Clyde Fans by Seth

Clyde Fans by Seth
Drawn and Quarterly, May 2019

An ambitious, insightful "picture novel" about the inner lives of two brothers who own a family business.

Let's get format out of the way first. 2020 is the first year that graphic novels are eligible for the Scotiabank Giller prize, and the jurors have included Clyde Fans on the current longlist. To anyone who thinks graphic novels aren't serious literature, you are seriously behind the times. That viewpoint was proved invalid in 1992, when Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer. Words and pictures together are a powerful way to communicate stories. Onward.

The story opens in 1997, but most of the action takes place in the 1950s. The atmosphere is steeped in melancholy. Neither of the brothers in this dysfunctional family is actually suited to salesmanship. Both men were resistant to change, and their Toronto business eventually failed when electric fans became obsolete. What gives this book such emotional resonance is its deep excavation into the lives of ordinary people. It also explores memory, the passage of time, and the power in the objects we collect.

Seth's meticulous art style evokes 1950s nostalgia, while telling a story about the dangers of dwelling on the past. The colours are somber blues, greys and black on brownish paper. 

Clyde Fans is a sophisticated, layered, existential masterpiece. I'm glad that some sort of special dispensation has allowed this book to be considered for the Giller, even though it was published outside of the eligibility timeframe. 

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This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I have been reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog. 

You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert

You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert
Translated from French by Donald Winkler

End-of-the-world surrealism in the voice of a child in Chicoutimi, Quebec.

Are you up for something totally weird? Something in a macabre vein? Faldistoire, the gay boy who narrates this tale, is already jaded by the time he's in Grade 2. 

        They teach us all sorts of stupid things at Rejean-Tremblay School. They boil down the meaning of life for us and make us swallow it in little pills to calm us at lunch or when the nurse comes to see us and meets us privately to deliver her messages: don't trust anyone you don't know, get vaccinated, this is how to brush your teeth, my-body's-no-body's-but-mine, beware of Halloween candies where old perverts have hidden long poisoned needles that will send you right to your grave, you have to inspect them and throw away anything suspicious.

Children in his neighbourhood are abused by adults, they die by accident and by homicide. Toads watch over their graves in the local cemetery. Transgender folk don't have it easy in Chicoutimi either.

        Thanks to our family connection, I find pictures of Paule before her operation in the photo albums of Angele, my grandfather Fernand's sister. He had been her golden boy before he was disowned by the whole family because of his transexual lunacies. When you eat at my great-aunt's and, a bit tipsy, she starts talking about her only son abducted by the demons of sodomy because his father was never there to discipline him and to alert him to sexuality's most twisted vices, I pretend to go to sleep on the couch and I listen to her song and dance as she curses a life that always gives all good things to the same people, Mother Nature who makes families of ten children without a single one that's fucked up, while my great-aunt is there all alone to shovel the shit of the entire world.

After he has completed Grade 6, Faldistoire's father chooses to send him to the private school in town.

        The Lycee charged money for the admissions test, each year's registration, the uniform that had to be changed every two years because we grew too fast, the shorts and T-shirts for physical education because of the new logo, every extracurricular activity and the materials required for it. The Lycee, a business masquerading as a school, with all the good intentions--bogus--of the teachers who, only once a year, on the day for parental visits, made as if they gave a damn.

The students' favourite teacher in high school is Madame Marjolaine:

        We were sure that she was the queen of sexuality, we imagined that she knew everything about blow jobs, anal penetration, cunts and cunnilingus, all those things we knew the names of but didn't know what they really were, and in time we would go and check out Google and watch a video that would give us our education, the real one.

Faldistoire is expected only to "survive as one raises one's head out of murky and toxic water." But doesn't everyone have a right to more than that? To thrive? In this novel, the ghosts are bent on revenge, on blowing up the status quo, on demolishing "beautiful things prized for no reason." It's a wild ride.

Giller chances: MEDIUM - It's unusual and strangely compelling, but probably too nihilistic for the Giller.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Arsenal Pulp, April 2020

I took in the gorgeous prose in small sips over the course of two months. John Elizabeth Stintzi is a nonbinary author who uses a fragmentary, surreal style. It's a rewarding story about memory and coming to terms with a difficult parent-child relationship. I felt like I was deep inside the reality of the central character, a nonbinary person, which may explain why I felt like this book was altering my brain. 

Alani (Al/Annie/Allie/Alice/Sofia/etc) and their mother emigrated to Canada from Germany when Alani was small. Their mother is a photographer and one day Alani asks, "What is it a camera does?"

         "They sort of take time, and they hold it still. So it is easier to look at."

         I squirm at the words I know and do not know, because Mother switched to English after Ilsa died and I am still trying to catch up.

         "What is the word 'time' mean?"

         "Zeit," Mother says. Her voice is not her voice. She has been recast, borrowing the inflections of some voice in my head. The smile floats above her head, like the blank spots in the eye after the flash has pierced them. Her smile is looming everywhere I look.

         "Zeit, time, is a sort of river of moments you float down. And I do. Everyone does."

This novel grapples in an impressive way with moments, memory and time. How it feels to experience them. As an adult, Alani is a visiting professor of photography in Minneapolis. They have a nonbinary student, Ess, who is working on a project described thusly:

         "These open spaces and small towns in America are not often thought of as being black or queer. They are where the white and the cis and the straight are assumed to flourish. And they do. They are crabgrass in the spaces. They overtake. But if you stop and look at the soil, you see they are not the only weeds that grow."

That passage reminded me of another wonderful novel about feeling like a misfit in an academic life in the midwest: Real Life by Brandon Taylor. 

