vancouver from Hong Kong. He is now an aimless twenty-something pursuing a modelling career for lack of a better idea of what to do with his life. Hadley, a younger half-sister that Malcolm didn't know about until the day of his father's funeral, becomes a catalyst for change. Thanks to her, Malcolm is drawn out of his self-absorption and begins to pay more attention to the people around him.

Canadian author Kevin Chong has an ear for the inherent humour in human foibles. Beauty Plus Pity will appeal to readers interested in themes of identity, family secrets and the immigrant experience.

Readalikes: Anything by Douglas Coupland; Money Boy by Paul Yee (for the Chinese immigrant identity and family relationships); Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron (for the feeling of malaise as a young man sorts out his future, as well as the humour and family dynamics); and maybe Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine (which is in graphic novel format, and explores ethnicity and desire with an understated, spare style).

Mangaman by Barry Lyga and Colleen Doran

2012-01-27T10:55:00.002-07:00

A character from the world of manga falls into an American graphic novel... it's not only a great concept, but well executed. Barry Lyga and Colleen Doran have created a clever and entertaining work of metafiction in Mangaman.

Government agents are trying to devise a way to send back Ryoko Kiyama after he comes through a Rip in the universe, but after several months without success, they decide to send him to a local high school while they work on the problem. Ryoko promptly falls in love with Marissa Montaigne, thereby causing a disturbance in her school's universe. It turns out that manga conventions came through with Ryoko. When he sees Marissa for the first time, flowers appear in the air around him and his eyes turn to hearts. The students who witness this are understandably freaked out. When Marissa's ex-boyfriend moves to defend her from this weirdness, Ryoko leaps with excitement: "Big time high school challenge! Awesome karate fight!" Motion lines ray outward from his entire body -- and these become black sticks littering the ground around him in the next scene. What fun!

Will Ryoko be able to return to the manga world? Will he want to?

Doran artfully combines East and West drawing styles. It doesn't matter whether you are a fan of one or the other, I promise you won't want to miss this.

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

2012-01-25T09:43:00.001-07:00

In this epic fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay brings an alternate Tang-era China to life. Shen Tai has chosen an unorthodox way to mourn his father's death. Shen Gao was a famous general, and that is why Shen Tai spends two years in a remote valley, burying the bones of long-dead soldiers. 40,000 men from two armies fell there; every night, Shen Tai hears the ghostly screams of the yet-unburied. His efforts yield an unexpected gift, one that is so valuable that it not only changes his life, but also the history of his country.

Under Heaven is an adventure saga with a richly described setting and a large cast of realistic characters. It will appeal to fans of both historical fiction and fantasy.

Readalike: Tales of the Otori series by Lian Hearn.

The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon

2012-01-21T17:26:00.005-07:00

Family secrets, the bonds of friendship and the scourge of urban development are at the heart of this entertaining novel set in contemporary Toronto. Poor folk living and working in the Kensington Market area battle rich property developers who want to level it and put up high rise buildings there instead. Revenge based on mistaken assumptions gets carried beyond the grave when ghosts join the fight.

One of the joys of this quirky novel is the omniscient narrator who addresses the reader directly, at times, but not in the Victorian "dear Reader" style. On page 2: "Mani may not seem to be a particularly likeable character, but he is not going to be in this story for very long."

"'Why don't you sit down?' [Nancy said to Henry.] 'Have a glass of water. It's got fluoride in it.' 'That's because the government wants you dead,' said Henry. 'But at least they're killing you slowly,' said Nancy. 'There's time to sit down.'"

Find time to read this when you're in the mood to be charmed.

Readalikes: Come Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant; Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King; The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

2012-01-14T09:02:00.001-07:00

Planets are won or lost in the galactic poker games of the gods in Meg Rosoff's There Is No Dog... which is how a dyslexic adolescent god named Bob came to be in charge of Earth, a "tiny, unproven" planet, "badly positioned -- miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat rundown part of the universe."

Bob was lazy, but he could be creative when the mood struck him. "And, boy oh boy, did Bob go to town on the creatures. He put spines on some, and strange colours on others; he added feathers and scales and sometimes feathers and scales; savage teeth and beady eyes on some, and sweet expressions and razor-sharp claws on others. Some of the fowl were lovely to look at, with long graceful necks and luxuriant plumage, but others had the most idiotically large feet, or wings that didn't work. [...] And then Bob went on to create every creeping thing, and some that leapt and climbed and slithered and tunnelled as well, and he told them to be frantic and multiply, which they did by the most gobsmackingly weird mechanism ..."

Skip forward many millenia, to find that Bob has mostly lost interest in his Earthly creations. Except for a certain young woman, a human. Lucy is a zookeeper in contemporary England. She has no idea what she is in for when her world's god decides to come wooing.

There Is No Dog is imaginative, playful and witty. Highly recommended for Grade 7 through to adult.

Readalikes: The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips.

Money Boy by Paul Yee

2012-01-11T20:44:00.001-07:00

Ray Liu is a closeted gay 18-year-old Chinese immigrant in contemporary Toronto. He came to Canada against his will four years earlier with his father and stepmother. Ray's English is still quite poor, he's a lackluster student and his main interest is online gaming. When his father discovers that Ray has been visiting gay websites, he kicks him out and locks the door.

Life on the street is a shock for Ray, who has been rather spoiled and sulky up to that point. Now, the only way that he can think of to support himself is by selling his body -- what's called being a money boy in Beijing. The poignancy of Ray's story is rooted in Paul Yee's realistic portrayal of Ray, the hard choices he must make, and the way his character strengthens over a short period of time.

I'm excited about booktalking Money Boy to a gay-straight alliance club at J. Percy Page high school tomorrow. Many of the students at that school were born outside Canada. The other books I'll be telling them about are listed here.

Huntress by Malinda Lo

2012-01-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

Set in the same fantasy world as Malinda Lo's Ash, Huntress is a prequel that stands on its own. Something has gone awry with the seasons and widespread famine is a possibility. Taisin and Kaede are both 17-year-old girls who have been chosen to be part of a covert group who will respond to an invitation to visit the Fairy Queen's court at midsummer. The hope is that the fairies will be able to provide assistance in dealing with the world's dire lack of sunshine.

Taisin is alerted by her prophetic sight that she will be deeply in love with Kaede at some point in the future, but she is adamantly opposed to this happening. It's not because she has any objection to same-sex romance, but rather because Taisin is determined to be a sage at the Academy and that job comes with a vow of celibacy. It makes for a lot of sexual tension in the story. Meanwhile, their mission is fraught with danger every step of the way.

Huntress has more of an Asian flair than Ash; a sort of I Ching meets fairies and unicorns. I happen to like Ash better only because I have a soft spot for grief themes and also for retellings of traditional stories (Cinderella, in this case). Both books are great for teens and adults who enjoy fantasy with strong female characters. Queer content is a bonus!

Any Empire by Nate Powell

2012-01-09T06:36:00.002-07:00

Once again, Nate Powell (Swallow Me Whole) explores the American psyche in his latest graphic novel, Any Empire. This time he looks at the effects of war and violence on young people growing up in a small town. Powell's artwork is often wordless except for sound effects: the huff of exertion; a cry of pain; distant voices indicated in word balloons with text to small to read; ... and the wup, wup, wup of unseen helicopters and boom of unseen bombs.

Lee and Purdy hang out together as kids, even though their only shared interest is playing imaginative war games. Both have fathers who were in the U.S. military. Purdy is the leader of a small group of boys, but Lee doesn't participate in their mysterious activities. Meanwhile, a girl named Sarah suspects the boys of killing turtles.

Fast forward to Lee and Sarah, meeting again after they are out of high school, living once again in the same town. Purdy has been injured in army duty overseas and he is back too. Expect some weirdness - this is Nate Powell - and be ready for a powerful tale. The ending is pure genius.

The Finder Library (Volume 1) by Carla Speed McNeil

2012-01-08T19:40:00.001-07:00

Collecting the first 22 issues of the comic Finder (plus extra material), The Finder Library allows complete immersion into about 650 pages of the imaginative world-building, complex relationships and compelling characters created by Carla Speed McNeil. The detailed black and white art is especially absorbing in its depiction of exterior and interior settings. McNeil's sharp social commentary is softened by her sense of humour.

Set far in the future on Earth, the stories center on Jaeger Ayers, who is part Aboriginal. His dual roles as both a sin-eater and a finder set him apart from everyone else. Jaeger's sometime lover is Emma, who has left her abusive husband, Brigham. Emma and Brigham are from different clans and their mixed marriage was frowned upon from the start. Jaeger and Brigham have a long history together that began in the army. Emma's three children - Rachel, Lynne and Marcie - are intriguing characters negotiating life within the context of their mixed heritage and insane father. The middle child was born male but raised as a daughter. Emma's father looks more feminine than her mother - another tantalizing thread in the overall cultural picture. The queer content is secondary, yet well-integrated and appealing.

Talisman was the only portion of this story that I had previously read and I was delighted to encounter it again within this collection. Volume 2 of The Finder Library beckons, but I've got a stack of other books to get through first.

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

2012-01-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

In a post-apocalyptic future that resembles the lawless wild west of yore, Saba vows to rescue her twin brother, Lugh, from the horsemen who stole him away from their dust bowl farm. She is admirably single-minded in her quest, undeterred by setbacks like being caged and forced to fight against other girls. Brave Saba escapes to tangle with skeletons and battle giant mutant worms. Even the sexiest of guys -- with moonlight silver eyes and a muscled, hairless chest -- will not sidetrack her resolve. So what if Saba's magic pendant gets warm whenever Jack is near... she will push him in the mud if he tries to kiss her!

"I ain't dreamed of fire before. An it warn't Lugh I was searchin fer so frantic. I dunno who it was." Saba's backwoods diction and terse style translate well to audiobook format (Recorded Books; 11.25 hours) performed by Heather Lind. I'm a sucker for dialect, especially in audio. The downside in this novel is that there is a lot of yelling, which Lind whisper-shouts. It was easier on the ears than actual shouting, and I don't know if there is a better alternative, but it was annoying anyway.

Blood Red Road is pure escapist adventure, the kind of book with witty quips exchanged during battle skirmishes and the ability to somehow see perfectly across long distances on cloudy nights. Young women racing on horseback, long past the age of combustion engines, urge one another to "get the lead out." It isn't a book for thinking; it's for when you feel like being swept away by fierce characters, a vivid setting and nonstop action. I liked that Saba isn't a romantic. When Jack tells her: "You make my brain hurt," she says: "Yer the most puffed-up big-headed swagger boots I ever met."

It's Canadian-born Moira Young's first novel. It's a lot of fun and it won the Costa Children's Book Award earlier this week. If you enjoyed The Hunger Games, you gotta read Blood Red Road.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki

2012-01-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

Shigeru Mizuki says that 90 % of his historical manga is based on his own experiences in the Imperial Army in the South Pacific during World War II. His artwork contrasts cartoonish figures of people against very realistic background drawings of Papua New Guinea's tropical setting. It is a moving account of what happened to the troops who survived after their commanding officer ordered them to die in battle in a suicide mission. From the blurb on the cover: "Mizuki deftly addresses and critiques the moral depravity of war."

Readalikes: Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert for another graphic novel about the senselessness of war from a soldier's point of view; The Color of Earth by Kim Dong Hwa for its similar art style; and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami for the storyline (among several) that is about a Japanese soldier's experiences in Manchuria.

The Man in the Moon-Fixer's Mask by JonArno Lawson

2012-01-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

JonArno Lawson's jaunty poems collected in The Man in the Moon-Fixer's Mask beg to be shared out loud. I'm particularly fond of the shortest ones:

"We saw a hippopotamus; / I don't know what it thought of us. / I doubt it thought a lot of us; / a glimpse was all it got of us." (Hippopotamus)

"Aghast that a guest was a ghost, / a fellow guest goaded the host -- / The gist of it was / he was angry because / a gust from a ghost chilled his toast." (Aghast)

Lawson's love of language is evident in poem titles like: A Princess Apprentice; The Rhinostrich; and The Frog Knows His Prognosis. Simple illustrations by Sherwin Tjia accentuate the slightly oddball, playful mood.

Readalikes: anything by Dennis Lee.

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus by William Todd Schultz

2012-01-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

Photographer Diane Arbus has a mystique to match her fame. What compelled her to photograph people "in the midst of the residue of their disordered lives"? The facial expressions she captures are often of discomfort, embarrassment or irritation. There are no photos included in An Emergency in Slow Motion, but many of those referenced can be viewed in a gallery online here.

Prostitutes, cross-dressers, lesbians, eccentrics and nudists were some of the subjects that fascinated her. Biographer William Schultz writes that her camera "provided a kind of harsh yet undeniable attention people believed they deserved." Statements like this made me uneasy as I read; how does Schultz know what Arbus' subjects believed? Penelope Tree describes modelling for Arbus as torture: "Now I know why everyone in her pictures looks like they do -- because they have to spend three hours with Diane Arbus staring at them."

I was curious to know more about Arbus, so I persevered with this book, even though psychobiography is not my thing. I'm not convinced that it's possible to understand an artist by analyzing their work.

Schultz admits that the best he can aim for in his interpretation is a blurry picture. "But that's what people are. Personality is blurry. Life itself is blurry. We live in ambiguity. We die there too." In 1971, when she was 48, Arbus killed herself. Even though she took two kinds of barbiturates and slashed both wrists, Schultz doesn't believe that her death was intentional. He strengthens his case with input from Arbus's therapist, but it still looks like suicide to me.

In addition to overcoming my resistance to Schultz's approach, getting used to his specialized language took me about three chapters. For example, in reference to photos exploring sameness (as with twins and triplets): "She welded bodies symbiotically, forced physical unities, while at the same time flaunting binary oppositions. I see this as a visual representation of Arbus's internalized object relations." Thankfully, unfamiliar terms are usually explained within the text: "Compulsion is [...] a response to ego-dystonic thoughts -- ideas at odds with the self."

Schultz doesn't shy away from discussing sex and the way he sees it defining Arbus's motives and conflicts. "If what Arbus wanted, and this is what she said herself, was to freeze sordidness, perversity, nastiness, puerility, then sex fits the bill. Freaks show us, aggressively, what we prefer overlooking, but sex ups the emotional ante." Arbus had both male and female sexual partners. She "called herself an explorer, and she was, no doubt, with all the requisite bravery and heedlessness. She was seeking the territory of the self."

Was Arbus a freak, as Schultz asserts? Was her pathology also her genius? I don't know if it matters, but I will view her photos with more context from here onward.

Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff

2012-01-01T19:10:00.002-07:00

It's tricky to write about Kid and Scout, teens living on the streets one summer in contemporary Brooklyn, because author Steve Brezenoff carefully never identifies the gender of either of them. Kid addresses the tale directly to Scout, jumping backwards and forwards in time to explain the situation.

Gender fluidity is unacceptable to Kid's father and it's the reason his fifteen-year-old is not welcome at home: "I've got the only kid I know who doesn't know whether to be straight or gay or a girl or a boy or what."

Kid is an artist and musician who had fallen hard for Felix, a junkie. Felix has been gone for nine months but Kid is still grieving when Scout turns up in response to an old poster calling for potential band members. The attraction is immediate, but tentative, as they guard their hearts and find a chosen family at a bar -- not the easiest place for a couple of teens to find safe harbour. There is also the accusation of arson at an abandoned warehouse where Kid and Felix used to sleep.

It's a tender story in a gritty setting. Kid is someone who can see beauty in the weeds coming through cracks in the pavement. I am happy to report that Brooklyn, Burning ends on a realistically positive note.

Readlikes: Almost Home (by Jessica Blank) for another book about queer homeless teens; Written on the Body (by Jeanette Winterson) for another novel narrated by a person of unknown gender.

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

2011-12-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

As with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick's new novel is constructed with sections of text alternating with wordless illustrations. The enlarged graphite pencil artwork is stunning in both books, but it is used to even greater storytelling effect in Wonderstruck. Instead of mostly contributing texture and atmosphere, this time the illustration pages carry an entire storyline, starting in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1927. The text portion of the story begins in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in 1977, with the two timelines eventually converging in New York City.

Rose, the child in the earlier timeline, is deaf. The sense of being cut off from the outer world translates beautifully in the wordless images. Her restlessness and yearnings are portrayed through her actions. Ben, 50 years later, is an orphan searching for information about a father he never knew. Imbued with a gentle sense of wonder, the stories explore what it means to find one's place in the world. A heartwarming experience.