As a teen, Alani's best friend is Tom, whose mother Del...

         ...was in a vicious cycle of falling into new men and then falling out of them into drinking. She was either too hopeful to give Tom the time of day, or she was too drunk to see him. We both loved our mothers so much, if only because we could not reach them or do anything to help them.

There are so many passages that I flagged as I was reading this, a sign of how much I love the language and the ideas. Here are a few about nonbinary reality for Alani:

         I couldn't look at myself half of those days. I wanted the many-ness of me gone. I was everything, but I wanted to be one simple fucking thing. I was sick of manoeuvring between. I never felt welcome in my body, except for the moments when I did, and by then I didn't even want to be.

_____

         The cat is yowling as I dress myself loose. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror across the hall and hate it, go back into the bedroom and put my hair up and bind myself up prairie flat. I kiss the light lipstick I'd thought was right onto the corner of my fist, bend down to my luggage for the packer. Even now I can feel wrong a few times before I even start a day.

_____

         I hated thinking about my body, hated acknowledging that it wasn't as malleable as I wanted it to be. I felt like I could never fully make a home in it, like I would always be trapped there. It was a classic teenage condition to have, only it was compounded for me by my gender trouble. I could never have the man's body or the woman's body I wanted. That hasn't changed, but I've realized over time that feeling like a prisoner in your body is what being human feels like.

Alani is fond of their copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is one of the few things they take with them on their return to Winnipeg to deal with their mother's imminent death.

         The book is wrapped in my first real binder, whose elastics have been so stretched by time and use that it no longer keeps anything flat. It has long since lost its transformative powers but is tight with nostalgia.

The home where they grew up in Winnipeg is probably the most ominous house I've encountered in literature since Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. During minor repairs prior to listing the house for sale, they can feel the house getting furious. More:

         The house can hear me even when I don't say it. Silence is the language this place knows best.

_____

        I walk south, streaming down sidewalks toward the river, and don't look back at the house. I do not need to look. I know that the house is following me.

At a vigil for an Indigenous youth found dead in the river in Winnipeg:

         I think about the rivers I grew up near and all the stories of their hunger, of the people who joined their flow, by their own choice or by another's hand, stories that happened again and again, with different names and dates and bodies. Stories that could almost be cliches if they weren't about real breathing people dying, stories that slowly prod a deep-tissue bruise you develop even if you never knew any of the people who died. Most of them vulnerable people, most of them Indigenous people, like this boy, many of them murdered.

         I walk, reaching out. I let my old city's grief, a segment of my old city's grief, flow over me.

         The first time I did this was back in 2007, when the westbound lane of the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi river at rush hour, killing 13 and wounding over 100 more. When people gathered there for a similar vigil, drenched in bug spray instead of cold rainwater, I reached out to the hurt in my adopted city. I wanted to feel present in the reality of the moment with them, with each of them, and hurt alongside them, to try and understand, while knowing it is always impossible to fully embody someone else's hurt. But I tried to imagine it.

The title of the book comes from a piece of art, the Monument against Fascism: 

         a twelve-metre-tall, one metre-wide aluminum column clad in a thin layer of lead that was installed in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1986. The point of the monument was to let people inscribe their names with metal styluses tethered nearby, and pledge themselves against fascism. Once the section of the monument within reach was filled up, the column would be lowered farther into the ground, so as to offer a fresh canvas.

         Eros said the monument was already halfway gone. "The point is that the monument won't be there forever. Once it's gone -- vanished -- the people will be responsible for keeping up its memory."

John Elizabeth Stintzi's prose is so striking that the rest of this review will be devoted to favourite passages. 

         Sometimes you hit a patch of rogue memories so cluttered you fall over, memories stacking into drifts where they shouldn't be, memories that you didn't curate into the palace, but they rise up from between the seams of the floorboards.

_____

         The darkness of the darkroom stares back into me. There is the wind, cascading across my throat, cradling it like a voice, like a noose.

_____

         There are so many numbers on this little sheet of paper I want to call.

         Life on a quiet, sunny morning in Winnipeg in May is an emergency situation.

_____

        "It's a rare and horrible thing, Sofia, when the world becomes exactly what you think it is."

_____

         It's shocking how an unknown thing can suddenly pop up fully formed in brilliant sharpness on our horizon. How a dead, inert thing can simply saunter in and manipulate history with its old injuries.

_____

        I tell her I've been busy and ask how Mother is.

        "Oh, she's about the same," she says.     

The thought of Mother being the same seems like worsening. A static level of hell never feels the same day after day -- you lose your resilience to it.

_____

        We always feel dread when we hear people tell the stories of their first loves, because we know how they end: misunderstanding and massacre, or at the very least, some sort of metamorphosis. A sort of metaphysical Rubicon crossing.

_____

        Everything was thick with a reminiscence of home, yet I pretended it was pure freedom. I pretended that I'd escaped it, that I'd moved past that life, even though in leaving it I'd only ensured the permanence of its hold on me. It was a sort of preservation of it. I was just pushing it along with me, up the hill.

_____

        For the entirety of that call, I covered my eyes with my free hand in the pitch-black dark -- to isolate the senses, maybe, or because I didn't believe that we were talking, not after so long. Her voice tremored into my ear, unlocking doors, closing windows. The many stagnant pieces of me began to move again like tectonics. I reactivated.

_____

        I felt like I owed it to the world to be miserable, and I wanted to feel pain every morning, wanted pain to absolve me of all my guilt. A would that must forever stay open.

_____

        I thought about how something occasionally singeing the fringes of one life must be an inferno in others. The nearness and farness of human suffering. How quiet it can be.