Legend by Marie Lu

2011-12-28T12:20:00.001-07:00

A YA post-apocalyptic dystopia needs believable characters in order to distinguish itself from the many other books in this genre. Marie Lu's Legend accomplishes this in the alternating voices of Daniel "Day" Wing and June Iparis. Day is a teenaged outlaw who failed the Trials and has since eluded the authorities, while becoming an embodiment of the Robin Hood legend. June is a member of the ruling elite, four years younger than her classmates in her university graduating class, legendary for being the only person to get a perfect score on the day of the Trials.

The setting is a repressive dictatorship called The Republic of America, occupying former California after much of the coastline has been flooded. Sure, there are elements shared with The Hunger Games et al, including an America at war with itself, young people forced to undergo some kind of life-changing ceremony, and even personal ornaments that carry symbolic significance. Day and June are star-crossed lovers as well as being pawns in a game much larger than themselves. It was the honest emotions kept me enthralled, along with thrilling adventure and secrets revealed. I also liked that Day's portion of the story is printed in bronze-coloured ink - sometimes it doesn't take much to please me!

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

2011-12-26T10:24:00.001-07:00

Set in 1851 during the California gold rush, this adventure is told in the introspective voice of Eli Sisters, a gentle-hearted contract killer. His job doesn't suit his temperament, but Eli follows the lead of his more ruthless older brother and partner in crime, Charles. Eli is loyal to Charles, while being aware of his faults. He also has complaints about their shared living arrangement. "Charlie has many unsavory acquaintances. They have no respect for the traditional hours of sleep." Eli himself is prone to sudden rage, but only when confronted by the actions of a bully.

Eli describes mastering a surge of anger: "My pants were still down and after collecting my emotions I took up my organ to compromise myself. As a young man, when my temper was proving problematic, my mother instructed me to do this as a means of achieving calm, and I have found it a useful practice ever since."

The chapters are short and the pace is quick. If you like darkly funny books with a strong sense of place and told in an original voice, you will enjoy The Sisters Brothers as much as I did.

Pair this with True Grit (Charles Portis) for another unusual western, or with In Bruges, a comedy about a couple of hitmen written and directed by Martin McDonagh.

Shakespeare's Hamlet: Staged on the Page by Nicki Greenberg

2011-12-24T16:39:00.001-07:00

An inkblot Hamlet and psychedelic background illustrations -- I would not have guessed that these ingredients could make such an enthralling interpretation of Shakespeare. Australian artist Nicki Greenberg put fountain pens and paint brushes into her actors' inky hands, but kept the archaic language. It works brilliantly. I thought I'd just flip through it and enjoy the sumptuous artwork, but I could not help being drawn into the story and appreciating how Greenberg made it come to life. A playful play, suitably tragic. Highly recommended.

The Chronicles of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg and others

2011-12-22T15:30:00.003-07:00

Fourteen outstanding authors tell stories inspired by the surreal charcoal drawing illustrations from a book Chris Van Allsburg published more than a quarter century ago: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. I especially liked A Strange Day in July by Sherman Alexie and Missing in Venice by Gregory Maguire, but there isn’t a dud in the bunch. They all include some element of the supernatural and celebrate the peculiar.

When Van Allsburg was interviewed by Nancy Pearl on Book Lust, he said that Harold and the Purple Crayon was one of his favourite childhood books. Hooray for art and the power of human imagination! The Chronicles of Harris Burdick would make a fine family read-aloud. Grade 3 and up.

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

2011-12-21T12:09:00.002-07:00

The current precarious state of our planet makes Ragnarok, a story about the end of the Norse gods, particularly relevant. A.S. Byatt writes: "We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness."

In addition to drawing on the power of the myths themselves, Byatt ups the ante by examining a young reader's relationship to them. Elements of Norse mythology are entwined with the story of a thin child -- perhaps herself -- in wartime Britain. This child was sure that her father would never return from overseas fighting, and consoled herself reading fairytales and mythology. I like the way Byatt distinguishes between the two, pointing out that myths are often haunting puzzles, unlike the narrative satisfaction offered by the foreseeable outcomes in fairy stories.

Both kinds of writings "offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be." The horrors of angry gods, giant wolves and sea snakes were an escape from the uncertainties of real life. "What was fearsome, the thin child understood, was to have helpless parents."

A detail from the death of the god Baldur attracted me, since this is something that niggled me in Libba Bray's teen novel Going Bovine. In Bray's book, the Baldur character is pierced and killed by driftwood mistletoe. I simply couldn't picture how a floppy plant like mistletoe could be used this way (nor survive as driftwood). Byatt describes the special preparations taken by the trickster god Loki, who "tore it gently from its foothold in an ash tree. It squirmed a little in his facile fingers. [...] Loki stroked and stroked his fleshy bundle, and pulled, and made hard, and spoke sharp words to it, until he had not a clump but a fine grey pole, still a little luminous, like the round pale fruit, still a curious colour like snakeskin or sharkskin rather than bark, but a pole, which he twirled in his clever hands until it balanced like a javelin and had a fine, fine point like a flint arrow." Isn't that nice and clear? Byatt's prose is always a joy.

Readalikes: Other books in the Canongate Myth series, such as A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, Weight by Jeanette Winterson and Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith.

Wandering Son by Shimura Takako

2011-12-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Gender nonconformity is the central theme in this gentle manga story set in contemporary Japan. Shy Nitori Shuichi is a boy who could easily be mistaken for a girl. All of his friends are girls, including Takatsuki Yoshino. Takatsuki-san is tall and handsome. She wishes she could be a boy. Both children are about 10 years old and are classmates in Grade 5 at school.

In a longish afterword, translator Matt Thorn explains some of the word choices he made, since gender and language are inextricably linked. Shimura's artwork is clean and straight-forward, although I sometimes had a little trouble distinguishing similar-looking protagonists.

In volume 1 of Wandering Son, Nitori-kan and Takatsuki-san make hesitant explorations of opposite gender identity, experimenting with clothes and haircuts. Nitori-kan derives a secret pleasure when he buys himself a girl's hairband, for example. Takatsuki-san makes forays into the city while dressed as a boy. The awkwardness typical of their years is portrayed with warmth and humour. They are surrounded by their loving, happy families and school teachers who show genuine care for them. It adds up to a reassuring sense that all will be well for these two as they continue on their journeys to self-knowledge. I look forward to volume 2.

Suitable for Grade 4 and up.

A Porcupine in a Pine Tree by Helaine Becker and Werner Zimmermann

2011-12-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

In this Canadian version of the 12 Days of Christmas, it was the title - A Porcupine in a Pine Tree - that first got my attention. Last winter, porcupines living near my mother's rural home denuded the bark from all of the pine trees that had been planted around her house nearly 20 years ago. None of those trees survived the damage. It's always good to be able to laugh at misfortunes like that, so I showed this picture book to her. It had the desired result: much laughter.

Helaine Becker plays well with word sounds (two caribou; six squirrels curling; nine loons canoeing) and her poem could easily be sung to the familiar tune.

After a porcupine feast

Werner Zimmermann's bright artwork supplements the text with lots of action. The "eight Mounties munching" have their box of donuts stolen by the "seven sled dogs sledding," for example. By the time the "ten Leafs a-leaping" enter, the tottering stack of five Stanley Cups has tumbled and the hockey players attempt to catch them. (When was the last time the Leafs won the Cup?)

The chaos builds until the porcupine restores harmony with a bit of magic at the end. The spindly Charlie Brown tree grows into a giant pine in the final illustration, ornamented with all of the iconic Canadian animals and people. The Stanley Cups are still out of the reach of any of the Leafs.

This is a book for preschoolers that the rest of the family will also enjoy.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

2011-12-17T11:15:00.001-07:00

Tina Fey is funny and she's a feminist. It's a great combination. I really enjoyed listening to her narrate the audiobook edition of her memoir, Bossypants [Hachette: 5.5 hours]. In addition to the benefit of Fey's comedic talent in delivery, the audio version includes the inaugural Saturday Night Live nonpartisan sketch with Fey playing Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton. Fey is always respectful, even of people she parodies -- including Palin. On the rare occasion that she has less-than-kind things to say about someone, she conceals his or her identity, for example by telling us the letters that spell this person's name are scattered throughout the chapter.

Liz Lemon at the NBC store in NYC

I've never watched Fey's creation, 30 Rock, but her praises of the comedy writers on staff there, as well as examples of some of their jokes, made me want to see a few episodes. My sweetie has the first five seasons on dvd; she thinks Fey is the funniest woman on the planet. Fey was the impetus behind a pilgrimage we made to 30 Rockefeller Plaza and the NBC store when we were in New York earlier this year.

Fey not only writes about her career (and working with men who pee in jars because they are too lazy to walk down the hall to the toilet) but also covers some of her childhood experiences, her parents, her (disastrous) honeymoon and motherhood. Recommended to anyone who enjoys a feel-good story from a woman's viewpoint.

The Beaver Manifesto by Glynnis Hood

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

"If I could design the perfect animal, it would be the beaver -- even its looks are compelling." Glynnis Hood's opening sentence makes her admiration for Canada's bucktoothed symbol clear. A longtime National Parks warden and now professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta Augustana campus, Hood has studied beavers for years. Her passion for them is inspiring.

I learned that beavers have been around for millenia and that there were once giant beavers the size of black bears in North America. Beavers have "outlasted the Ice Age, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction." The export of beaver pelts began in the 17th century, fueled by a craze for beaver felt hats. "The trade was to become a big industry; it was a mammalian gold rush complete with espionage, smuggling, ecological warfare and greed." It is a fascinating piece of history, told with tongue-in-cheek humour. She writes about antique maps portraying zombie-like beavers and I found an example online here. Hood outlines the way beavers and the fur trade shaped the formation of Canada as well as contemporary Canadian psyche.

It is the ability of these "remarkable hydrological engineers" to mitigate the effects of drought that has made the strongest impression on me. I grew up on the shore of a small lake near St Paul, about 200 km northeast of Edmonton. Beavers lived there when I was a child, but they were trapped and removed as pests when they prospered and chopped down a lot of trees. In 2002, that lake dried up completely. After reading The Beaver Manifesto, I believe that the lake would have survived if the beavers had still been there. "Whether land managers can bring themselves to see beavers as allies rather than pests, however, is as unpredictable as the weather."

Hood's book is only about 120 pages long and would make a lovely gift for anyone interested in the environment, eco-politics and Canada's history. I love the cartoon beaver on the cover with its fist raised high. Readalike: The Grizzly Manifesto by Jeff Gailus, also published by Rocky Mountain Books.

Children of the Wolf by Jane Yolen

2011-12-12T09:08:00.001-07:00

Two feral children were found living with wolves in 1920 in northeastern India, near Medinipur. Jane Yolen was inspired by diary records of that time to create Children of the Wolf (published in 1984). It's a fascinating story, even though there is some dispute about the historical facts. Yolen chose to tell it in the voice of 14-year-old Mohandas, who lives at the Christian orphanage where the two wild girls were brought. It isn't a happy story, because Yolen remains true to the inherent tragic circumstances and misguided good intentions on the part of adult caregivers.

This book will make a good complement to the two books our Two Bichons club will be discussing in January: Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys and Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. Cindi, a member of our book club, loaned her personal copy to me and I am impressed by the high quality book design. Viking Press used a lovely thick paper that shows no signs of yellowing 27 years after publication. I also really like the font used for the chapter titles and cover title (see dust jacket image).

The Next Day by John Porcellino, Paul Peterson & Jason Gilmore

2011-12-11T07:45:00.001-07:00

"Every year, nearly one million people die from suicide. What if they had waited just one more day?" Those two sentences break my heart. I've known too many people who have died. The Next Day is based on interviews with Tina, Ryan, Chantel and Jenn, four people who survived near-fatal suicide attempts. Their stories are entwined and told in John Porcellino's minimalist comic strip style. Sometimes I found it hard to tell who was who, but that didn't seem important anyway.

Porcellino's art looks simple but packs an emotional punch. His autobiographical graphic novel, Perfect Example, is the best description I've ever read of how it is possible to feel both aimless and depressed while also feeling good about hanging out with friends. He was an excellent choice for this project, which can also be viewed online in an interactive website.

Jenn has the last words: "Surviving a suicide attempt has to change you. It changes everything about you. Because at some point you have to come to terms with a very simple fact... you are not meant to be dead." This book feels so much more honest than Jay Asher's teen novel about suicide, Thirteen Reasons Why, which did not ring true because the dead narrator sounds so perky. Another thing that I dislike about TRW is that Hannah blames her death on other people's actions. It is vital that we talk about suicide, however, so I'm grateful that the subject is being addressed in popular fiction and graphic novels for young people.

Readalikes: How I Made It to Eighteen by Tracy White and Hello, Cruel World by Kate Bornstein.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

2011-12-10T08:53:00.001-07:00

Dr. Jennifer White is the prime suspect for the murder of her best friend, Amanda, who lived three doors down from the White's Chicago residence. Jennifer herself has dementia and cannot remember what happened. She had been a top notch orthopedic surgeon, but was forced to retire at 64 because of her mental illness. Alice LaPlante wisely chose first person to narrate this account, locking the reader inside of a deteriorating mind. Towards the end, Jennifer switches to second person as she gets more removed from her surroundings and from language itself. It is both a compelling character study as well as a mystery novel.

I listened to a Brilliance Audio production [10 hours] read by Jean Reed Bahle that kept me so enthralled I took extra-long walks with my dog.

My Name is Mina by David Almond

2011-12-09T16:47:00.001-07:00

In this prequel to Skellig,* we meet the highly intelligent Mina, who is being homeschooled because she did not fit well into the traditional elementary school system in England. Mina is a child who admires William Blake's poetry and spends a lot of her time thinking in a tree. Her story is told in the form of a journal (with effective changes in font style and size).

I love Mina and her lively imagination. She wonders about such things as a future world without humans, and "what if there was a story where nothing interesting happened at all?" Mina did create such a story: an empty page. "It's like an empty sky waiting for a bird to cross it. It's as silent as an egg waiting for the chick to hatch. It's like the universe before time began. Look at it closely, and it can be filled with memories, with dramas, with dreams, with visions. It's filled with possibilities, so it isn't really blank at all."

Life is a magical adventure for Mina. She records ideas for extraordinary activities in her journal: "Stare at the dust that dances in the light" and "Listen for the frail and powerful thing at your heart." David Almond knows how to get to what is at the very heart of things. He knows that daydreaming is an important activity and that growing up can be hard, but it also contains great joy. What a gift of a book this is. For ages 10 and up.

*Skellig is one of my all-time favourite books and David Almond is one of my all-time favourite writers.

Paris to the Past by Ina Caro

2011-12-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

New Yorker Ina Caro had a great idea: to use Paris as a home base and then make day trips to places reachable by train in 90 minutes or less in order to make French history come to life. She begins with the cathedrals and fortresses of the middle ages and travels century by century, ending with Napoleon in the 19th century. I love France and travelling by train - as well as being interested in history - so I thought this book would be perfect for me. It would have been, if I didn't find Caro's chatty and repetitive style so annoying. With only 50 pages (out of 349) left to go, I gave up.

How many times would I have to read that Caro could only imagine historical people and events by having physical evidence? I got it the first time. Yet her imagination does seem pretty vivid. When she learned that a beheading had taken place in a garden she passed on foot in Paris, Caro "began picturing the courtyard with the count's severed head rolling in puddles of blood" and "began taking another route to the Place des Vosges." She is also good at editing out present-day people dressed anachronistically, and seeing only the architecture around her.

Caro uses first person and is so much present that I felt like I was reading a blog. Regarding Claude Monet's dreams: "I was surprised to learn that his nightmares, unlike my black and white dreams, were in pre-Hollywood technicolor, largely in pinks and blues." Louis X11's wife carved these (translated) words on the wall of their chateau at Blois - Nothing means anything to me anymore - and Caro comments "the words I would have carved if my love had died." In describing the assassination of King Henry IV, Caro twice mentions the irrelevant fact that the killer was red-haired. At another point, Caro is surprised by "the French tide, about which I had totally forgotten" and I wondered if the tide in France could possibly be different from the tide in Spain or England.

Caro's constant presence isn't actually the problem. I usually enjoy feeling like I'm right there, right beside the author... as long as it is someone I get along with. Caro just rubs me the wrong way. I happen to be reading another Jewish author's historical exploration now: Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes. He has brought me right to a particular street in Paris as he examines the mansion of an ancestor and then slips inside behind a delivery person. The difference is that I like hanging out with de Waal.

Another detraction is that Caro's sense of humour doesn't appeal to me. "Those who dismiss the great-man theory of history have obviously not considered the consequences of Louis the Fat's obesity on the city of Paris, or for that matter on me." Sentence structure can get pretty convoluted: "What becomes clear as we travel in Joan [of Arc]'s footsteps is that what the people of France in the fifteenth century believed had a truth in the consequences it produced: their faith in the legend replaced despair and bound the fragments of a feudal country into a nation with a messianic patriotism strong enough to finally drive the English out of France." (Whew!) Some of her references are obscure: "The keep itself [at the Chateau de Vincennes] is as typical of the period as a Levitt house would have been in 1950s America." (I had to google images of Levitt homes, never having heard of them before.)