_____

        When the monument vanishes, what still stands? Is it the things the world has decided should be upheld, should be visible? the big heroes and the villains, the moments of affection and the moments of shameful betrayal -- the extremes?

_____

        When the monument vanishes, we ourselves are tasked with keeping up the struggle. We're left with the impression of the monument's absence, with remembering what we want and need to remember. In pulling away from something, in obscuring its easy presence, you get a sense of what the thing really is to you. You get a more full view of it.

_____

        Most monuments, eventually, make their memories stuffy. They make you think that there is only one version of something that you should remember. They make you think the past is clean and over.

Monuments to bad men are toppling in real life as I write this. It's time to think about the past differently. It's time to reevaluate our personal memory associations. It's time to envision a new future.

Giller chances: HIGH - This is the kind of novel that builds empathy and feeds the soul.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

The Union of Smokers by Paddy Scott

The Union of Smokers by Paddy Scott
Invisible Publishing, March 2020

A tale of trauma, a "theme essay," told in the singular bantering voice of a white twelve-year-old boy, Kaspar Pine, who might be on his deathbed.

        One nice thing about living a short life: it's gonna be pretty much all highlight.

The story is set in 1960s fictional Quinton, Ontario, on the day the town's major employer, a creosote factory, shuts down.

        People don't like to talk about occupational hazards around here, especially if they're dependent on the source of the hazard for survival. If you worked at Quinton's creosote plant you'd know what I mean. Its hazards leaked all over the place, up to the moment earlier today when it closed for good because of all that leaking. Nobody in Quinton talked about the creosote hazards either, because that's the sort of conversation that got you fired, even if the creosote made you sick.

Since he was six, Kaspar has lived on a farm with his grandparents. Being continually grateful for their kindness to him, he behaves well when he's at home. When he's elsewhere, he admits to being "a well-rehearsed asshole." I found his voice irritating, even while having some sympathy for him. 

        Hardly anybody in town ever smiled at me, and if they did, I knew they meant it as a caution light: You're entering dangerous territory.

The cover illustration, showing a chicken with its head cut off, is a warning. There's a lot of gross unpleasantness in this novel: talk (and throwing around) of dead canaries, of knackers and how they go about their job of killing animals, and of Kaspar's passion for smoking the cigarette butts that he collects.

        [...] most things, not just cigarettes, should have filters on them. Drowned dads, cancer diagnosis, factory closings, canaries... What if all that unpleasantness slipped through charcoal-activated, menthol-flavoured felts of alternative possibilities first -- Heaven, or Medicare, or UIC -- and came out the other side with hints of hope? I've smoked roll-yer-owns and I've smoked things I'd found between the cracks in sidewalks, and no matter how crusty they'd gotten, even a sidewalk smoke with a filter doesn't come close to the eye-watering experience of a rollie.

All of Kaspar's "declarative-in-essay-form sonofabitch"-ness and wisecracking tends to obscure the important underlying narrative, which is about the terrible things that parents do to their children. And maybe that is part of the author's point: that children who have been traumatized might be annoying and unpredictable. 

I tend to like novels like this, with a distinctive narrative voice, and a combination of humour and tragedy. The Union of Smokers misses the mark. It's okay, but too over-the-top. I didn't find Kaspar to be a believable character. Humour is a tricky genre. This might be perfect for another reader looking for a jokey approach to serious topics like environmental degradation and child welfare.

Giller chances: LOW

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Some People's Children by Bridget Canning

Some People's Children by Bridget Canning
Breakwater Books, May 2020

A fatherless girl's coming of age story set in Newfoundland.

Is this a novel primarily for teens or adults? The Scotiabank Giller prize rules disqualify YA (Young Adult) titles, so that question was one that I asked of my YA book group when we discussed this title yesterday. I agree with our general assessment: it's an adult novel with crossover appeal to older teens.

Imogene Tubbs is 12 when the novel opens in 1986, living with her grandmother in the tiny settlement of St Felix in the western part of the island of Newfoundland. It's an 11-hour journey by bus from there to the provincial capital, St John's. Imogene's mother Maggie is in Ontario; her promises to have her daughter join her have not been kept so far. Everyone in town suspects they know who Imogene's father is, a terrible man named Cecil Jesso, although Maggie denies this and the prologue scene shows otherwise.

The story spans about a decade of Imogene's life, into her early adulthood. It's a clear-eyed and compassionate look at adolescence and the search for identity. The characterizations have nuance. The sense of small town claustrophobia, the landscape and weather are all vividly portrayed. 

        There's always some kind of wind in St Felix's. Sometimes a cold wind off the water to spoil a warm summer day. Or a Wreckhouse blast that gouges the breath from your mouth and tries to suffocate you right out in the open.

Imogene has been sheltered from the larger world, which she mainly knows through books. Readers who were bookish children will understand her need to bring three books along on a bus journey.

        That night, Imogene goes to bed early so she can read Harriet the Spy. She likes how Ole Golly takes Harriet for egg creams. She doesn't know what egg creams are, but imagines it's what people in New York eat all the time, like vanilla cake batter you can drink.

Newfoundland English appears now and then, such as "b'y" at the end of sentences; Tipp's Eve (December 23); "now the once;" "a bit drove;" and Jiggs' dinner.

        She's never been able to get excited about Jiggs.' Boil out all the nutrients and salt it like it might come back to life and haunt you.

One of the reasons that this novel doesn't fall into the YA category is its absence of prudishness. The characters take a pragmatic approach to sexual intercourse and underage drinking. When Imogene's grandmother is out of earshot, profanity abounds. In this passage, Imogene is attending university and her friend Jamie describes his older brothers to her:

        "They're bastards. They really are. Just because someone's related to you, doesn't mean you have to like them. And Eric is a dirty fucker. He's the kind of guy who would show up at your house when you're having a party and steal your CDs."
        "That's fucking vile."
        "Nasty behaviour. That stuff's an investment, especially if you had to buy the bands you already have on tape over again."

Mental health is an important issue, addressed with sensitivity.

        The days get shorter and darker and Maggie follows suit.

1980s popular culture finds its way into the smallest of Canadian communities. And teenage hormonal angst is pretty much the same everywhere. 

        He has started spiking the front of his hair with gel that makes his fleecy blond fringe dark and geometrical. This new hair irritates Imogene and she feels guilty for her irritation which is also irritating. Liam can do whatever he wants with his appearance. But it annoys her that he didn't ask her opinion on his spiky hair, like she will just go along with whatever stupid decision he makes.

Imogene learns to forge her own path forward. Some People's Children is a rewarding read for anyone who loves character-based novels with a strong sense of place.

Giller chances: MEDIUM 

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson

Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson
House of Anansi, May 2020

A literary historical novel with the propulsion and atmosphere of a western.

I loved Gil Adamson's Outlander (2007), in which a 19-year-old white woman, Mary Boulton, is on the run from the law across the 1903 Canadian West, so I was delighted to learn that her new novel is a follow-up to Mary's story. In Ridgerunner, it's 1917 and Mary has recently died. Her widowed husband William Moreland and her son Jack Boulton are the main characters. There's also an ensemble of colourful secondary characters, including Sampson Beaver. Formerly a US marshall from Oklahoma, Sampson is now an old man living in seclusion in the mountains, and the nearest neighbour to William and Jack.

        Sampson took off his hat, turned his face up to the moon, and closed his eyes like a man sunbathing. Perhaps, he thought, we are toughest when we are young, and life wears us down; we become increasingly tender with age. 

Jack is indeed tough and capable at twelve, living on his own in the wilderness while his father is on the run, blowing up banks and stealing money so that his son will have choices instead of living in poverty. Everyone seems to struggle with their mental health, including Sister Beatrice, the nun who initially took charge of Jack after his mother died. Her inherited family house is in Banff, but town life didn't suit the boy.

        But a small town is a living engine run on talk, innumerable bees grumbling in their paper cells. Jack heard it everywhere he went. Gossip, opinionation, conjecture, speculation, debate.

Gil Adamson's prose is a pleasure. She evokes time and place beautifully. This is the kind of story where you can really sink into the atmosphere. Most of the story takes place in the Rocky Mountains near Banff and Lake Louise, but Moreland travels far. The following passage is an example of his experience of the prairies:

        But the prairie had puzzled him; the way you could walk for hours and seem not to advance. All around him were roads that ran so long and straight between wintering fields of unknown crops they seemed to vanish over the curve of the earth. He saw a ranching truck in the distance heralded by nothing but a soundless dust plume leaning with the wind. He watched it go, wondering where the driver was headed. Ranches, feed barns, maybe a killing house, where someone was making money on wartime bully beef. To the truck's right, a tiny fist of terrible weather hung over the land, so corralled by the miles it would never make it to where Moreland stood. How beautiful to watch weather work at a distance, without the slightest need to decide what that weather would mean to you. Rain, snow, lightning, it was happening to someone else.

Remote as the setting is, the outside world encroaches. Young men are scarce, having gone off to fight in the war in Europe. Hundreds of civilians deemed "enemy aliens" are imprisoned in internment camps at Castle Mountain and Banff, where Jack sees them being used as forced labour.

Moral ethics, loyalty, the class divide, motherhood, and father-son relationships are some of the issues that provoke thought. Overall, the plot and pacing make this a page-turner. It's intelligent and very readable.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - As enjoyable and well-written as Ridgerunner is, I don't see a larger truth, something that would lift this into award territory. I guess what I mean is that I didn't feel changed after reading this.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys

Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys
HarperCollins, August 2020

A poetic novel based on a true story of friendship between a boy and a murderer in mid-twentieth century Saskatchewan.

The characters in Rabbit Foot Bill are the kind at which Helen Humphreys excels in bringing to life: emotionally distant loners, scarred by trauma. Leonard tells the story that begins in 1947, when Bill, a man his father's age, is living in a sort of cave he's carved for himself into the side of a hill, far outside of town. Leonard is twelve, son of the stationmaster in tiny Canwood, Saskatchewan. Leonard and Bill have a special bond, and the boy spends as much time with him as possible, avoiding bullies at school.

        The next day at school I try to keep well away from the group of boys who are always beating on me for reasons I never understand. It's raining, so I must be hit. We're doing sums in arithmetic, so I must be hit. The sky is a certain shade of blue, so I must be hit.

After witnessing Bill commit an act of violence, Leonard doesn't see him again for a dozen years. In the meantime, Leonard becomes a psychiatrist and takes a position at the Weyburn Mental Hospital, where scientifically dubious experiments with LSD are underway. There are 1,800 patients in the facility, including Leonard's old friend Bill. Something bad seems bound to happen.

Humphreys is one of my very favourite, must-read-everything-she-writes authors. Her writing has a quiet melancholic power, and her language use thrills my word-loving soul. Her stories are grounded in the natural world and her flawed characters are deserving of grace. Whatever place and time, I feel myself sink into her descriptions of setting.