I was able to relate to Caro's experience of the crowds of tourists at Versailles: "My day had been comparable to shopping at a department store during the Christmas season." For a more engaging account of French history, I recommend Graham Robb's Discovery of France.

Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel

2011-12-05T07:33:00.001-07:00

It's been more than a week since I read Beatrice and Virgil but the story haunts my thoughts. In spite of loving Yann Martel's Life of Pi, I had put off reading his most recent book because I knew it was about the Holocaust - always a heartbreaking subject - and because reviews have been mixed. Now, I'm very glad to have finally read it because it is brilliant. As well as being heartbreaking.

In Vancouver last year, I heard Martel explain why he chose to write about the Holocaust through fiction. He believes that it is through art that people can make sense of complex reality by comprehending it at an emotional and psychic level... or something like that. He said it more eloquently; he has a way with words.

In Beatrice and Virgil, autobiographical elements create an interesting tension regarding truth. How much is the writer Henry in the story like the author himself? Yet the writing style is fable-like, as when Henry and his wife move to a different city: "Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin." And then there is the play within the novel, which is presented only in fragments. It is clearly an allegory and told as a conversation between close friends who happen to be a donkey and a howler monkey.

I look forward to discussing this short and powerful novel at the Woodcroft Branch Library CanLit Book Club. It's a drop-in event and everyone is welcome. These are the details: December 7, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. at 13420 114 Avenue in Edmonton. Call 780-496-1830 for more information.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

2011-12-04T08:32:00.001-07:00

Prospector Jack Halloway's smart mouth and disregard for protocol gets him into trouble with the mining corporation he works for on the day he finds an extremely valuable seam of sunstones on a backwater planet. Then he goes home to his treehouse (safe from the dinosaur-type predators on the jungle floor) to find a previously-unknown native species inside. If this fuzzy little ewok-type thing is sentient, all of the rules will change and the mining company will lose its lucrative rights on the planet. The stakes are high - and that makes for a page-turner of a story with a fascinating character at its heart. I stayed up 3 hours past my bedtime to finish Fuzzy Nation last night.

Similar to: the movie Avatar.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

2011-12-03T12:55:00.001-07:00

For an eleven-year-old boy, 21 days travelling on his own on a steamer ship is enough time to have many adventures. In 1954, Michael and two other boys made a sea voyage from Ceylon to England. "I had no family responsibilities. I could go anywhere, do anything. And Ramadhin, Cassius, and I had already established one rule. Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden."

When not enjoying clandestine picnics in the lifeboats on deck, the three boys took their meals together with an interesting group of adults at the least-privileged table in the dining room. They sat with Mr. Mazappa, a pianist for the ship's orchestra, who "cheerfully claimed to have 'hit the skids'" and Miss Lasqueti, who "had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in mud." There were also a mute tailor, a retired ship dismantler and a botanist growing poisonous plants in a garden in the hold. Table talk might amble from Italian Madonna paintings to breast-feeding to learning that Mr. Mazappa had children. (I've seen quite a few paintings of anatomically-odd breast-feeding Madonnas in Italy and have to agree with Mr. Mazappa's complaint that "there is a child that needs to be fed and the mothers are putting forth breasts that look like panino-shaped bladders. No wonder the babies look like disgruntled adults.")

The boys paid close attention to the details of mysterious adult world affairs around them, but some of these things did not actually become clear to Michael until long after the voyage. To the adult Michael who is narrating the story, the long-ago trip is somewhat dreamlike: "A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep on a deck chair - these are images only from memory." Later in the narrative, these images are explored more fully. Was your curiosity piqued by the white-sheeted body? Mine too.

In vignette scenes, the events unfold like memories growing sharper upon close reflection. The Michael in the novel also happens to be a writer of mixed heritage born in Sri Lanka, adding a layer of surrealism that reminded me of Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil. Ondaatje's tale remains firmly realistic, however. It has the feel of a memoir. I was right there on the ship with young Michael, experiencing the wonders. How nice it was to be young again, if only vicariously.

The Flint Heart: Freely Abridged from Eden Phillpotts's 1910 Fantasy by Katherine Paterson & John Paterson

2011-11-29T15:07:00.001-07:00

If you're looking for a great family read-aloud, I recommend The Flint Heart. This episodic tale begins: "Many years ago, oh, let's say five thousand, there lived in the south of England, in what is called Dartmoor, tribes of people who had never thought to make anything out of metal, much less plastic."

A talisman with dangerous powers, two wise children and their dog, a damaged hot water bottle and a whole heap of fairies keep the story lively. There are also lots of full-colour illustrations by John Rocco. All ages; the large-size type and wide leading will be friendly to young readers just getting started on chapter books.

Mini Mia and her Darling Uncle by Pija Lindenbaum

2011-11-27T19:55:00.001-07:00

I'll be giving a talk on queer role models in children's picture books later this week as part of the InsideOUT speakers series at the University of Alberta. I'm looking forward to talking about some of my favourite books, like Pija Lindenbaum's Mini Mia and her Darling Uncle. The story has been translated to English from its original Swedish. It's narrated in first person by Ella, a preschooler who is such a fan of soccer that she gets called Mini Mia, after the soccer player Mia Hamm. Tommy, Mini Mia's favourite uncle, causes her much dismay when he shows up with a boyfriend. Fergus tags along wherever they go and really gets on Mini Mia's nerves. ("Doesn't he have a home to go to? Apparently not.") Her jealousy makes her extremely naughty and finally so unhappy that she takes to her bed. ("Now no one is allowed to talk to me and I don't want any dinner -- just a little bit of jam. I'm never going to hang out with Tommy again. I'm just going to lie here bored stiff. Forever.") But Tommy doesn't give up on her and, in the end, it turns out that Fergus is much better at soccer than Tommy.

I've blogged previously about some of the other books I'll be showcasing, including Christian the Hugging Lion, In Our Mothers' House, Gertrude Is Gertrude Is Gertrude Is Gertrude, Pink, and The Odd Egg, The full list of titles I'll be talking about is here.

The talk is at 5 pm in room 7-152 Education North on Thursday, December 1, 2011. Full details available at the website for the Institute of Sexual Minority Studies and Services. It's open to the public; I hope to see some of you there.

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai

2011-11-27T19:13:00.001-07:00

In 1975, the year she turned 10, Ha and her family were forced to flee Vietnam and take refuge in the U.S.A. Author Thanhha Lai drew on her own immigration experiences to craft this moving tale. Lai's free verse format is like looking through snapshots over the course of a year. The focus on Ha's emotions is particularly effective.

Ha is a child who loves to eat. She planted a papaya tree in her yard in Saigon and watches closely for fruit: "Two green thumbs / that will grow into / orange-yellow delights / smelling of summer." Later, at the refugee camp: "Someone / should be kissed / for having the heart / to send cases of fish sauce / to Guam." Ha's family is sponsored by a man in Alabama, who brings them a paper bucket of chicken one day. They find it almost inedible, because they are used to "fresh-killed chicken / that roamed the yard / snacking on / grains and worms. / Such meat grows / tight in texture, / smelling of meadows / and tasting sweet. / I bite down on a thigh; / might as well bite down on / bread soaked in water. / Still, / I force yum-yum sounds."

The hardships are many in this National Book Award-winning story of total upheaval.

Readalike: Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is another verse novel immigration story for children and tweens.

Theodora: Empress, Actress, Whore by Stella Duffy

2011-11-24T11:47:00.001-07:00

Theodora is a strong and engaging character in this rags to riches story set in the sixth-century Byzantine empire. It is based on a real woman who became the consort of emperor Justinian the first. She was five when her father, the bear-keeper in Constantinople's Hippodrome theatre, was killed by a bear. Theodora began her training as an entertainer shortly afterwards and discovered that comedic acting best suited her quick wit. Throughout her life, Theodora's hot temper flares when she encounters personal injustice. This is in sharp contrast with her stoic self-control over revealing any physical discomfort. I admired Theodora's attitude toward life, as summed up in this quote: "mistakes are simply steps from which to move forward."

Theodora is a fascinating character and I enjoyed getting a glimpse into what life might have been like for a lively young woman living in this ancient time and place. Theodora and her cohorts took both male and female lovers. Queer sexuality comes up in other ways also. My favourite part, however, concerns the celibate time she spent in the desert near Antioch, living with religious mystics.

Davina Porter narrates the Recorded Books edition of Theodora [11.5 hours] with her usual elegance and attention to subtle emotional details. Porter's British accent provokes strong reactions from audiobook listeners. When I worked in the division of the library that provides materials to blind and home-bound patrons, we kept a list of who loved or hated various narrators, and Porter appeared frequently -- sometimes loved, sometimes hated. I'm a fan, so Porter's voice was a bonus in listening to Theodora as an audiobook.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

2011-11-21T07:30:00.001-07:00

Voice and character are two outstanding aspects of Esi Edugyan's award-winning novel, Half-Blood Blues, about musicians in a jazz band in Europe during the second World War. The tale is narrated by Sid Griffiths, who is 82 years old in 1992. His story often flips backward in time as he relates the events surrounding the disappearance of his youngest bandmate after being picked up by Nazi soldiers in Paris.

Sid played bass in the Hot-Time Swingers in Berlin in the 1930s. Ninteen-year-old Hieronymus Falk, a German with a Black father, played trombone. Chip Jones, Sid's boyhood friend from Baltimore, was the drummer. Here Sid describes a session they played with Louis Armstrong, who had heard about Falk's talent:

"Chip's kit was crisp, clean, and I could feel the lazy old tug of the bass line walk down into its basement and hang up its hat, and I begun to smile. Then the kid come in. He was brash, sharp, bright. And then, real late, Armstrong come in. I was shocked. Ain't no bold brass at all. He just trilled in a breezy, casual way, like he giving some dame a second glance in the street without breaking stride. It was just so calm, so effortlessly itself. Give me a damn chill."

Fifty-two years later, on the way to the airport, Sid's cab driver asks, "Where you off to?"

'"London," I said. "I'm going back to London. I live there." Better not to tell folks your business, I figure. Nor to let them know you're leaving your pad empty. A man's got to be careful these days.
"London?" the cabbie said. "No kidding. I used to live in London. England's alright but the food'll kill you. Whereabouts you live over there?"
I frowned. I ain't got no mind for this damn small talk. Best to shut him up quick. "Not London England," I said. "London Ontario. In Canada."
The cabbie's eyes sort of glazed over. Canada kills any conversation quick, I learned long ago. It's a little trick of mine.'

Ha! I never got tired of Sid's cranky voice. I could tell he was suffering from an old pain -- a mix of sorrow and guilt and shame -- and I stayed glued to his telling right up to the last satisfying word.

Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean

2011-11-20T10:41:00.001-07:00

"Rin Tin Tin is that rare thing that endures when so much else rushes past." Journalist Susan Orlean spent years investigating the many stories that originated from one German Shepherd puppy that was found in France by an American soldier near the end of World War 1. From that dog and his owner, Lee Duncan, grew a dynasty in movies and then on tv that spanned four decades and made Rin Tin Tin known around the world.

Rintintin & Nenette dolls

Lee Duncan kept two puppies he found in a bombed kennel: a male and a female. He named them Rin Tin Tin and Nenette, after a couple of French good-luck charm dolls. Duncan wore a pair of these tiny woollen dolls around his neck. My own dog happens to be named Nenette, but I had never heard of these dolls before Orlean's book. (Nenette is named for a pet goose I knew in central France - even though my girl has a much sweeter temperament.)

Orlean's research covers such topics as the origin of the German Shepherd breed, the use of canine corps in wartime and the rise in popularity of obedience training in the U.S.A. Early movies, the advent of sound and colour and some of the personalities of the film industry are also covered. It would not have occurred to me that in silent films, a dog's inability to speak is not a handicap, and so, from the beginning, Rin Tin Tin was considered a star in his own right.

I listened to a Simon & Schuster audiobook (12.5 hours) read by the author. Orlean did a better job than Jennifer Jay Myers, who narrated Orlean's The Orchid Thief, but I found my interest ebbed and waned while listening to Rin Tin Tin, depending on the topic being explored. The Orchid Thief, on the other hand, held my attention throughout. What I liked best about Rin Tin Tin was that the central theme has to do with the importance of stories in our lives. I also enjoyed the personal perspective Orlean brought into her research near the end, as she examined her own involvement in the subject.

Nenette (not the goose)

"I had wanted [...] some proof that everything, in its way, mattered. That working hard mattered. That feeling things mattered. That even sadness and loss mattered because it was all part of something that would live on. But, I had also come to recognize that not everything needed to be so durable. The lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting, but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy."

NOTE: You can spend a day with Susan Orlean and Rin Tin Tin archived materials in California as a benefit to the American Humane Society. Make your auction bid here.

Set to Sea by Drew Weing

2011-11-19T15:09:00.001-07:00

A poverty-stricken poet is shanghaied aboard a clipper ship bound for Hong Kong in this charming graphic novel. With one panel on each page of this little book, Drew Weing uses very little text to show how, after long adventures at sea, the poet finally has the wisdom to create a successful book of poetry - which is also titled Set to Sea. It's a fable that will appeal to all ages. (Be warned that there is violence depicted in an extended pirate fighting sequence.) Set to Sea deserves all the praise it's been getting, including a Lynd Ward honor award.

Check out Drew Weing's website.

Readalike: Good-bye, Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson.

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

2011-11-17T15:36:00.001-07:00

Come, Thou Tortoise is told in the unforgettable voice of Audrey Flowers, who leaves her tortoise with friends in Oregon when she flies home to Newfoundland after getting word that her father is in a coma. She grew up in St John's with her scientist father, Walter Flowers, and her sweet Uncle Thoby, who has one arm longer than the other. The family had great fun playing with language and puns.

"My dad did sometimes refer to us - the three of us - as the Bouquet. I think the Bouquet should hit the sack, he'd say. The bouquet is wilting. Or at least one Flower is. Speak for yourself, Wilter." Audrey may have a low IQ, but like her father and uncle, she is a master of words: "The Fairfont Hotel greets you with signage so cursive you curse your inability to read it." She meets the lawyer Toff, who is "wearing a purple scarf. Sorry, cravat. Some silk business tucked into his shirt. [..] My dad used to have an expression for a flamboyant dresser: Christmas on a stick. I'm sorry but a purple cravat is flamboyant."

At one point, Audrey cannot get into her house because the doorknob broke off. She goes to her neighbour for help, still holding the doorknob, and they call a locksmith. "On the table, the brass doorknob looks amazed to be reflecting the inside of someone's house. It lies on its side like it has fainted." (I was very sympathetic, since the doorknob to my front door broke off earlier this year. Unlike Audrey, I have another door that enabled access while I waited to repair the knob.)

Audrey grieves for her father, sorts through family secrets and frets about her tortoise in the most hilarious manner. Occasionally, the narrative switches to the voice of Winnifred the tortoise, who puts up with such indignities as being used as a bookmark while she waits for Audrey to return. Winnifred loves to sit on the dashboard when she travels in a car. (She is much smaller than Mrs. Cook, the tortoise in The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart.)

I would not say no to another book by Jessica Grant.

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

2011-11-14T05:51:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of beautiful picture books these days with just a few words and a clever twist at the end and they are cute, but they're not the kind of book that invites re-reading. Jon Klassen's I Want My Hat Back is not of that ilk. Yes, it only has about 250 words, many of them repeated, and yes the art is lovely. The book is beyond clever; it is outstanding. I'm fascinated by it -- both the narrative and the art. I'm not at all surprised to see it on the "best of" lists that are starting to appear (like this one in the NYT).

It's a story about a not-very-smart bear looking for his lost hat. Jon Klassen, illustrator of Cats' Night Out (and others), has combined simple cut-out shapes with textured art. The large-font text -- which would work very well for emerging readers -- is all in dialogue and in a different colour for each animal. Red, the colour of the lost hat, is used to great effect. Most of the illustrations are on the left, with text by itself on the right-hand page. Whenever this layout changes, it signifies a dramatic moment. The white background changes to red on another significant page. A crucial moment is wordless. The denouement is delicious. I love the deadpan humour thoughout. I love this book.

All ages. Readalike: Wolves by Emily Gravett.

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik

2011-11-13T19:34:00.001-07:00

This true story documents three American men who competed in 1998 to see the most different species of birds in one year. One of them managed to collect 745, which is amazing, considering that the area of the contest was restricted to Canada and the U.S.A. (minus Hawaii). Journalist Mark Obmascik profiles the men, including how they became interested in bird-watching and how they managed the time and money to chase rare birds.

I saw this white-crowned sparrow near Whitehorse.

I listened to an abridged audiobook (Random House; 6 hours), capably read by Oliver Wyman. It reminded me of another book about people and their obsessions, The Orchid Thief, although The Big Year is not as funny as Susan Orlean's book. A movie version, just released, is apparently more of a comedy; I read about it in Film Journal International online. My sweetie's father, Cliff, was a lifelong birder who kept meticulous records - he was in my thoughts as I listened to the escapades of these guys.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

2011-11-11T19:31:00.001-07:00

Humans are a story species, according to Joseph Gold. Thirteen-year-old Conor O'Malley learns about the power of stories when he meets an ancient British monster. Can anything be scarier than knowing his mother is terminally ill? Conor must find the courage to face his nightmares as well as the bullies at school.

Illustrator Jim Kay has created lots of atmospheric black and white art that adds to the menacing suspense of the tale. The expensive clay-based paper shows off Kay's subtle textures and spiky sharp contrasts. It also make the book feel nice and heavy, even though it is barely over 200 pages long.

Irish author Siobhan Dowd died of cancer at 47, leaving behind two completed manuscripts (since published) as well as an idea sketched out for another novel. Patrick Ness crafted this story based on Dowd's notes. It is fabulous. Have kleenex handy.

An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark

2011-11-09T21:18:00.000-07:00

Mental illness has been Moranna MacKenzie's lifelong nemesis in this character-driven novel set in Cape Breton. She was just a child when her mother committed suicide. Years later, the loss of custody of Moranna's two daughters was due to her own instability. When Moranna learns that one of her daughters is to be married in Halifax, she is determined to finally see them again.

The cover art on the Vintage trade paperback edition -- a folk art mermaid set against a background musical score -- ties in well with elements of the story. Moranna created a mermaid tale to entertain her girls when they were still with her; she carves folksy images of her Scottish ancestors to support herself; and Moranna performs concerts on a painted piano board every morning to an audience of chairs in her kitchen. The cover illustration also captures the whimsical, fun-loving nature of Moranna (when she isn't being contrary and self-absorbed).

There are lots of other interesting and well-rounded characters too. It's a powerful and uplifting story of redemption and family pride.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

2011-11-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

Was the re-discovery of a thousand-year-old poem the catalyst that caused the shift from medieval Europe to Renaissance? Stephen Greenblatt starts with Poggio Bracciolini (a 15th century book hunter that brought the webcomic Family Man to mind) who located a long-lost copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius in a remote German monastery. Lucretius recorded some mighty powerful ideas.

What was so startling - and dangerous - about the very long poem by Lucretius? Greenblatt writes that "On the Nature of Things is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a great poem." It contained subversive ideas on politics, ethics and theology, including these elements:

1. "Everything is made of invisible particles." (atoms)
2. "The elementary particles of matter are eternal."
3. "All particles are in motion in an infinite void."
4. "Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve."
5. "The swerve is the source of free will."
6. "Nature ceaselessly experiments."
7. "The universe was not created for or about humans."
8. "Humans are not unique."
9. "The soul dies."
10. "There is no afterlife."
11. "All organized religions are superstitious delusions."
12. "Religions are invariably cruel."
13. "There are no angels, demons, or ghosts."
14. "The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain."
15. "The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion."
16. "Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder."

It took me about 100 pages to get sucked in by the narrative. Even before that, however, I enjoyed quotes like that of a 4th century historian complaining that "people were driving their chariots at lunatic speeds through crowded streets." In the end, I found The Swerve's blend of philosophy and history to be thought-provoking as well as entertaining.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

2011-11-05T06:04:00.000-06:00

"Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well." The first two lines of the book pretty much set the tone for this paranormal romance. The first part of the book is set in contemporary Prague, where 17-year-old Karou is studying art. Later, the action moves into the world of seraphs and chimaera.

"Karou was, simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx." This kind of description rings all kinds of warning bells in my head, but I liked Karou anyway. She is feisty and smart and self-sufficient. She is ignorant of her family origins and was raised by monsters. Karou is such a great character and I was curious enough by the mystery of her background to keep reading though all the romance-y stuff. ("___ and ___ were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight.")

Romantic intrigue -- a handsome prince with his eye on one beautiful sister whose heart belongs to another while her ugly step-sister is secretly in love with the prince -- is really not my thing. Neither is fussing about clothes, hair and cosmetics while getting ready for a ball. Iron abs and wild, timpani hearts don't interest me. I usually sort of skip past those parts when I'm reading, but since they are central to the plot of Daughter of Smoke & Bone, I couldn't ignore them. Sigh. I much preferred Taylor's first book, Blackbringer.

Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People by Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu

2011-10-29T15:53:00.000-06:00

The macabre weirdness in Douglas Coupland's new book, Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, is perfectly suited to Halloween. I found it a good antidote to the overly-sweet holiday decorations that I've seen in some people's front yards - Winnie the Pooh wearing a purple witch hat, that sort of thing. At first glance, Graham Roumieu's full-colour illustrations and the sparse text on each page make this look like a kid's book. It is not. One child is barfing copious amounts and another has pooped his pants right there on the front cover. The stories are nasty and gory and bad behaviour goes unpunished. Hee hee hee! I especially liked "Kevin, the Hobo Minivan with Extremely Low Morals."

If you like Edward Gorey's irony, or the wickedest tales in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (David Sedaris), Coupland's demented collection of short stories is for you. Read one of them, "Mr. Fraser, the Undead Substitute Teacher," online in the Globe and Mail here.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

2011-10-27T14:03:00.000-06:00

International smuggling, a mentally-unbalanced genius, orchids, Seminoles and the Florida swamps -- The Orchid Thief covers a lot of ground, but it's mainly about people and their peculiar passions.

Photo of ghost orchid by Mick Fournier
HBI Producers of Fine Orchids

John Laroche first came to New York journalist Susan Orlean's attention because of a small news item about plant poaching in Florida's Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. Laroche wasn't the only orchid collector Orlean met who she would describe as having an "air of benign derangement."

The kooky orchid enthusiasts are portrayed sympathetically. Orlean developed a passion of her own: she wanted to see a ghost orchid in bloom. She was willing to hike for miles through mucky swamp water up to her waist, hoping for a glimpse. Like Orlean, I've experienced that "time spent in a greenhouse had a rare shapeless quality." I could totally identify with Laroche's approach to gardening. He said things like "I'm a plant. Why would I want rough bark instead of smooth bark? Why would I want wide leaves instead of narrow leaves?"

Orchid I saw in the Royal Botanic
Garden in Belgium, July 2011

I listened to a Random House Audible production (9 hours) with Jennifer Jay Myers narrating. Orlean has written in first person and I had to remind myself several times that Myers was not Orlean, since I found Myers' voice irritating. She's overly dramatic in her pronunciation: "I HATE hiking with CONvicts armed with maCHEtes." "THEN I heard about SNAKE boy, who LIVES in his little SHACK surrounded by REPTILES and BUGS." (Every time Myers said "bugs" it was more like "buuuugs.") It didn't hinder my enjoyment by much, but I hope to never listen to another book narrated by Myers.

The movie made about the book -- Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze -- appears to bear little relation to Orlean's story. If you've watched the movie, don't expect to find a love affair between Laroche and Orlean in the book. There's no illicit drug made from rare orchids, either. But there's a whole bunch of other great (and funny) stuff.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

2011-10-25T17:40:00.000-06:00

Helen Oyeyemi's newest novel dazzles with an inventive narrative format and playful prose. It opens with a famous author, St. John Fox, sitting in his study in 1937, "sort of listening to something by Glazunov; there's a symphony of his you can't listen to with the windows closed, you just can't. Well, I guess you could, but you'd get agitated and run at the walls. Maybe that's just me. My wife was upstairs. Looking at magazines or painting or something, who knows what Daphne does. Hobbies." Anyway, Mary Foxe drops by to visit Mr. Fox. She is a character he has created and she is pissed off that St. John keeps killing off the women in his books, so she challenges him to a game. They take turns going into each other's stories and Mary's goal is to make St. John change his wicked ways.

I enjoyed Oyeyemi's riffing on the Blue Beard fairy tale. She is especially interested in why a husband would kill his wife. Some of the stories incorporate more elements of magic realism than others. Several of these stories draw on Oyeyemi's Yoruba background. At the writersfest in Vancouver, Oyeyemi said that although she was born in Nigeria, she doesn't feel a particular attachment to that country, only to the Yoruba people. She grew up in England, immersed in western mythology as well as traditional Yoruba stories.

It is her way with words that is especially delightful, so I'll quote a few bits. When Mary lay in a dead woman's bed and couldn't sleep, "Minutes pricked shallowly, like thorns."

In a tale of an adopted child: "The woman insisted on being called mother. (Which the boy called her, but with a secret hiss that came from a place inside him that he did not understand - inside his head, her name became motherhhhhhhh, smothered myrrh.)"

St. John Fox says of public libraries that they " always make me feel covered in ink. Ink on my clothes, ink in my eyes. Terrible. All the body heat in there is bound to make the pages mushy."

It's lots of fun. Readers might also like read and compare the original tales that inspired Oyeyemi. Joseph Jacobs' version from English Fairy Tales is here and Charles Perrault's Blue Beard is here.

Afternoon Tea at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-24T07:56:00.000-06:00

Six Canadian authors entertained us while we enjoyed teawith currant scones, clotted cream and jam, shortbread, fancy cookies and minicupcakes at the Afternoon Tea on Sunday. Rose petals were scattered over each white tablecloth. It is notsurprising that this event sells out weeks ahead of time.

Lynn Coady read a funny scene from The Antagonist in which Rank, a young and jaded hockey player, isapproached in a bar by Beth, a fat lady with religious intentions. Her “wristsjangled with bangles” and “her ears drooped with hoops.” I’m looking forward toreading this book.

Author D.W. Wilson could have been dressed to play the part ofRank, wearing a plaid shirt, ripped blue jeans and a Canucks baseball cap. Heread the story “Sediment” from his collection Once You Break a Knuckle. It is set in Wilson’s BC hometown,Invermere, where young men ping rocks off coal trains, drive camaros in loserlaps down the main street which has only one traffic light, and build bonfiresthe size of mobile homes. It’s the kind of place where “Life is a series ofevents between shit storms, or so my dad says.”

Michael V. Smith wore a skinny black suit and bow tie,telling us, “Some boys like camaros and a few boys like bow ties.” He read a section from Progress inwhich a woman who has been idly watching the construction progress on a damwitnesses a terrible accident.

An awful thing also happens to one of Tessa McWatt’scharacters in Vital Signs; she beginslosing language due to a brain aneurysm. Read my review here.

Elizabeth Hay said, “You write a book and then you try tofind ways to talk about it as if you knew what you were doing.” Alone in the Classroom is about a schoolteacher in 1929.


Inukshuk on English Bay

Wayne Johnston made a funny speech about always going last,then read from the same passages in AWorld Elsewhere as he had read at the Coast to Coast event. It was just asamusing the second time.

And that wraps up another writersfest for me; I’ll be backin Edmonton on Monday. Goodbye, Vancouver. It’s been great!

When Then Was Now at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-24T07:47:00.000-06:00


some of my ticket stubs...

Historical fiction was the unifying element for the fourauthors in Saturday’s When Then Was Now panel. C.C. (Chris) Humphreys’ latestnovel, A Place Called Armageddon, isabout the fall of Constantinople. He said a historical novelist “jumps into thegaps in history” and “facts are, more often than not, interpretations.”

Esi Edugyan feels it is most important to get to the essenceof real-life characters, and that makes it alright to make slight alterationsto historical details. In giving voice to her African-American musicians inWWII Paris in Half Blood Blues,Edugyan meshed patois of the era with invented slang and more contemporaryphrasing.

The Reinvention ofLove is also set in Paris, but in the 19^th century. HelenHumphreys grew so fond of her character Saint-Beuve that she gave him asomewhat happier ending than he had in real life. I was thrilled that she readfrom one of the same sections that I quoted in my review, where a poet challengesSaint-Beuve to a duel.

I’ve also reviewed Randy Boyagoda’s amazing new novel, Beggar’s Feast. He talked aboutfinding the balance between the personal and the history, an especially trickything for him since he based his Sam Kandy character on a distant relative. (Imaginelearning that a family member hadkilled two wives with no legal repercussions. Shades ofBluebeard…)

In response to a question about how modern concerns affecthistorical fiction, Helen Humphreys said literary petty jealousies are asrelevant today as they were in Saint-Beuve’s time. Boyagoda’s publisher wantedSam to have “a Dr. Phil moment when the emotions of the main character becameavailable,” but Sam was not that sort of man and not at all of that era. Warsare perennially of interest, while the ideas of citizenship and belonging from Half Blood Blues are certainly relevantto readers today.

Community Centred at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-23T13:45:00.000-06:00

One Irish man (Dermot Healy) and three Canadian women(Suzette Mayr, Farzana Doctor and Angie Abdou) made up Saturday’s Community Centred event. It initially appeared that Healy was the odd one out, but allfour authors contributed to a lively panel discussion on the many definitionsof community.

Mayr began with a reading from Monoceros, which is based on a true event; a 17-year-old boycommitted suicide after homophobic bullying at a Calgary school. Using multiple voices,the novel explores the way a tragedy can affect a broad spectrum of people. Weheard from the boy’s (secretly gay) guidance counsellor, who wonders “What wasthe last thing he said to the dead boy? Goodluck. Or Perk up.” Mayr spokeabout the importance she placed in documenting contemporary Calgary (whichreminded me of Chimamanda Adichie’s admonition about the dangers of the single story). We learned that her publisher asked her to disguise Calgary in anearlier novel, Venous Hum, in orderto make it more appealing to an American audience. (Venous Hum is on my top ten list of favourite books, by the way.)

Farzana Doctor’s new book, Six Metres of Pavement, is also based on a true and tragic story. Anews clip about a man who forgot his child in the back of his car stayed in theback of Doctor’s mind for a long time, wondering how that man would be able tocarry on with his life afterwards. SixMetres of Pavement was discussed earlier this year at the Lesbian Book Clubthat meets at Audreys Books in Edmonton; we had previously discussed her earlier novel, Stealing Nasreen. Both books featureintersecting communities in Toronto.

There's a wonderful cross-section of people in the community Angie Abdou created for Canterbury Trail. She said that each of her characters thinks he or she is themain character, but really it is the place/geography that carries that role. It was nice to have the opportunity to thank her in person for commenting on my review of her newest book. The excerptshe chose was in the voice of Michael, a real estate developer who wasuncharacteristically stoned on mushroom tea. His pregnant wife, Janet, fondlyremembered Michael’s former ski bum self, murmuring, “Long time, no see.”

Abdou's last line was the perfect lead-in to the final reading, DermotHealey’s Long Time, No See. Healeysaid he incorporated details he encountered in his County Sligo community andcalls himself a “global local.” One of my favourite lines from the book is: “Memoryis a stranger who comes to call less and less.”

Coast to Coast at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-23T10:09:00.001-06:00


Me at writersfest.

One of the many great things about hearing authors islearning how to pronounce their names and the names of their characters. MiriamToews (rhymes with ‘saves’) read from IrmaVoth (rhymes with ‘boat’)… except that nobody bothers with the Mennonitepronunciation in this book, so Voth rhymes with ‘goth’ instead. Toews read acompelling excerpt in which 19-year-old Irma was travelling in Mexico with hersqualling baby sister. Irma admires the infant’s fierce honesty and imaginesshe was communicating something like: “I possess vital intangibles and when Ibegin to talk the world will know its shame.”

The four authors at Saturday's Coast to Coast event let their senseof humour come through in their writing. Anita Rau Badami said a sense of theabsurd helps for survival in India, where she lived until moving to Canada in1991. Her newest book has a creepy mood, however, so there isn’t much room forhumour in it. She “got tired of writing nice characters” so she filled Tell It to the Trees with horriblepeople. The seed for this book came from visiting a family whose house was sopristine it made her suspicious of what all that perfection might beconcealing. I was surprised to hear that the setting for Tell It to the Trees is a composite town in northern BC, not a realone, and I will update my review of the book accordingly.

Zsuzsi Gartner said “my favourite writers all make me laughand then punch me in the gut at the end.” That’s exactly what Gartner does tome. She said she writes her endings first, and then figures out how to getthere. The audience laughed all the way through her reading of “MisterKakami,” a typically satirical short story from Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.


Toews signs books.

Wayne Johnston likes to “combine comedy and pathos in a seamlessway.” He read a hilarious exerpt from AWorld Elsewhere in which a 7-year-old boy was travelling by ship fromNewfoundland to North Carolina with a man named Landish. Landish explained the ship’sworkers to the child: pursers look after women’s purses; stewards serve thestew; porters serve port; and petty officers are “short, unhelpful men.” Yetanother book to add to my TBR pile. (Yay!)