        Supper is cold beef and potato salad. Father doesn't like talk at meals, so we sit there in the cool of the kitchen with the night noise of the prairie outside and the rattle of knives and forks against our plates. My parents won't be finding out about my missing school until tomorrow, so tonight I am safe and I sink into the calm waters of this, into our quiet supper in the kitchen, followed by my mother and I listening to the radio in the parlour and father sitting on the porch, smoking. I don't call it happiness, but looking back now I think it was a sort of happiness; that shelter is a kind of happiness.

 A novel like Rabbit Foot Bill is many things, including shelter, escape, and a window on truth about the human condition.

Giller prediction: MEDIUM HIGH - Much as I love it, I think this will be on the periphery of the longlist, bumped out by flashier novels. But I hope I'm wrong.

NOTE: I'm grateful to HarperCollins for providing a review copy.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog. 

Indians on Vacation by Thomas King

Indians on Vacation by Thomas King
HarperCollins, August 2020

A funny novel about living with depression and despair.

Mimi Bull Shield, from the Blackfoot Nation in Alberta, and her husband Blackbird Mavrias, who is of Greek and Cherokee descent, travel to Europe in search of Mimi's uncle's medicine bundle. Why her Uncle Leroy ended up in Europe is a story in itself, plus there's a whole lot more going on in this hilarious novel. So much that, by the end, my heart was broken.

But let's back up to the beginning, to when Bird and Mimi have newly arrived in Prague. He is grumpy, she is full of optimism and excitement.

        I'm sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress.
        "My god," she whispers, "can it get any better?"

Years of living together have given this mismatched pair a warm understanding of each other's strengths and weaknesses. Their relationship feels as real as the characters themselves. Their differences are a gold mine of humour.

        Mimi came home from her weekly jaunt to the thrift stores. She has a circuit that she works, much like a trapper on a trapline. 
        [...]
        For me, thrift stores are in the same category as the garbage bins behind fast-food joints. For Mimi, they're gold mines just waiting to be quarried.

It is clear from the opening chapter that something more than a reluctance to travel is bothering Bird. When they encounter an encampment of Syrian refugees, his despair comes to the forefront.

        "Are you depressed again?"
        "Just tired."
        "It's the refugees, isn't it?" says Mimi. "You don't like seeing children in distress."
        I can't imagine that anyone likes to see anyone in distress, but as soon as I think this, I remind myself that I'm wrong. For the most part, no one much cares what happens to other people, just so long as it doesn't happen to them. We have the capacity for compassion. We simply don't practise it to any degree.
        It's more an ideal that we hang on a wall where it's easy to see and almost impossible to reach.

The narrative flows back and forth in time. The present-day sections begin: "So we're in Prague," giving readers a rhythm that's easy to follow. There are no easy answers, however. As Mimi says: "The problem with human beings is that we can describe what we do. We just can't explain why."

Giller chances: HIGH - Thomas King is at the top of his storytelling game.

NOTE: I'm grateful to HarperCollins for providing a review copy.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog. 

Swimmers in Winter by Faye Guenther

Swimmers in Winter by Faye Guenther
Invisible Publishing, August 2020

This collection contains three pairs of astute stories about Canadian lesbians, the first one starting in the 1940s and the final one taking place sometime in our future.

In the title story, lesbian women live an underground life in Toronto, constantly in fear of exposure and arrest, because homosexuality is illegal. It's told in first person by Florence, a promiscuous musician and songwriter who sometimes longs for the company of her ex-girlfriend, a singer named Magda. The next story, 'Fight or Flight,' takes place about 55 years later, in the voice of Magda as an old woman. She looks back on her youth, a time when she took care to guard her heart. 

        But no one could own me. That was what I promised myself every night, on and off the stage. I was my own keeper, my own maker, and it would always be that way.
        Life has its own current, though. No matter your will, there's the rush and the undertow. The truth is that I'm not a swimmer. If I learned how to stay afloat, it was only because I knew what drowning felt like.

The second pair of stories follow women working blue collar jobs, in restaurants and as a security guard. Secrets confound their romantic entanglements. As in the other pieces in this book, the characterizations are vivid. The way exterior forces influence their interior lives is palpable.

The final diptych begins with 'Opened Fire,' about a soldier returning from Afghanistan. Carmen has PTSD and struggles with re-entry into civilian life. Canadian laws have changed since the settings of earlier stories in this book, but lesbians still aren't widely accepted in in the small town where Carmen grew up. When Carmen and a new friend from her running group decide to go on a first date, they choose a bar that they hope will feel welcoming. Carmen's brother tells her:

        "Of the four in town, it's probably the best one. It had one of those rainbow flags in the window for a weekend in June, last year. I mean up on the Friday evening, and down by Sunday night, but still."

There's a passage in 'Opened Fire' that reminded me of what it was like when I temporarily couldn't read because of anxiety during the first couple of months of the COVID-19 pandemic this year.

        Carmen loved the way Aurora peered at a book like it held a mystery, like it gave her some comfort. Carmen missed that for herself. She missed being able to concentrate on words and a make-believe world without the memories pummelling down, without images leaping in her mind, scrambling her vision and making her forget what she'd just read. Books and reading were a luxury, gifts she wanted back. She wanted her life back.

The final story, 'Flood Lands,' takes place in a post-apocalyptic future landscape. While each of the paired stories have links, I found the connections between the final two the most pleasing of all: a flood; a baby; literacy; and two women named Carmen (the second is the first Carmen's great-great-niece), who get around on two wheels.

I enjoyed all of these for their character studies and the way they covered a spectrum of queer women across a century of time. The format is also structurally appealing; I don't remember ever reading sets of diptychs before. 

Giller chances: MEDIUM LOW - It's a promising first collection. I hope to see more stories or a novel from Faye Guenther in the future.