Pure Poetry at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-22T09:22:00.000-06:00

Olive Senior and John Glenday were the highlights among thesix poets hosted by Billeh Nickerson at Friday’s Pure Poetry event. Saturday’sevening Poetry Bash has four of the same authors, but I preferred the Fridayafternoon time slot mostly because of the venue, the Waterfront Theatre beingso much more comfortable than Performance Works.

Olive Senior read from Shell,starting with a whimsical poem about ginep fruit. She also shared a sweet storyabout how the poem had inspired an 11-year-old girl to write a story. It was lovelyto hear Senior’s Jamaican lilt and phrasing – “in two twos the tree grows.”Senior followed some lighter pieces with a layered poem covering 500 years ofCaribbean history, starting with Columbus.

John Glenday said he “did lots of things wrong when I beganwriting poetry. All my poems were first drafts for two decades.” I don’t knowif Apple Ghost is from that time, butI’m glad that he read the title poem, since it is one I am familiar with andlike very much. Glenday’s approach to inspiration resonated with me, calling itthe work of examining the world, not something that enters passively into anartist. “By examining the world, we breathe life into it.”

Glenday told little stories to introduce the origins ofthree poems from his newest collection, Grain.Did you know the can opener was invented 48 years after the invention of thetin can? “Tin” is a love poem that made the audience chuckle and then heave acollective sigh at the end. “St Orage” was inspired by a sign with too muchspace between the “t” and the “o.” The final poem was a result of repeatedviewings of Disney’s Beauty and the Beastwhen Glenday’s son was ill – he retold the fairy tale backwards. I couldhave listened to this Scottish poet for another hour.

Gull wants my lunch.

Sachiko Murakami, originally from Vancouver, read poems fromRebuild about real estate entwinedwith the death of her father. She encouraged us to go to her projectrebuild.cawebsite to create for ourselves.

Sharon Thesen, another BC author, shared images from herchildhood in Oyama Pink Shale – a time peopled by creatures like dogfishwoman, and mummies who drove Ford F10 pick-up trucks.

American poet Fanny Howe read from Come and See, a collection about the catastrophes of the 20^thcentury from the perspective of a grandparent.

Martin Espada grew up in the projects in Brooklyn and hispoems from The Trouble Ball draw onhis Puerto Rican heritage. I especially liked the one about getting his tonsilsout as a kid – the promised “you can have all the ice cream you want” was ahuge disappointment, since the ice cream burned his raw throat afterwards.Espada’s delivery was powerful and he ended with a rousing poem of rebellion inhonour of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Conversations with Bill at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-21T21:35:00.002-06:00

Some of the things I love about the writersfest have to dowith the location, like taking the little ferry shuttle from English Bay overto Granville Island. We’ve been blessed with sunshine up until now, but itlooks like there’ll be nothing but rain from here on.

False Creek Ferry

At the first event I attended today, Conversations with Bill,I was most excited to hear Kate Beaton but ended up being entranced (yet again)by Helen Oyeyemi. Three very different authors each had 30 minutes in thespotlight with the always charming Bill Richardson.

Helen Oyeyemi had a good rapport with Richardson, whorecognized Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe in an English fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs – “LadyMary was young and Lady Mary was fair” – and Oyeyemi confirmed that these were stories she had grown up with. TheBluebeard stories bored her, however, because there wasn’t an explanation forwhy the husband killed his wives, plus she couldn’t relate to the moral thatone should not be curious. I remembered my similar displeasure with Bluebeardas a child. Then I totally bonded with Oyeyemi’s dislike of Jane Eyre (creepyMr. Rochester locking his wife in an attic). I hadn’t previously thoughtof it as a Bluebeard story. Anyway, Oyeyemi was gracious and well-spoken and Iloved her.

Kate Beaton was not initially forthcoming with Richardson,but warmed up after a while. She had interesting things to say about publishingweb comics as a full-time job – marketing t-shirts and prints as well as gettingadvertising revenue – since her comics are viewable free on the internet.Best was when she got talking about her passion for people in history; she gotthe audience laughing with her descriptions of Canadian historical figures. Iadmire her work but I didn't feel a need to join the long line-up to get her to sign the book I had bought. Check out Hark, a Vagrantonline. (Beaton also gave a nice plug for Craig Thompson's Habibi. )

Barry Callaghan spoke about his stormy relationship with hisfamous father, Morley. He also read from his hilarious essay “Canadian Wry”written for Punch magazine to explain Canadians. (It is collected in Raise YouTen.) Callaghan’s anecdote about his disdain for Robertson Davies was candidand amusing, especially since he called him a windbag… the pot calling thekettle black?

It all added up to 90 minutes of eclectic entertainment.

The Forest and the Trees at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

2011-10-21T07:01:00.000-06:00

Fall colours on Granville Island

Charlotte Gill stopped counting after she had planted onemillion trees. She worked 17 seasons as a tree planter and describes the job asone that gives a person full contact with the natural world. I’m really lookingforward to reading her memoir, Eating Dirt. At the writersfest yesterday, Gillsaid she has learned that people can’t put back a forest; only time can dothat. About a thousand years. Canada still has 1.5 million square miles of treecover remaining and Gill would like us to view this as a planetary treasure.

West Coast art on Granville Island

Andrew Nikiforuk talked about a different kind of loggingcompany, one that’s been around for 300 million years: bark beetles. Thesesmall creatures – "tree managers without PhDs" – are part of the renewal process.Like all beetles, they are the world’s garbage men. I like the way Nikiforukcompared a tree to a well-defended fortress and bark beetles to medievalknights and peasants, swarming the castle. Humans have aided bark beetles intheir work through logging practices that remove biodiversity in forest make-upand through decades of fire suppression in parks. Nikoforuk explained why thegovernment response to the bark beetles has probably been more destructive thanthe beetles themselves.

Book table at writersfest event

Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle is sure to be a fascinatingread. He talked about scientists working with sound to “stress the hell out ofthe beetle.” They tried Rush Limbaugh and Guns & Roses, but found that itwas low frequency amplified insect sounds that completely changed bark beetlebehaviour, such as cannibalizing each other and not laying eggs. Anothersolution Nikiforuk offers is community-based ownership of forests, rather thanownership or lease by multinationals. Trees are the lungs of our planet and astheir numbers go down, so does the oxygen in the air we breathe.

Word! at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

2011-10-20T22:39:00.000-06:00

This morning as I waited in line to get into The Forest and the Trees, I chatted with a woman who said the Wednesday Word! event was the best out of three festival events she had seen so far. The spoken word event is so popular that it is offered twice and still sells out early; the advance ticket sales are the main reason that I'm a member of the festival. Anyway, we had tix for the Thursday time slot and I felt totally energized after the event.

Brendan McLeod hosted Tanya Davis, Zaccheus Jackson and Sheri-D Wilson. Brendan asked each poet which they would rather have, a talking teddy bear or the ability to shoot staples from their fingers. That should give you an idea of the general wackiness and fun.

Sheri-D had pushed the envelope too far for some people at the event on Wednesday, so she was forbidden to do her panty poem today. She advised us to watch it on YouTube. Instead, Sheri-D performed a powerful piece about the murder of Reena Virk. Zaccheus told heartwrenching stories about homelessness and substance abuse. Tanya's autobiographical stories were disarmingly funny. Check out her How to Be Alone video online.

Grand Openings at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

2011-10-19T12:01:00.001-06:00

I am in Vancouver for a week at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival, staying at the lovely Sylvia Hotel on EnglishBay. The weather on Tuesday was gloriously sunny, so my companions and I spentthe day walking in Stanley Park before attending the Grand Openings event onGranville Island last night. The lineup of seven authors was stellar, as isusual at this festival, but Cate Kennedy and Helen Oyeyemi were the authors Iwas most excited to hear.

Kennedy read from two new books, including a heartbreakingexcerpt from the novel The World Beneath, about a woman with Alzheimer's, inwhich her husband and son collude in denying her alcoholism to a doctor.Kennedy chose a poem (from A Taste of River Water) that was a story in itself,and she mentioned that her poems are always like that. I’d love to hear more, but I think that book will be hard to find in Canada. I looked at The World Beneath at the festival bookstore and was horrified to readone of the quotes on the back (from Library Journal) comparing her writing toJodi Picoult! If you dislike Picoult’s style as much as I do, believe me thatKennedy is nothing like that. She makes keen observations about human interactionsand chooses her words carefully. (See my review of Dark Roots.) It was too bad that the festival bookstore didn't have many copies of Kennedy's books available, because the supply had already run out by the intermission.

I’m halfway through Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox at the moment –enjoying it very much – and can attest that it is even more delightful to hearit read aloud. The narrative is a sly twist on Bluebeard in which an authormeets his match in a character come to life. (See also my review of The Icarus Girl.)

Dermot Healy told us he would speak slowly on account of hisIrish accent. He read a very funny part from Long Time, No See about aninfestation of ghost chickens.

David Bezmozgis also made me chuckle. He read about aRussian Jewish refugee worker in Italy who had a special talent – that offinding suitable places to copulate – in The Free World.

Guy Vanderhaeghe seemed nervous and spent a lot of time setting the scene for A Good Man. His excerpt, about Sitting Bullarriving one evening into a Sioux camp after defeating Custer,could have stood on its own. It reminded me of Fools Crow by James Welch. Basedon my enjoyment of The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing (as well asWelch’s book), I’ll add Vanderhaeghe’s new book to my TBR pile.

Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter is about genocide inCambodia, so it was considerate of her to read from a side story in that novel.She said her account of an artist who was losing language because of a neurologicaldisorder was based on a woman from North Vancouver.

Lloyd Jones told us about a blind German man who lives witha companion from New Zealand and a nurse from Tunisia. I’ve really enjoyed acouple of his earlier novels (Mister Pip and The Book of Fame) and will givethis new one (Hand Me Down World) a chance too, but either the part he chose wasn't particularly compelling or I was just too tired to take in the last reading of theevening.

I plan to keep blogging through the rest of the festival. The next events I'll attend are on Thursday (The Forest and the Trees and Word!) so today is another day to enjoy the beautiful city of Vancouver.

The Reinvention of Love by Helen Humphreys

2011-10-17T08:38:00.000-06:00

"He is my neighbour. We live two doors apart on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He is also my dear friend. I am also in love with his wife."

In Paris in the 1820s, when he was 22, Charles Sainte-Beuve favourably reviewed one of Victor Hugo's early books, a collection of poetry. As a result, Hugo invited Sainte-Beuve to his home and they became good friends.

(Another poet, who did not fare so well under Sainte-Beuve's criticism, came into the newspaper office to challenge the reviewer to a duel, shouting "Choose your weapon." Sainte-Beuve leaned across his desk, staring him down: "I choose spelling. You're dead.")

Sainte-Beuve was a remarkable individual, an intersex person who made public his love for Hugo's wife, Adele, when he published a book of poems about their affair - without changing any names. Canadian author Helen Humphreys writes in her author's note that "with few exceptions, the events in my novel mirror actual events. Where possible, I have used the words of Sainte-Beuve, Adele, and George Sand." The words may come from historical sources, but Humphreys is the one who has gathered them together and shaped the telling, using the distinctive first person voices of Charles, Adele and Adele's youngest daughter.

I really loved this book and think the best way to convey the magic of the prose is through quotes, as in this moment when the friendship between Charles and Adele shifts to romance:

"She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren't staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement - that soft tumble, softer than water falling from a fountain - that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adele turned and saw me watching her, and it was as though we had just discovered each other for the first time. I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a place of propriety. I was undone. Nothing could be the same."

Charles' use of the pronoun "her" to refer to himself (as a sleeping child) is interesting here. He otherwise seems to consider himself male, although he switches to dresses and a female persona, Charlotte, in order to draw less attention when meeting up with Adele.)

Why would the mother of four children and wife of such a publicly-known writer risk having an affair? Humphreys explores this question with a sensitive portrayal of Adele. "Victor loves me. I know this to be true. But Victor loves me for himself, and Charles loves me for myself, and the difference between those two is so astonishing that I don't know how to reconcile them."

The Reinvention of Love is a fascinating and intimate slice of people's lives during several turbulent decades. Highly recommended to fans of literary historical fiction.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

2011-10-15T19:59:00.000-06:00

This big, juicy cross between Harry Potter, the Narnia books and Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry has adult themes and is aimed at grown-up readers. Quentin Coldlake is the central protagonist, but as with Harry Potter, he is surrounded by a cohort of friends attending the same college of magic.

I listened to the Penguin audiobook [17 hours] narrated by Mark Bramhall. There's a lot of dialogue, which moves things right along. I liked that Bramhall had different voices for each character, since this helped to keep straight who was who.

Grossman's word choices irked me at times, as when he called Quentin's parents their usual glassine selves (when "glassy" would have made more sense in the context) or saying that studying spells was "backbreaking" work. Another minor annoyance was mention of two Inuit students who came from the same reservation in Saskatchewan - either they were Cree or from some other First Nation (not Inuit), or else they were from a territory, not a reservation, and definitely not Saskatchewan.

Quibbles aside, The Magicians is an engrossing fantasy quest adventure that evokes books I loved when I was younger. I've just received an email notice that it's my turn for the digital audiobook of the sequel, The Magician King.

Habibi by Craig Thompson

2011-10-14T15:36:00.001-06:00

I was blown away by Habibi, a multi-layered epic about twoslave children in the Middle East. Poverty forced Dodola’s parents to sell herinto marriage while she was still very young. Later, she was kidnapped intoslavery but she escaped with a much younger child, Zam. The two spent six yearson their own in the desert before being separated and then spend about the samelength of time struggling to find each other again. Their love for each otheris complicated: as mother and child; as siblings; and then in a romantic sensealso as they get older.

The setting is a dystopian near future, with pollution andwater shortages. There is an overall quality of timelessness, however. This is partly because of the stories that Dodola tells, first to amuse Zam and later in a Scheherazade-type role in a sultan's harem. Magic is a part of young Zam's life, as when snakes spell messages for him. He and Dodola are both wonderful characters, storybook ingenues in a corrupt real world.

Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the first graphic novel togive me a feeling that I’d read a proper novel when I’d finished it. (Mostgraphic novels have more of a short story feel for me, which isn’t a bad thing,only different.) Anyway, the narrative style in Habibi is much more complexthan in Blankets. Retellings of traditional stories are interwoven with presentday and with history. Time shifts to the past have the immediate visual clue ofswitching from white background to black, and the tales told by Dodola haveornate decorative borders to them.

Artwork in Habibi by Craig Thompson

I fretted a bit at the beginning that I was going to have to endure lessons in Arabic script, but that's a tiny fraction of the 665 pages. It was actually a painless introduction to a few Arabic letters and enough that I was able to read the final word, hubb, meaning love. Thompson's black ink art is totally sumptuous. I will only give you a taste of it here with the final double spread.

Nothing comes to mind as a true readalike, only books that have partial similarities. Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines tackles social issues in a complex narrative style and beautiful graphic novel format. You might want to revisit your favourite translation of Tales from 1001 Nights. Robert Crumb's graphic novel version of The Book of Genesis would make a good pairing, since some of Dodola's stories draw on the common origins of Christian and Islamic traditions. Trash by Andy Mulligan could flesh out possible lives for the people who live on the garbage dump. And of course there are Thompson's earlier works, including Good-bye Chunky Rice, Blankets, and Carnet de Voyage.

NOTE added October 29, 2011: If you'd like to read some far more in-depth critiques of book, check out the Habibi Round Table at the Comics Journal website, where Hayley Campbell wrote: "I actually really like it when writers go off on some tangent in a madly enthusiastic way." Me too!

ANOTHER NOTE added November 19, 2011: Listen and watch Craig Thompson's lecture that was filmed in Minneapolis and posted on the Forbidden Planet website.

Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou

2011-10-13T22:11:00.000-06:00

After an unexpected dump of spring snow in the Canadian Rockies, a motley group from a tiny ski town makes a pilgrimage to a backcountry ski hut for one last powder extravaganza. Mountain conditions are ripe for an avalanche, but human interactions are just as volatile in this mix of snowmobilers, skiers, snowshoers and a snowboarder together with four dogs, an overcrowded cabin and copious amounts of booze and drugs.

Angie Abdou takes full advantage of the possibilities for humour when incompatible (and immature and horny) people are in close quarters. She pays homage to Chaucer in subtle ways, like having the cook (who made marijuana cookies) become too stoned to tell a coherent story. The short chapters keep shifting to different limited third person points of view and so the reader gets multi-dimensional character sketches. They are believable people, flawed but with redeeming qualities. The only two I could see myself hanging out with are the lesbians, but I could only take Cosmos in small doses. She's the kind of person who would use "goddess" as a verb.

The very best thing about the book, however, is the ending. I LOVED it! If you read Canterbury Trail and disagree that it's a fabulous ending, I'll see you in the comments area.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller

2011-10-11T13:11:00.000-06:00

Alexandra Fuller was born in England but moved to central Africa with her family in 1972, when she was two. She raised there in poverty, mostly on a tobacco and cattle farm in Zimbabwe during the time of the Rhodesian civil war. Their trips to town were made in a mine-proof Land Rover, her parents holding submachine guns as they drove. Fuller presents her racist, alcoholic and insane mother quite unvarnished in this memoir. It is at turns funny, poignant and horrifying.

I listened to the Recorded Books audiobook which was expertly narrated by Lisette Lecat (10 hours, 15 minutes). Since Fuller is only recording her life into her early 20s, it makes sense that she closes with these lines: "This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we take. It's the choice we make to get on with it."

Fuller's latest work, Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness, is said to focus more on her mother. I've no doubt that it's every bit as fascinating as Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

For more stories about White girlhoods in Africa, check out my list on the Edmonton Public Library website. Child of Dandelions by Shenaaz Nanji is a novel set in Uganda in 1972, when everyone who wasn't ethnic-African was expelled from that country, even those citizens who had been born in Uganda. Another possible readalike is Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace, a fast-paced novel about bullying and racial tensions based on the author's experiences in an elite boarding school in Zimbabwe in the 1980s.

No Sweetness Here by Ama Ata Aidoo

2011-10-10T20:33:00.000-06:00

First published over 40 years ago, this collection of thoughtful and entertaining short stories from Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo does not feel dated at all. Her African women and men are doing ordinary things, like moving to the city to find work, or praying over a sick child. They cook, laugh, and fall in and out of love. They are vividly alive.

Aidoo captures voice especially well. Two of the stories are told entirely in dialogue. I love the expressions her storytellers use to object to interruptions: "I'm cooking the whole meal for you, why do you want to lick the ladle now?" (In the Cutting of a Drink) and "I am taking you to birdtown so I can't understand why you insist on searching for eggs from the suburb!" (Something to Talk About on the Way to the Funeral).

The path that led to me choosing this book is rather convoluted. I'll thank a commenter on the Amy Reads blog for linking to an NPR interview with Chimamanda Adichie in which she recommends No Sweetness Here. Adichie's warm praise, together with my having enjoyed Aidoo's novel Sister Killjoy some years ago, spurred me to track down the short story collection via interlibrary loan. I'm very glad to have done so.

Drawing from Memory by Allen Say

2011-10-07T14:25:00.000-06:00

Japanese artist Allen Say's picture book autobiography is a treat for all ages. Photos and archival documents as well as paintings and black and white sketches are used to illustrate his life, up until age 16 (in 1953), when he went with his father to live in the United States.

Say's early life was remarkable. His father said to him "I expect you to be a respectable citizen, not an artist! Artists are lazy and scruffy people - they are not respectable." His parents had divorced when he was a young child and that is partly why he ended up living on his own in Tokyo from age 12 onward. Say's favourite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei, agreed to take him on as a student. Shinpei became a sort of father to Say after that.

Say struggled with drawing hands and asked, "How long do I have to practice?" Shinpei's response: "Drawing is never a practice. To draw is to see and discover. Every time you draw, you discover something new. Remember that." (This advice is also useful for me, since I'm currently taking a drawing class.)

The book is fascinating record of social conditions during World War II and its aftermath in Japan through the eyes of a young person. It is also a moving account of remaining true to one's artistic heart. There's a nice interview with the author in School Library Journal online.

Readalikes: the autobiography A Drifting Life by Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi covers a similar time period and subject in graphic novel format for adults and teens. The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis is another good all ages picture book autobiography.

Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

2011-10-06T12:07:00.001-06:00

Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and quantum electrodynamics in a graphic novel package = YAY! That was my initial reaction, since I've not yet gotten around to reading anything written by Feynman himself and also because I loved Jim Ottaviani's earlier GN treatment of Niels Bohr, Suspended in Language. Not surprisingly (since the quantum physics world is small - ha!) Bohr makes appearances in Feynman too. What surprised me was the difficulty I had engaging with Feynman's life story. At about 100 pages in, I set it down for a couple of weeks, not sure if I would ever finish it.

Either I gave up at exactly the spot where the story picked up (what Feynman did next after he'd finished working on the Manhattan Project atomic bomb) or else I wasn't in the right frame of mind when I lost interest, because I eventually enjoyed the final 150 or so pages.

In 1965, Feynman was asked in a TV news show to explain in a few words what he had won the Nobel prize for. In a taxi afterwards, a cab driver sympathized, "I'da said, 'If I could explain it in three minutes it wouldn't be worth the Nobel prize!"

Parts of Feynman's lectures are presented frame by frame. It didn't bother me that I couldn't understand most of the science as he explains how photons react with electrons. In the audience, students are pictured with thought bubbles ("How can it be?" I don't like it." I don't understand.") with words written backwards; words that would be right-way around from the lecturer's point of view. Feynman says, "I can see you saying 'I don't understand.' Tough. I don't understand it either. I don't like it either."

Feynman used squiggly line diagrams to explain his theories and these translate well to a graphic novel presentation. Leland Myrick's expressive line art keeps the wide cast of characters identifiable. Feynman's unruly, uncombed hair is unmistakable. Colourist Hilary Sycamore has added solid, muted colours to the artwork. It's an attractive book that will appeal to readers who enjoy graphic novel biographies and/or science.

David at The Centered Librarian has posted links to talks by Feynman that are on YouTube with lovely photo imagery. They are divided into three subjects - Beauty, Honours and Creativity - and each one is only 4 or 5 minutes long.

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

2011-10-03T09:30:00.001-06:00

The river Thames in London has frozen solid only 40 times between 1142 and 1895. Canadian author Helen Humphreys has written character-based vignettes for each of those times, based on true archival accounts. Her prose is both lyrical and spare. Since the destruction of the old London Bridge and the building of a new one that allows water to move more quickly and freely, "the Thames would never, will never, freeze solid in the heart of London again." Historical artwork and photographs add to the charm of this little book, which can be enjoyed in brief dips, or read straight through in the way of a story-cycle.

I recommend this to fans of the sort of historical fiction that spans centuries and in which place is as much a character as the people, such as Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd, or Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett - even though these authors write much fatter books. If you are looking for more slices of life from medieval England, you might also enjoy Good Masters! Sweet Ladies by Laura Amy Schlitz.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner

2011-09-30T11:21:00.003-06:00

Zsuzsi Gartner employs bracing black humour in her collection of stories, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. They are set in or near Vancouver, often in a cul-de-sac. Random elements pop up more than once: terry cloth shorts; children riding unicycles; a lost person showing up astride the back of a giant turtle. Each story, however, is inventively unique. Some incorporate fantastical elements, like the angels who inhabit the bodies of teenagers for a while in We Come in Peace.

If forced to pick a favourite, I'd choose Floating Like a Goat, which is in the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter's Grade one art teacher, written "in such a deeply caffeinated fugue state that I fear my letter to you will come across as intemperate." I was sympathetic to this mother, incensed by the teacher's imposed strictures, such as insisting "that when six-year-old children draw people or animals their feet MUST be touching the ground." " 'I guess she's never heard of Chagall,' I said to Georgia, trying to sound offhand, as I'm well aware that it's considered verboten to undermine a teacher's authority."

Gartner isn't shy about exposing the comical underside of modern society. It's like she has a sharp knife point to deftly slip under one's guard, moving her readers from laughter to full danger alertness.

Readalikes: The thorny vine pictured on the cover, the humour and the supernatural elements all brought Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters to mind. For more social satire, try anything Ali Smith. Gartner's Investment Results May Vary, with its litany of "huh, huh, huh" at the end reminded me of one of Lorrie Moore's stories from Birds of America. Others brought Jackie Kay's story My Daughter, the Fox (in Wish I Was Here) to mind. I could keep going like this, but really, Gartner has her own fabulous style.

The London Train by Tessa Hadley

2011-09-26T21:16:00.000-06:00

Two storylines converge on a chance meeting between Cora and Paul, strangers who sit across from each other on the train between London and Cardiff. Marital infidelity, disputes over agricultural practices, an adult daughter who goes missing, and a husband who disappears are some of the plot devices that hooked me in Tessa Hadley's reflective novel. I feel like I know the characters well and can imagine them going on with their lives beyond hopeful ending to the story.

Juanita McMahon narrates the audiobook [Clipper Audio; 10 hours] production. McMahon's interpretations of Cora's Welsh and the various English voices were fine, although the Polish accents for a couple of minor characters weren't convincing.

Readalikes: We Had It So Good by Linda Grant (for character-driven domestic fiction) and maybe Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (for the double storyline about families, but minus romance).

Tell It to the Trees by Anita Rau Badami

2011-09-25T20:48:00.003-06:00

A dead body is found in the snow outside the home of the Dharma family in smalltown British Columbia in 1980. The head of the family is Vikram, an abusive tyrant who beats his children and humiliates his wife. Suman Dharma and her children, Varsha and Hemant, take turns telling us what happened to Anu, the dead woman who had been renting the cottage at the back of the Dharma property. Anu's voice is also present, in the form of her journal entries.

I like books with multiple points of view, but it was creepy to see the world through the eyes of Varsha, a horrible and manipulative 13-year-old. It's an unsettling novel.

P.S. To whomever wrote the jacket copy for Tell It to the Trees: the town of Merritt, B.C. is not located in northern Canada. It is only one degree of latitude north of the U.S./Canadian border. So there.

Note added October 23, 2011: Yesterday Badami said her setting was a composite, not a real town, set in northern BC. I stand corrected.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2011-09-20T09:45:00.002-06:00

Escape to the deepest Amazon in Ann Patchett's wonderful new novel. Dr. Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota existence far behind when she travels to Manaus in Brazil to find out what happened to her colleague and lab partner, Anders Eckman. Their employer is Vogel, a giant pharmaceutical company, which has been funding top secret research among the Lakashi people. The Lakashi women remain fertile and bear children well into their 70s. Dr. Annick Swenson is the formidable scientist heading the research, and she is also Marina's former professor. Another complication is Jim Fox, head of Vogel, who has been having a clandestine romantic relationship with Marina for over a year, since his wife died.

Patchett has created a rich cast of characters, a vivid setting and surprising plot twists. The ending is the biggest treat of all. The narrative arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, yet so much possibility remains open for the characters to make further choices and to live on beyond the final pages. Very highly recommended!

The Better Mother by Jen Sookfong Lee

2011-09-18T08:24:00.002-06:00

Born in Vancouver in 1950, a gay boy comes of age in his Chinese family, feeling like an alien. Danny feels more affinity for an exotic dancer that he meets in a Chinatown alley than for his own mother. In the early 1980s, Danny works as a wedding photographer by day and cruises for anonymous sex in Stanley Park at night. Moving back and forth through time, Danny's story intertwines with that of the dancer, who is known as Miss Val or the Siamese Kitten.

This all sounded promising, but I was disappointed because Jen Sookfong Lee's style put me off. Both Danny and Miss Val seemed like stock characters. Danny is attracted to fashion and silky fabrics from a young age and that sums up his early gayness. Couldn't Lee have done better in imagining him?

After three chapters, I skimmed through the middle, read the ending and brought it back to the library. It annoyed me to be told what Danny was feeling, rather than being shown: "The fulfillment of his wants helps him to believe that he is not a failure" when he's on his way home from another faceless sexual encounter. Danny's poor relationship with his father was presented as a given, with minimal exploration. To be fair, there might have been more character development in the middle parts that I skimmed. I didn't pay much attention to Miss Val's backstory, which included giving up her daughter.

Lee was inspired by a real-life photographer of burlesque dancers, Theodore Saskatche Wan. I found the author's note at the end more interesting than anything else in the book.

Readers who liked The Secret Daughter are likely to also enjoy The Better Mother. Another character-driven historical set in Vancouver's Chinatown (and one that I loved) is The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy.

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

2011-09-15T14:26:00.001-06:00

"In the old days in Nigeria, people were kind of scared of twins -- some people still are. Traditionally, twins are supposed to live in three worlds: this one, the spirit world and the Bush, which is a sort of wilderness of the mind." Sarah Harrison explains this to her eight-year-old daughter, Jessamy, after Jess learns that she had a twin sister who died at birth. Jess is a precocious child who has been advanced a year at her school in London and is having great trouble adapting to her new class.

While on a visit to her extended family in Nigeria, Jess makes friends with another girl, Tilly Tilly. When Jess returns home to England, she's delighted to find Tilly Tilly has moved there. It takes a while before Jess realizes that nobody else can see Tilly Tilly, but that doesn't mean she isn't dangerous. Things get pretty spooky!

The Icarus Girl is a challenging book that generated great discussion at my book group last night. There are so many mysterious things, from the choice of title (why refer to a Greek myth? Is Jess the Icarus girl, or is that Tilly Tilly?) to the ambiguous ending. (I thought the final poem made things clear, but not everyone agreed with me.) I'm really looking forward to Oyeyemi's latest book, Mr. Fox.

Readalikes: For another story about twin girls with joint British/Nigerian heritage, try 26a by Diana Evans. Nigerian author Ben Okri's The Famished Road is narrated by a spirit child.

Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi

2011-09-13T07:00:00.002-06:00

The vegetarian dishes in Plenty are exquisitely photographed and there are lovely line drawings between chapters and even the cover is puffy like a photo album -- maybe that's why I ended up treating this as more of an art book than a recipe book. I'm sad that other people are waiting for it and therefore I must return it to the library, since I'm not ready to part with it yet. I have read through most of it, dipping in wherever the pages opened, enjoying Ottolenghi's introductions as well as browsing through the recipes themselves.

I did try a few of the recipes, such as polenta made with fresh corn. That one was a disappointment because it was a lot of work and I found the end result too sweet. "Mixed beans with many spices and lovage" turned out great and I was happy to find an actual recipe that called for lovage, since I have a giant plant in my garden. Ottolenghi includes heaps of fresh herbs - at least a tablespoon per person - in his recipes, which is lovely. His penchant for herbs comes across clearly in the recipe titled "Steamed rice with herbs (or, actually, herbs with rice)."

Mostly, this book has inspired me to cook creatively, rather than to follow instructions on its pages. I'll be borrowing this beautiful book again. Meanwhile, it's good to know that Ottolenghi has a recipe column in the Guardian.

Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda

2011-09-12T17:17:00.002-06:00

Born under an unlucky horoscope in 1899 in Ceylon, a Sinhalese village boy was given to a Buddhist temple when he was 10. The monk who sexually abused the boy called him Squirrel. (This crime against children is obviously not only perpetrated by Catholic priests.)

After three years, the boy escaped the temple and gave himself a new name: Sam Kandy. He used whatever means necessary to get ahead, including murder. He made his fortune, then lost it, then got rich again, but it wasn't until old age that Sam discovered peace and redemption. Sam's life spanned a century of momentous changes in the country that became Sri Lanka.

I spent four months there in 1978 and enjoyed being transported back to that tropical island through Boyagoda's writing. His prose style includes lots of description - and some sentences run to 15 lines - but the story still moves along. Important plot points, especially violent ones, are often slyly worded. I would sometimes be as startled by the way they were revealed as by the content itself. It's not a bad thing to feel safely removed from the civil unrest and violence in the story.

Family saga readalikes also set in Sri Lanka include: Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai; Mosquito by Roma Tearne and Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.

Paying for It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John by Chester Brown

2011-09-10T19:10:00.002-06:00

I've read memoirs written by call girls and rent boys, and feminist theory both for and against prostitution, but this is the first time I've encountered the activity from the viewpoint of a thoughtful john. Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown tackles this deeply personal topic with a frankness bordering on clinical detachment. In among the (many!) pages of appendices and notes at the end, Brown's good friend Seth contributes these comments: "I often jokingly refer to Chet as 'the robot.' [...] He's definitely an oddball. That said, he is also the kindest, gentlest and most deeply thoughtful oddball I know."

Seth's praise rings true. Brown's attitude towards the women that he saw was considerate and even gallant. The book opens in Toronto in June 1996 with the chapter "My Last Girlfriend." Brown maintained a platonic relationship with his ex-girlfriend and they continued to live together even when Sook-Yin's new boyfriend moved in. (Brown's lack of jealousy when his girlfriend was with another guy was of particular interest to me, since I too was born without the jealousy gene.) Afterwards, chapters are titled with the (fake) names of the prostitutes he saw, ending with "Back to Monogamy" in 2010.