NOTE: I'm grateful to Invisible Publishing for providing a review copy.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona

How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona

Hamish Hamilton, March 2020

Audiobook (7 hours; Penguin) read by Laurel Lefkow

The premise and puzzle of this story is a woman who goes missing on New Year's Day in 1986. The issues raised include parenting after divorce, alcohol addiction, mental health, and dealing with the unintended consequences of our actions.

It takes place in Whale Bay, a small fishing town on the West Coast, "a stone's throw from Canada."

        People thought frozen lakes were stable, and they walked out onto them. People did this sort of thing all the time. They drove snowmobiles and trucks onto lakes! Lewis had done this as a boy every winter, in his father's red pickup truck, on Lake Mendota. Even there, two or three people fell in every year, fishermen mostly, their bodies pulled out -- sometimes alive, sometimes not -- covered in icicles. That was the trouble with frozen lakes. There was no way to tell the thickness of the ice, nor the depth of the water beneath.

The narrative unrolls in shifting third-person perspectives: 

• Vera is the missing woman; her voice comes from beyond death.
• Denny, an alcoholic jewelry designer, was Vera's husband. He's arthritic and severely depressed.
• Hot-tempered Leo, flaky and ill-equipped for parenting, is also an alcoholic. His wife Evelina had enough of his violence and kicked him out. 
• Evelina is fiercely protective of her two children, worrying about them when they spend time with their father. She is addicted to lottery scratch cards.
• Ten-year-old Jesse and his little brother Dmitri are Evelina and Leo's boys. 
• Lewis Cote is the young police officer who took a call from Vera about finding a lost boy. That's the last anyone heard from her. Lewis is new in town and lonely.

Loneliness pervades this novel. Both Denny and Evelina have let their friendships lapse after marriage, leaving them with nobody to turn to for support when their spouses are no longer in their lives.

        They trudged back up the hill, and Denny watched the policeman drive off. And then he and Scout went back into the silent, empty house. He looked at the ceiling. He looked out the window.

        Who did he have left? Who was there to talk to? Who could he tell about his day if Vera never returned? What he wanted to do was tell Vera about all of this. "Vera! Vera, you'll never guess what happened!" he wanted to say. "You disappeared!"

Lewis, the police officer, feels an emotional connection to Jesse:

        He couldn't tell whether Jesse was okay or not. There was an intensity to him that Lewis hadn't seen in a child before. It reminded him of his own childhood, the constant tension in his shoulders, the way he felt that if someone bumped into him, he would shatter.

The sections with Vera's viewpoint from the afterlife didn't work for me. It's not that I object to a ghost's perspective per se. Sometimes it's a perfect way to provide a wider scope. In this case, however, I found those parts sentimental and message-y.

        No one tells her to do anything, but she knows that what she is meant to do is float. To stop dipping back down to the surface of the earth. To stop caring. [...]

        It's okay, Denny. I am up here. I am up here. We did the best we could. We loved each other so deeply at first. Think of that. Think of how hard we laughed. She feels the absence of her own eyes and her own tears, and the absence of her own mouth and her own voice, and the absence of her own arms and the absence of the warmth of another person's arms around her.

While the majority of the novel takes place over the course of 1986, the final chapter leaps ahead to 2020, wrapping everything up neatly. Too neatly.

Giller chances: MEDIUM-LOW - The title of the book is great (Celona credits Jia Tolentino for the line), the rotating viewpoints make for in-depth characterization, and the puzzle of Vera's death is interesting. Vera's ghost hits a sour note and I have reservations regarding the denouement (left vague here for spoiler reasons).

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

The Certainties by Aislinn Hunter

The Certainties by Aislinn Hunter
Audiobook (6 hours) read by Sandra Flores and Steve Cumyn
Knopf, August 2020

If you've been following my blog, you already know that I like epigraphs. One of the two that open this slim, sorrowful novel is by Federico Garcia Lorca:

        Narcissus.
        My sorrow.
        And the likeness of my sorrow.

The same book will hook different readers in different ways. A philosophical, character-based story of refugees, with references to Roman mythology, already has several hooks for me. And then there's the description of an aging body.

        I shift my legs in the bed and the left leg begrudges the movement. I know my heart isn't what it ought to be but the left leg's reticence these past months is a mystery. To will the body and have it refuse you is a strange thing because it makes you, like our friend Narcissus, see yourself doubly, as both self and obstinate other.

The narrator is a German Jewish professor fleeing the Third Reich with a unfinished manuscript in his briefcase and Ovid on his mind. It's 1940. After making it across the Spanish border, and while waiting for his fate to be decided by the authorities there, he addresses his thoughts to Pia, a small child he met by chance.

        This was late June, when the roads out of Paris were a slow parade of cars, horses, carts and bicycles. And the occasional French soldier riding against the tide on a motorcycle, or walking dejectedly toward some town he'd left when he was a different man. Everyone was barking out news and all the news was contradictory. We are losing the war! We are winning the war! Though the German planes overhead and the German soldiers who sometimes strafed the fields or walked alongside us until veering off to secure the next commune told the true story.

In an alternating storyline set in 1980, a woman named Pia helps recover bodies from a shipwreck, the bodies of people who were obviously refugees. In the audiobook edition, two different readers delineate the switch back and forth.