In addition to his sexual encounters, Brown portrays the many discussions he had with his friends about prostitution. I like that Brown isn't afraid to challenge cultural attitudes about morality. He further refutes the usual arguments surrounding the issue in the appendices. Philosophy and ideas about marriage, sex and monogamy permeate the text. Did you know there may be a connection between the twelfth century Cathars and French court troubadours, and the development of the concept of romantic love?

Brown's careful black on white ink work is nicely balanced between subtlety and strength. I was reminded of Seth's Wimbledon Green, but Brown's work is more realistic. The book has a lot of nudity - as you would expect from the subject matter. Where Brown shows himself lying naked after sex and talking with the woman, I find the scenes quite touching in their vulnerability.

I think this memoir will appeal to a lot of different readers. As Robert Crumb states in his introduction, "this is a very enlightening book, as well as being entertaining." Readalike: Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown.

One last comment: in the notes, Brown identifies the restaurant on Queen Street where he and Seth held a particular conversation - it's called Terroni. I was in that same restaurant last year! I remember that a woman who joined our group set her giant Starbucks drink on the table and sipped it throughout our meal. Hmm... that would make a good cartoon strip, wouldn't it?

Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

2011-09-08T07:35:00.004-06:00

In a combination travelogue and history book, American journalist Ian Frazier explains his fascination with Russia, and Siberia in particular. He made five trips to Siberia in 16 years, plus another 5 or 6 trips to western Russia during that time.

Frazier digresses from his travel journals onto topics such as the empire of Chingis Khan, the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, the Decemberists, famous duels, and petty excuses for banishment to Siberia. Sometimes brief, sometimes extensive, these side tangents reminded me of Bill Bryson's style in At Home. History, politics, geography and people - there's more than a bit of everything, because this isn't a short book. I listened to the MacMillan audiobook, 20.5 hours, read by the author. Occasionally Frazier sounded like he was yawning as he spoke. In the print version, I would have skipped over the Russian words and phrases, but I appreciated hearing them pronounced for me.

The anecdotes from Frazier's camping journey across the continent were my favourite, especially hearing the details of daily Russian life as he encountered it, like wedding parties celebrating in the middle of the highway. Frazier's Russian driver on this trip had a knack for repairing their vehicle with bits of garbage salvaged from the roadside. He would clean the bug-encrusted windshield by splashing it with some drinking water, breaking apart a cigarette and sprinkling it over the glass, then dismantling one wiper blade to render the whole thing spotless.

Frazier saw a remarkably large number of beautiful women in Siberian cities and brought up the ongoing tragedy of the sex slave trade. I thought of Zara, who escaped this horror in Sofi Oksanen's novel Purge. Siberia is not on my list of places to see, yet I really enjoyed travelling there vicariously.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

2011-09-05T14:21:00.000-06:00

Inspired by quirky vintage photographs, author Ransom Riggs has dreamed up a story about an unusual orphanage located off the coast of Wales. One of the orphans grew up to be Abe, Jacob's Jewish grandfather. At 15, Jacob had long given up believing in his grandfather's outlandish tales about growing up among orphaned children with peculiar talents... until Jacob saw his first monster. His adventures began then.

The book is sprinkled with over 40 reproductions of old photos. If you're in the mood for something completely different, check this out. It kept me amused and intrigued, although the gimmick wore a bit thin by the (cliffhanger) end. Grade 7 - adult.

Beautiful & Pointless (A Guide to Modern Poetry) by David Orr

2011-09-04T14:20:00.000-06:00

This amusing and enlightening book about poetry is something that I'll recommend to many people, and not just my poet friends. It is also a guidebook that will give confidence to readers who have been hesitant to travel the pathways of poetry. David Orr is an award-winning poetry critic whose work is "clear-eyed, opinionated and idiosyncratic" (as praised by Tom Perrotta).

In this book, Orr demystifies contemporary poetry for general readers. Rather than talking about poetry "as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone" it is helpful to think of it as a foreign destination that "both welcomes and confounds" a traveller. I was tickled that Orr used Belgium as a hypothetical example, since I've just returned from a trip there. Orr writes that you would not "decide in advance that you'd never understand Belgians because you couldn't immediately determine why their most famous public statue is a depiction of a naked kid peeing in a fountain. You'd probably figure, hey, that's what they like in Belgium; if I stick around long enough, maybe it'll all make sense."

Why bother with poetry? In the final chapter, Orr addresses this question with humility and wit. The "typical defense of poetry tends to assume that it's enough to point out that the art form does something interesting or clever or attractive, when the real difficulty lies in demonstrating that poetry does something so interesting, clever, or attractive that people should forego other activities in order to enjoy its interestingly clever attractiveness."

Forego other activities and treat yourself to Orr's delightful little book. (And then read some poetry!)

Along a Long Road by Frank Viva

2011-09-01T08:10:00.001-06:00

Deceptively simple, this picture book about a bicycle journey rewards repeated readings. The rhymes ("around a small town and down"), concepts (up, down, into, out, over) and counting (to three) capture only some of the appeal for young children. There are plenty of pictorial jokes and details, such as a snail beside the cyclist as he climbs a hill and a bird flying as he swiftly descends. The pages also offer a treasure hunt of transportation vehicles of every kind.

Frank Viva's graphic retro style reminds me of artwork by Pascal Blanchet and J.otto Seibold. Viva uses swoopy curves in his bold shapes and has chosen muted primary colours in addition to black and cream: gray-blue, deep red, and golden yellow. The yellow is used only for the road and is cleverly printed with shiny slickness on matte paper, to wonderful effect.

When I learned from a note inside that the book was created as a single, continuous thirty-five-foot long piece of art I immediately wished to see it spread out like that. Check out the book trailer at Frank Viva's website.

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

2011-08-31T11:46:00.003-06:00

Gina Moynihan tells how she cheated on her husband and embarked on an affair with Sean Vallely, who was also married. The thrill of forbidden passion is masterfully evoked by Irish author Anne Enright. Gina's voice is distinctive and intelligent. I liked her very much, despite her poor impulse control. Here she describes the sensual pleasures of kissing:
"After the kiss -- the five-minute, ten-minute, two-hour kiss -- the actual sex was a bit too actual, if you know what I mean." (p. 34)
"Another epic kiss, a wall-slider if there ever was one, I feel like I am clambering out of my own head, that the whole usual mess of myself has been put on the run by it." (p. 69)
"I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like bird song; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness." (p. 70)

At the crux of this tale is Evie, Sean's young daughter who has epilepsy. In the contemporary Dublin setting, with the wreck of two families mirrors the crash of the Irish economy. I don't know how I managed to choose three novels about marital infidelity in a row, but this is the strongest of the three, thanks to Enright's accomplished prose.

Readalikes for a similar strong voice in a short novel with a contemporary setting: The Spare Room by Helen Garner; Molly Fox's Birthday by Dierdre Madden.

The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti

2011-08-30T19:58:00.005-06:00

The tree of songs, squirrel dreams and a ceremony performed for a tree's first fruit - these are only a few of the stories in this gorgeous art book from India. "In Gond belief, trees stand in the middle of life, and the spirits of many things live in them." Three artists of the Gond tribe of central India contributed paintings which have been hand silk-screened onto black paper. Each artwork is paired with a tale narrated by the artist.

An example: "Snakes and Earth. The earth is held in the coils of the snake goddess. And the roots of trees coil around the earth too, holding it in place. If you want to depict the earth, you can show it in the form of a snake. It is the same thing." The illustration by Bhajju Shyam shows seven snakes with their heads as the roots of a tree and their bodies forming the branches within a thicket of twigs. In another, a pair of trees called "The Marriage of Desire and Intoxication," the story is of a human husband and wife who were turned into the trees of cannabis and alcohol.

See images (with prints for sale) at the Ashvita website. Lovely!

Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt

2011-08-29T21:18:00.000-06:00

When Mike's wife Anna suddenly begins speaking nonsense at age 59, it is clearly a serious health issue. The doctors call it jargon aphasia. Mike tries to make the most of their time together, knowing Anna's death may come at any moment. His biggest dilemma is whether or not to come clean about an affair that he had years earlier. He would like Anna's forgiveness, but doesn't want to add to her distress.

It's a tender portrayal of a longtime marriage. The story is somewhat slight, but three adult children in the family add texture, as does the rural setting an hour outside of Toronto. I especially liked artist Aleksandar Macasev's whimsical illustrations depicting Mike's attempts to communicate with Anna when he was at a loss for words.

I prefer McWatt's earlier novel, Step Closer, but the central question in Vital Signs interests me and I'll probably mull over this book for quite a while.

The Big Why by Michael Winter

2011-08-28T11:55:00.004-06:00

The Big Why is a sensual fictionalized journal of real-life artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), covering the time in his early thirties when he lived in Newfoundland. It was shortly before the start of the first world war when Kent decided to move from New York City to the little town of Brigus, where only one house had indoor plumbing. Kent lived in a tent inside an abandoned cottage while he fixed the place up before sending for his wife and children.

Life in Brigus was austere for everyone, since fishing and sealing were the main occupations. There is a strong contrast, however, between the cultural attitudes and outlook of Kent as compared to his Newfoundland neighbours. These differences, together with Kent's inability to be faithful to his wife, provide the tension in the story. It's a character study of an artistic temperament, an idealistic man who has trouble curbing his impulses. After Kent has left Newfoundland, he has a conversation with his friend Bob Bartlett, a polar explorer who also lived in Brigus:
"The question is not, he said, were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that's a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. That, my friend, is the big why."
It's telling that this speech comes from Bartlett, who is identified as an "invert" (gay) in the book.

I loved the Newfoundland vocabulary and expressions, like boo-darbies (fairies), the dunch (numbness), measuring in quintals (114 pounds), swiling (hunting for seals) on swatchy ice in a clever boat, walking in your softs (barefoot) and making fish (preserving salt cod) on flakes.

It doesn't help to clarify the difference between a dory and a skiff, but this bit of dialogue between a couple of teens watching a small boat is entertaining:
"Tom: Look at that skiff.
Dory.
She's a skiff.
She's a dory, boy.
Go on, you useless article.
Look at the rake on her.
Look at the side, the ramp.
Okay, a flat.
She's a dory, okay? A dory.
What about the V in the back there.
That's a little skiffish. but she's a dory.
What about --
Ah shut your face.
Go fuck yourself."

Marital infidelity is a theme throughout, and not just between Kent and his wife, Kathleen. The morning after Kent and his best friend Gerald (Kathleen's cousin) have been on a drinking binge in New York:
"There was a note on the table. His eyes blinking back flashes of wet. He was holding the note.
I hate it when my wife asks mechanical engineers to go to California with her."

A nonstandard orthography is used throughout the book, with minimal use of apostrophes (i.e. didnt, theyre, wasnt) and no quotation marks to differentiate internal and external dialogue. It took me a little while to get used to this, but it added to the intimate feeling of Kent's journal.

I was pleased to see that both the hardcover and paperback editions of The Big Why have art by Rockwell Kent on the cover. The frank and lusty sensuality in The Big Why reminded me of another historical novel about a real artist, As Above, So Below by Rudy Rucker.

NOTE: Michael Winter has a sibling, Kathleen Winter, who is the author of Annabel.

Grace by Elizabeth Scott

2011-08-25T21:38:00.000-06:00

Grace, a member of the rebel Hill People, has been trained since childhood to be a suicide bomber. At 17, she is sent on her big mission to do her part in overthrowing the ruthless dictator of her homeland. Something goes wrong and the story opens with Grace's efforts to escape her country safely. She tells her story in first person present tense, filling in the backstory as she journeys towards the border.

The premise is intriguing and I mostly enjoyed this until it got too preachy in the final 20 or so pages. I was also uncomfortable with the first name of the evil dictator - Keran Berj - which is awfully close to the Islamic holy book when coupled with religious zealot suicide bombers.

I'd recommend this dystopian science fiction to Hunger Games fans in Grade 9 and up, especially those readers who are interested in philosophical questions.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

2011-08-24T11:37:00.000-06:00

Ka is a New York lesbian sculptor whose father has been her main muse and model for her work. It isn't until Ka is well into her adulthood that she learns a shocking truth about the man: under the Duvalier regime in Haiti, her father tortured and killed people. The Dew Breaker is an amazingly powerful story about forgiveness and redemption.

The novel told in a series of short stories, a form I like very much. (Click on the 'story-cycle' tag below to link to others that I've reviewed.) I'm grateful to Amy at Amy Reads for drawing my attention to this book, since I've wanted to read something by Danticat for a long time and Amy's review spurred me to action. The audiobook [Recorded Books; 6 hrs, 45 mins] that I listened to was narrated in the lovely voice of Robin Miles. I enjoyed her nuanced interpretations of Haitian-accented English.

As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel by Rudy Rucker

2011-08-21T20:54:00.006-06:00

In this rich imagining of the life of 16th century Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rudy Rucker uses one of Bruegel's works to title each chapter. The novel spans the second half of his life, to his death at age 44. It begins in 1551 with his trip to Italy and subsequent return to Antwerp as a young man, then the progress of his love life, friendships, and family life as he built a following for his work (and dropped the 'h' from his surname). His paintings and drawings contained veiled political and religious commentary, a risky thing during a time when treason and religious heresy were punishable by death.

Art lovers and fans of historical fiction will find this book interesting. I picked it up before heading off to Belgium and only got halfway through before my trip. Now that I'm home, I just couldn't seem to get back into it, so I read the final chapter to see how things turned out and it feels like that is enough. It was nice that the storyline involving Bruegel's gay friend, mapmaker Ortelius, is also wrapped up in the final chapter.

I learned a lot, but it isn't exactly a page-turner. Rucker's style is often more like a university lecture (albeit an interesting one). Here's an example: "Leaning against the wall were two great oak panels, nearly five feet across and four feet high, each of them painted with hundreds of little figures, too many to count.* Bruegel and his patron Nicolas Jonghelinck called them wemel paintings. The word wemel meant 'seethe' or 'boil'; it was the word they'd used in Bruegel's village to describe the motion of a mass of insects:** like ants, like the roly-poly bugs found under a rotten log, or like the springtails in a wet pile of duckweed at the river's edge."

While I was in a museum in Brussels, it was a thrill to see the original painting that was used on the dust jacket of this book, The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Reading As Above, So Below, (well, as much of it as I managed) gave me a greater appreciation and a deeper understanding of the early Flemish art I saw on the trip. In the story, Bruegel spends hours examining the paintings of his hero, Hieronymous Bosch. This gave me the idea to take my time with similar art, since so much is going on in them. I felt rewarded to spy such things as a street vendor cooking waffles in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. And then I went outside to enjoy waffles on the streets of Brussels...

*A quibble - I believe stars are too many to count, but not figures in a painting.
**Why didn't he just put a period here?

Pieter Brueghel II; detail from a copy of his father's work.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

2011-08-19T20:39:00.004-06:00

Tove Jansson is a Swedish/Finnish lesbian author who wrote and illustrated books for both adults and children. I picked up Fair Play (at Audrey's Books in Edmonton) for two reasons: I was excited to see something new (to me) by Jansson and I'll read anything with an introduction by Ali Smith.

Fair Play is a collection of short stories that together form a novel. It's about a long-term loving relationship between two artists, a writer/illustrator named Mari and a photographer/artist named Jonna. As Ali Smith points out in her introduction, these characters are clearly autobiographical. Jansson's lifelong partner and travelling companion, Tuulikki Pietila was a graphic artist and the women spent over 40 years together.

In the stories, Mari and Jonna deal with ordinary things like jealousy, disappointment and irritation. Their unfailing willingness to sort things out and the trust that they will succeed are very appealing qualities. Their love is so obviously rock-solid. I was intrigued that the two women have connected, yet separate, living spaces. (Sort of like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but without the histrionics.)

Some of the stories are also set on a tiny island where Mari and Jonna spend summers in a cabin. "The room had four windows because the sea was equally beautiful in all directions." Jansson's writing (translated by Thomas Teal) is as light and airy as the seaside cabin. Each word seems to fit exactly right, shipshape and freshly scrubbed. Jansson makes it look so easy.

Fair Play reminded me of a story-cycle I read years ago, The Riverhouse Stories by Andrea Carlisle, not only because they are both about the life of a lesbian couple, but especially for the gentleness, kindness and fable-like quality these books share. Fair Play is possibly the best book I've read so far this year.

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

2011-08-17T17:23:00.001-06:00

"This is the story of a boy who used to be a wolf and a girl who was becoming one." The first sentence of the prologue pretty much sums up the second book in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. I enjoyed the first book, Shiver, but am less enthusiastic about Linger.

I know that part of my antipathy is because of the audiobook narrators [Scholastic; 10 hours, 40 minutes]. Usually I like it when alternating character voices are interpreted by different performers, but not this time. Three of the four - Dan Bittner, Pierce Cravens and Jenna Lamia - spoke so slowly that it drove me nuts! They sounded like dimwits. Only Emma Galvin, as Isabelle, sounded like a normal person.

Isabelle is attracted to a new werewolf, Cole, whose personality is as prickly as hers. That worked very well. The lovey-dovey relationship between Grace and Sam proceeds as it was laid out in Shiver, but Grace's parents have made an odd about-face. In the first book, they were negligently oblivious. In Linger, they do everything possible to keep Grace and Sam apart.

The change in Grace's parents seemed so out of character that I pondered this after finishing the book. In the end, I concede that they may have been shocked by what they saw as a breach of trust by their daughter and that's why they over-reacted. They continued to be bad parents. At the core of the story is the theme of breaking free from expectations and fulfilling your own destiny. Bad parents provide a better foil for this action.

A nice aspect of the audiobook is the inclusion of original music composed and performed by the author. You can hear it while watching the lovely trailer Stiefvater created using paper cutouts and stop motion filming.

Linger ends in a cliffhanger, but even without that, I am curious enough about the final outcome to plan to read the final book in the series, Forever.

The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones

2011-08-15T07:48:00.003-06:00

I'm back from Belgium with lots of good memories, a head cold that started after I landed in Edmonton and a laptop that refuses to connect to the internet. On a borrowed machine, doped up on medication and probably jetlagged too, here is a review of one of the books I read on the trip.

Author Lloyd Jones is probably best known in North America for his novel Mister Pip. The Book of Fame is also a New Zealand award-winner. It's a fictionalized account of the true story of the original All Black team of young rugby players who travelled to the UK in 1905 where they astounded sports fans with their skill. I know next to nothing about rugby but I was swept up in this amazing tale.

Over the course of a year, the New Zealand team lost only one match out of 35 games. "For the record, we scored 830 points and conceded 39." You don't have to know anything about the scoring system to recognize what a feat this was. Final scores give a good indication of their prowess: Oxford (47-nil); Bedford (41-nil); Munster (33-nil); Yorkshire (40-nil). Their crushing itinerary had them sometimes playing two or more games per week. They suffered broken ribs and collar bones among other injuries and illness and continued to win against the top British teams. The men came from humble backgrounds - farmers, miners, civil servants - and their first impressions of England exemplify this: "There appeared to be little in the way of landscaping left to do."

The choice of first person plural narration is an inspired and perfect choice because the men worked so well as a team they were like one individual with many bodies. The only other time I've read a novel in this viewpoint is in Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. The format Jones used could be loosely described as verse. Vignettes, fragments of newspaper accounts, personal journal entries and list poems are all part of the mix. There are accounts of game details too, of course, but I never felt overwhelmed by too much sports talk.

When I finished the book, I immediately felt the need to watch an All Blacks haka on YouTube. I could imagine the impression it would make on the opposing team!

I highly recommend The Book of Fame to readers who enjoy travel writing or historical fiction with a focus on people and everyday-life details. It's a must for rugby fans.

Essex County by Jeff Lemire

2011-07-26T22:01:00.005-06:00

Cartoonist Jeff Lemire's three interrelated stories about lonely people living in a rural part of southwestern Ontario have been collected into a single volume in Essex County. I had read each one individually as they were released and now I'm very glad to have read them again, all together. Their combined impact is stunning. I marvelled at Lemire's craftmanship - both the narrative and images are powerful and moving.

Book one: Tales from the Farm. Lester, a ten-year-old orphan, goes to live with his uncle and the two are painfully awkward in their grief and inability to connect with each other. Luckily, Lester finds a kindred spirit in Jimmy Lebeuf, the former NHL player who runs the local Esso station. A nice touch: Lemire used his own childhood drawings for Lester's attempts at superhero comics.

Book two: Ghost Stories. Lou and Vince Lebeuf are brothers playing on the same professional hockey team in the early 50s in Toronto, until Lou's attraction to Vince's fiance drives a permanent wedge between them. Nice touch: The illustration of Lou flying through the air right after he scores a winning goal is based on the iconic photo of Bobby Orr taken by Ray Lussier at the Stanley Cup in 1970. (Even I, a non-sports fan, was able to recognize it!) Another nice touch: The Fuel Station bar where the hockey team hangs out in Toronto forms a link to the gas station operated by Vince's son in book one.

Book three: The Country Nurse. Flipping back and forth between two time periods, a young nun cares for a group of children in a church orphanage in 1917 and a travelling nurse looks after her patients in present day. Nice touch: The parallels between the two time periods are emphasized with two almost identical panels, the young orphan Lawrence Lebeuf feeding chickens in 1917, and Lester Papineau doing the same chore in contemporary times. Only the scene through the open door of the chicken coop is different. Which reminds me of another nice touch: The Forest Glade Nursing Home (in books two and three) echoes the former orphanage in its clearing in the woods.

I really love this work and was delighted that it was one of the five Canada Reads titles this year (even though my pick, Skim, didn't make it past the top 40). It was disappointing that the comics format, rather than the content, was the focus of the discussion on air. My library book club has chosen Essex County for our meeting tomorrow. One of the members said she had brought it in on hold at the library some months ago because of Canada Reads but then sent it back when she saw it was a graphic novel. I'm pleased that she decided to give it a try for the book club and I look forward to our discussion.

NOTE: This is my 500th post on Lindy Reads and Reviews. I had hoped to mark this milestone with the addition of an alphabetical index to all of the books here, but I haven't had time to create that. Soon, I hope. (Well, after I'm back from holidays... and after I've got the weeding caught up in my garden when I return... and who knows what else will interfere... besides reading more books... )

Another note, added July 28: The book discussion of Essex County went very well last night. 8 out of the 13 people there had never read a graphic novel previously and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Hooray for Jeff Lemire!

NOTE, added August 17: I was tickled to see a French edition of Essex County in a comic store in Brussels. It was displayed next to one by another Canadian, Guy Delisle.

The Olive Tree by Carol Drinkwater

2011-07-25T20:49:00.002-06:00

Carol Drinkwater is a British actress who has an olive farm in Provence. She is absolutely passionate on the topic of olives and her enthusiasm is contagious. I think I ate olives or cooked with olive oil every day while I listened to the Clipper audiobook (15 hours), which is read by the author. Check out Drinkwater's website for details about her numerous other books, all with 'olive' in the title.

Subtitled A Personal Journey Through Mediterranean Olive Groves, this book is mostly a travel memoir. Drinkwater travelled on her own through Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Italy, following a proposed UNESCO Olive Heritage Trail. It is also an exploration of the history of olive cultivation and of 21st century agricultural concerns like water shortage, intensive farming, climate change and pesticide use versus organic practices.

Drinkwater has some pet theories about how olives were introduced to the Mediterranean. Her pure conjecture annoyed me, but then she admitted she was kicking around ideas on history to make historians turn in their graves, and I felt better. I also cut her some slack when she landed in Algeria at the same time as the capital had been bombed. A network of beekeepers had arranged to assist her travels through their country by putting her up in their homes, but Drinkwater stubbornly insisted on time to herself in a hotel. She didn't find out until afterwards how dangerous the situation had become for foreigners in Algeria.

Like Drinkwater, I enjoy travelling on my own. I'm heading off to Europe later this week, where I'll have 10 days to myself before joining a friend for a week in Ghent. My iPod is loaded up with audiobooks, ready to go.

An Unfinished Business by Boualem Sansal

2011-07-24T14:51:00.000-06:00

Rachel Schiller learned two horrible things in 1994: that his parents who lived far away in Algeria had had their throats slit by Islamic fundamentalists, and that his father had been a Nazi SS officer working at concentration camps during WWII.

Rachel had been sent to be educated in Paris in 1970, when he was 7. The only time he returned to Algeria before his parents died was in 1985, when he collected his younger brother, Malrich, so that he could also have the benefit of a French education. 14 years apart in age, the two brothers are also of very different temperaments. In alternating passages from their journals, the reader learns how they coped with the shock of learning the truth about their respected father.

Strong parallels are drawn between the Nazis and the Islamic jihadists controlling the banlieu of Paris where the brothers grew up in a foster family. Rachel wrote, "you can't commit atrocities with enlightened people, you need hatred, blindness and a knee-jerk xenophobia." Grief and pain are central emotions in this story, but there is also a determination on Malrich's part to make a better future and to avoid repeating tragic history.

Author Boualem Sansal's books are banned in his native Algeria. He was awarded the German Book Trade Peace Prize this year.

The Klondike by Zach Worton

2011-07-21T17:38:00.000-06:00

"The story of how a handful of colourful characters sparked the largest mobilization of gold seekers in history is brought vividly to life in this debut graphic novel by cartoonist Zach Worton." (From the back cover.)

I was disappointed. The vignette style would have worked better with a more coherent connection between the parts. I would barely get to know a character and then the action would leap to another place and other people. Many of the secondary characters are never mentioned again. For example, the scene in 1897 Skagway, in which a Japanese worker was shot in a dispute over who could work stevedore jobs, ends as abruptly as the death and the story moves on to other events. I was often left wanting to know more. I also wanted to correct the spelling of 'greenhorn' (which doesn't have an 'e' on the end).

The black and white artwork is appealing and captures many different kinds of people as well as the beauty of the northern landscape. I especially liked the way Soapy Smith's eyes were drawn as zigzags - it's a good way to represent his mad intensity.

Since the book feels incomplete on its own, I suggest pairing this with either Gold Diggers by Charlotte Gray or Klondike by Pierre Berton for back-up information on the central events and characters.

Mennonites Don't Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack

2011-07-14T21:26:00.002-06:00

This collection of short stories depicts Mennonites living in the area around Swift Current, Saskatchewan. If you take away the cream gravy and the rollkuchen, they could almost be any farm or small town families in the Canadian prairies. Having been raised in a similar (albeit Catholic) environment, I could identify with the setting (and a vocabulary that includes chesterfields). Hossack's characters, however, are hard on each other and themselves and are so beaten-down by life in general that I felt fortunate not to have known their sort when I was growing up.

I wasn't wowed by Hossack's plain writing style, which relies heavily on exposition, and I found some of the stories too sentimental. I was also unconvinced by the similes, for example describing a laugh as "a sound as dry as paper being crumpled." If I hadn't just read Cate Kennedy's remarkable prose, I would perhaps have felt more generous. Still, if you're looking for realistic hard-luck tales about surviving rather than thriving, you'll find them in Mennonites Don't Dance.

Saskatchewan short stories that I really liked: A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker; Cool Water by Dianne Warren; and A Song for Nettie Johnson by Gloria Sawai. If you're looking for more about Mennonites, you can't go wrong with A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. Last summer at the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival, I heard some very funny stories about growing up Mennonite as told by Rebecca Schellenberg.

Blackout by Connie Willis

2011-07-13T07:14:00.001-06:00

A genre-blend of historical fiction and time travel, Blackout is set in the same world as The Domesday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. In this case, several historians at Oxford in 2060 travel back to study England at war in 1940. The main ones are Michael - there for the evacuation at Dunkirk, Merope - who observes children evacuated from London to the countryside, and Polly - who's right in the middle of the London blitz. The story leaps around with cliffhangers everywhere: include the final ending. To find out what happens to everyone, you must read the next book, All Clear.

I listened to an audiobook (Brilliance; 19 hours) performed by Katherine Kellgren, who sounded like she spoke through clenched teeth whenever the dialogue was in a protagonist's thoughts, rather than out loud. There's a lot of this, and it gave the impression that the historians had simmering frustrations. Which may be accurate, since they were obliged to hide their true identities and their foreknowledge of events. Still, it made me feel a bit on edge. It may also have increased my annoyance with the historians, who did a lot of rationalizing when things went wrong. They are supposed to be intelligent people, but they did some pretty stupid things.

Blackout is an entertaining page-turner, but I liked To Say Nothing of the Dog much better. I picked up this book in response to a read-along at two other book blogs: She Reads and Reads and Books and Movies. Instead of stopping at the correct place for first week, however, I've read it all the way through. Oops! How did that happen? My excuse is that I'll be away in Europe by the end of July. I'm looking forward to following the ongoing discussion, however.

There but for the by Ali Smith

2011-07-11T15:18:00.005-06:00

A guest at a dinner party in London locks himself into an upstairs room and refuses to come out. This odd event opens Scottish author Ali Smith's darkly comic look at modern society. She captures the ingrained bigotry that is revealed in casual conversations, including thoughtless assumptions made about blacks, gays and immigrants.

By staying locked in a room for weeks and then months, Miles affects a large number of people. Each part of this story - named for each word in the title - is nimbly told from four different points of view, in limited third person. Smith is widely read and has a quick wit, so I shouldn't have been surprised by the frequency that I found serendipitous connections to other stuff I'm reading. Here are a few:

a) Precocious 10-year-old Brooke asks philosophical questions like "If you travelled to the past to make the future better, would you actually be able to?" I'm currently listening to the audiobook Blackout by Connie Willis, which is about time-travelling historians in England. Also, Blackout and There but for the both reference the last words of Admiral Nelson. ("Kiss me Hardy.")

b) Several of the protagonists are music fans, so there are numerous references to songs and songwriters and I undoubtably missed some, but I noted that 85-year-old May's internal dialogue referenced a line from 'She Moved Through the Fair.' ("I won't slight them for their lack of kind.") I'd not thought about this traditional ballad for a long time, but heard it recently performed by members of the Edmonton Opera chorus at the Devonian Botanic Garden.

c) "A lot of the people Anna had seen had trouble speaking, either because of translation problems, or because a rain of blows had made them distrust words. Or both." This could apply equally to the silent refugees in one of Cate Kennedy's stories collected in Dark Roots.

d) At the infamous dinner party in There but for the, guests debate the relevance of art to human society and it looks like two of the men might come to blows over "that pointless skull encrusted with diamonds." My nephew Graham learned this week that a piece of his artwork was chosen as the regional winner in a national art competition. It's a sculpture (and working iPod dock) of a skull covered in computer circuitry created in homage to Damien Hirst's crystal skull.

The prose is lively and insightful. Enjoy!

Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy

2011-07-09T19:45:00.001-06:00

This wonderful collection of short stories from Australia is aptly endorsed in the quotes on the back of the book:

"sly, seductive, and surprising"
"talent for the comic and the chilling"
"clear-eyed, unsentimental empathy"
"a feeling for the precise moment when stars move in the cosmos"
"funny, wise, and achingly sad"
"incredibly spare and gifted writing"

What can I add? The stories differ widely, yet almost all of them deliver a little jolt at the end. I would be seeing a situation one way, and then suddenly have my perspective altered. This could have been unsettling, except the endings were just so fitting, it was more like an a-ha! feeling. A very good reading experience.

The Sweet In-Between by Sheri Reynolds

2011-07-08T13:25:00.000-06:00

Kenny (Kendra) is a gender-variant teen who learns to trust that ze is loved and welcome in the family where ze has lived in the years since hir mother died and hir father was imprisoned. Kenny disguises hir body and never uses the bathroom at school. Hir self-loathing is heartbreaking. After a friend confides that she'll pray for hir, even though Kenny's lifestyle goes against her personal beliefs, Kenny doesn't know what to say.

"I kick along the beach and think about my lifestyle. I didn't know I had one, and truth be told, I sort of thought you had to be eighteen to qualify. I'm surprised that Wendy doesn't agree with my lifestyle, because that implies I've chosen to live a certain way when I haven't really chosen anything at all."

My heart went out to Kenny, who always tries so very hard. If you enjoy coming of age stories about young people overcoming difficult situations, I recommend this. It's too bad that the cover photo on the edition I read has got nothing to do with Kenny, who would never have been caught wearing a dress.

Readalikes (none of which are about trans people): Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea; Breathing Underwater by Lu Vickers; Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron

True Grit by Charles Portis

2011-07-05T22:03:00.004-06:00

Oh. Wow. This book is AMAZING. The plainspoken narrator, Mattie Ross, totally won me over with her voice. It has the feel of a memoir, rather than a novel, as Mattie looks back on the winter when she was 14, when she left her home determined to avenge the murder of her father. She is practical, unsentimental and unselfconcious. She is a force to be reckoned with, undaunted by the lawlessness of the old west.

The story has plenty of adventure and action as well as colourful characters. I'm not surprised that it's been translated to film. Not having seen either of the movie versions, I can't say how closely they follow the book. I look forward to watching the Coen brothers version soon. (Well, not so soon. I just checked and there are 464 people ahead of me on the waiting list for the dvd at the library.)

I listened to the Recorded Books audio edition (6.5 hours) read by Donna Tartt. Her deadpan delivery is perfect for the part. In an afterword, Tartt says that four generations of her family all fell in love with this book at about the same time. I know exactly how that feels and I'm already planning to buy copies to give as gifts. I'm sure that my mom and siblings will love it too.