War can change you utterly. You can become completely unlike your previous self. Powerless. Stateless. A refugee. Our only certainty is our mortality. In this understated and mournful novel, readers are asked to bear witness.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - This one is likely to hover on the periphery of the longlist. I'm uncertain whether The Certainties will make the cut.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley

Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley
Biblioasis, April 2020

As you would expect from a book titled with a person's name, this novel is deeply character-based. Even the city of Halifax is a character here. Everyone, including the city, is full of surprises. The story is told in first person chapters that can also be enjoyed as standalone short stories. The timeline starts when Aubrey was five. He ran away from one of his sisters' birthday parties and met a strange child named Cyrus Mair.

        I thought him reckless and exuberant and smart. He was fabulously weird. I wanted to know what he knew. I couldn't really guess what he was dreaming up in his mind, nor what games and inventions occurred there, but I liked him. His world was in a constant state of becoming, and this September afternoon was the beginning of a fascination that would last a sort of lifetime for me because, even if I didn't know what I wanted, like everyone else I would not be able to stop paying attention to the creature known as Cyrus Mair.

Cyrus becomes not only a friend but an inspiration. Aubrey comes to understand that what you choose to believe in can determine what you become. He spends his growing up years floundering, trying to understand other people, such as his English teacher, Theo Jones.

        He is working, he tells me, on a long poem. "Miranda," it's called. He keeps his drafts and fragments in a wooden box on his desk. the box, as I contemplate it now, seems like a piece of his own personality, so confidential it is, so worn with care. "I've been working on it for eight years," he adds. I nod appropriately but privately I think: Eight years? To a thirteen-year-old it's more than half a lifetime. On one poem? A poem was homework you did between TV shows. What was it doing taking eight years? I walked away reverential, astonished at Mr Jones's conception of his own poetry, yet to my young mind there was something odd and flawed about the enterprise. 

Mr Jones sums up Aubrey -- and the point of this novel -- in a comment on Aubrey's report card:

         "A vivid mind slowly coming to grips with itself --Theo"

An oddball cast weaves in and out of the narrative. Much alcohol is consumed.

        My mother grabbed a plastic juice glass from the dishwasher and poured herself four fingers of white wine. "They're anti-war, you know, these people. Flower children. They think anything's possible. The wife's a women's libber. Vivien. But very sweet. Him? I'm not so sure. Wes is the saintly type. Wants to do good. Like build a barn for mentally retarded kids in New Brunswick." She tossed back half the wine. "Sure. Why not? But what are they going to do with a barn -- shear sheep? Honest to God. Be careful of these so-called saints, children. Believe me, people who act like saints -- a lot of so-called saints are trouble. Living in a dream world."

A strong sense of time and place is created using cultural references like Pixy Stix and Lik-a-Stix candy, drinking Orange Crush and Kool-Aid, his sisters "stockpiling Barbies in a velvet Crown Royal bag," the smell of Tide laundry detergent, and watching 'The Six Million Dollar Man' on TV. Music plays an important role too.

        The last year I live in Halifax, the winter I decide to leave the city for good, I arrive at the Palace much more drunk than sober. I am twenty-two years old and grief-struck by the recent death of a friend. So I stare at the giant video screens on the walls. I am watching the music video for The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger," sort of trying to figure out how Sting can be dancing in slow motion in a maze of tall candlesticks while his lips are in sync with the song, which is not in slow motion, when I become aware of someone beside me also watching Sting. It's Theo Jones, holding a beer to his chest, and swaying slightly. He is past forty now, but looks roughly as he once did, though puffier and shorter.

Unfamiliar (made up?) words make perfect sense in context, like when Aubrey talks about his uncle Lorne growing a "greebly" moustache. Lorne is only eight years older than Aubrey. He came to live with them when "Nanny and Dompa, living Montreal, were moving into some marital hurly-burly." When Lorne reaches adulthood, he can no longer bear living in Halifax. He tells Aubrey:

        "This burg --" He sighed as if unable to delay a judgment that had become screamingly obvious. "It's like living in the Bottle City of Kandor. It's so cut off, it's bogus. It's beyond bogus. It's so bogus, it's rogus. It's an embarrassment of rogusness. And everywhere fossified. Fwa!"

It takes nearly 400 pages to get there, but eventually, Aubrey has had enough of Halifax too. Sometimes the bantering wordplay between Aubrey and his friends gets to be a bit much, but it's an enjoyable experience overall. I've now lived an alternate Nova Scotia childhood and adolescence, and I've met vivid characters who will live on in my head.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - Not only is this the kind of literary fiction that you can really sink into, it also contains layers that reward rereading.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

Misconduct of the Heart by Cordelia Strube

Misconduct of the Heart by Cordelia Strube

ECW Press, April 2020

Audiobook (18 hours; Dreamscape Media, 2020) read by Eve Passeltiner

A witty, wise novel about moving forward and opening your heart after experiencing trauma.

Stevie Tree lives in a "crappy Scarborough triplex with paint peeling off the stucco." She shares the tiny space with her son, Pierce, who was discharged from the Canadian forces after serving in Afghanistan.

        Gripping his head like it might explode, Pierce slid down the cabinets and sat on the cracked linoleum. "They're goat herders. They pray five times a day. Who the fuck made them the enemy?"

        I suggested the CIA, George W. and Mr. Cheney, but Pierce's face was a slammed door. I could feel it reverberating.

        He was never diagnosed with PTSD. To avoid paying him disability, Veteran Affairs decided he had a pre-existing mental disorder.

Pierce has night terrors that leave Stevie bruised. A cook at the restaurant where Stevie works as kitchen manager is concerned that one of these days, "That kid is going to fuck you up. Seriously." 

        I never think of him as my kid. I was the kid. My parents raised Pierce while I grew up playing musical fuckchairs and chain-drinking to steady the turbulence in my head.

Stevie was gang-raped by four men when she was in high school. The fact that Pierce was born as a result of that assault was a secret she kept from him as well as her parents. She also didn't tell him that he might be biracial, since his skin looks as white as hers. Meanwhile, a Black 4-year-old child, possibly Stevie's granddaughter, has been dumped on her parents' doorstep with a note for Pierce. To top it off, Stevie's parents have dementia.

        His cough drives me nuts. He hacks up Afghan dust laced with fecal particulate from porta-johns and Kabul's open sewage system. Shit dries up in 40-degree heat and becomes airborne. Most days the sky is brown.

        When he signed up he told me he was 'doing the right thing for once.' I told him it was George Junior's cash-grab poppy war. Naturally Pierce didn't want to hear this. That first Christmas he called my parents, not me. They were already losing bolts.

        "Why isn't he home?" they asked with the stunned look of the demented.

        "He's fighting a politically contrived and unjust war," I said.

        "Why?"

        "To satiate corporate greed. War's good for business. Ike said that. Remember Ike?"

        They chewed toast. They live on toast. I shut their stove down because they frequently forgot it was on and used it as a countertop. Peggy melted an electric kettle on it. Reggie decided the oven was a car part that needed oiling.

Darkly humorous situations abound with Stevie's parents, her neighbours, her creative writing class, and at work. The chain restaurant employs a motley crew, including a deranged penny-pinching general manager named Bob. He's the kind of guy who writes "ever present and always watching" on the schedule instead of his hours.

        "Bob," I say, "we need scrubbies."

        "I'm not buying you scrubbies."

        "Why not?"

        "Because your staff broke the ice machine."

        "How do you know it was my staff?"

        "Daniel says they drink Coke with ice non-stop. Maybe they don't have ice machines where they come from."

        "You can't not buy scrubbies because the ice machine is broken. You said yourself another reason we failed the office report is we are the dirtiest Chappy's. How are we supposed to become the cleanest Chappy's without scrubbies?"

        "If your staff can't respect the ice machine, why should I buy them scrubbies?"

Beneath the many day-to-day absurdities lie serious issues. War and its aftereffects. Sexual assault. Alcoholism. Longterm consequences of poor parenting skills. Poorly-paid immigrant labour. The characters feel one hundred per cent real. I felt like I was perched on Stevie's shoulder, cheering her on as she learned she actually is a decent human being, loveable and capable of caring.

Giller chances: HIGH. This appealing rabble-rouser certainly deserves to make the longlist, at least.

NOTE: This audiobook is in Hoopla, so look for it there if your public library subscribes to that database.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.

 

The Last High by Daniel Kalla

The Last High: A Thriller by Daniel Kalla
Simon & Schuster, May 2020

A medical thriller about the opioid crisis, set in Vancouver.

Who would have guessed that as part of the Shadow Giller project I would read three books in a row that are partly set in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver? Five Little Indians, No Going Back, and now this. One of the things I appreciate about The Last High is the way it shows the broad spectrum of people who are addicted to opioids. While some are junkies living on the streets, others are wealthy lawyers, project development entrepreneurs, medical doctors, or high school students from stable families.

Julie Rees, an ER doctor and non-using drug addict, is the central character. Author Daniel Kalla is also an emergency room doctor, so I trust the medical details. Like Kaie Kellough does in Dominoes at the Crossroads, the author slips reference to himself into the prose:

        "Why do you work two jobs? Is there some issue with the ER doc's union?"
        "The issue is we don't have one." She laughs. "I don't work full-time ER. A lot of us at St Mike's have secondary interests. We have two docs who do ICU part-time. And two others who also work palliative care on the side. One guy even writes books -- medical thrillers -- they're not half bad. I happen to have specialized training in toxicology. It's a nice balance, actually."

A particularly lethal form of fentanyl is suspected when overdoses aren't responsive to the naloxone antidote. Opioids are explained:

        "All these opioids -- whether you're talking morphine, heroin or the fentanyls -- basically work the same way." She knows it's an oversimplification, but she doesn't want to get bogged down in the insignificant differences in the drugs' actions. "It boils down to potency that separates one from the other. Fentanyl is about a hundred times more potent than heroin. But carfentanil? It's a hundred times more powerful than fentanyl... "
        "So we're talking ten thousand times as strong as heroin?"
        "Exactly. The stuff was developed for tranquilizing elephants. Literally. A single grain of it can kill a person."

Illegal drugs and their distribution, loan sharking, money laundering: a snarl of criminal gang underworld activities are integral to the plot. There's also a romance developing between Julie and a police detective, Anson Chen. Canadian identity comes up at a dinner party:

        Dinner is served over several courses while they discuss everything from politics to films, and even take time to compare their upbringings. Maria grew up comfortably in Manila, the daughter of two doctors, while Goran's parents struggled as farmers in Communist-era Yugoslavia.
        After Julie mentions that her dad's parents emigrated from Wales, Anson folds his hands together and proudly announces, "I guess that makes me the most Canadian at this table."
        "How do you reach that conclusion?" Goran asks.
        "Well, my dad's parents came here from Hong Kong when he was a kid, but my mom's parents were born here. By my calculation, that makes me third-generation Canadian."
        Goran laughs. "You win, then."
        Anson's expression turns serious. "Never really felt it, though. I always had a bit of an outsider's complex. Like I always had something to prove."

The dinner conversation turns to the recent spate of overdose deaths, until one of them asks, "Can we please talk about Trump instead?"

Giller chances: LOW - While this novel is well-written and will suit anyone looking for an entertaining and informative thriller, there isn't that special quality that would shift it into literary award territory.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.