Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough

Dominoes at the Crossroads: Stories by Kaie Kellough

Esplanade, January 2020

Pieces of short fiction about Canadian identity as part of the African diaspora -- short stories, autobiographical fiction, science fiction, spy thriller, memoir, metafiction, history, historical fiction: whatever form this hybrid collection uses, by the end it has transformed into a novel. It's safe to call it outstanding.

        Writing is read in present time, but it can easily move among different times, from the past through the future. It can disappear into alternate timelines. For that reason, the form of writing that resonates with me most is memoir, a subgenre of fiction. A memoir can begin at any point. It can become a search for origins, or an excavation of memory. It can play double Dutch with time and memory, can illustrate how the past sometimes follows the future, and the present sometimes freezes in its advance.

Told in first person, drawing on Kellough's family history and others', deftly slipping in and out of personas and time periods, occasionally into French (or the French pronunciation of Haiti), the prose has the assurance of a poet's grace.

        Somewhere in this story is a break, a portal, a black hole. It may only be the size of a small pothole on Cremazie Boulevard, or the size of a period between sentences, a semicolon, a semicolony, a sixteenth note's round head, or an island that looks like ink spilled onto the blue map. In 1972 a young woman fell through such an inkspill, one called Ayiti, and a young man reached for her hand and was pulled in after her. They were my grandparents.

In several of the stories, the author is himself a character.

        A writer like Kaie has to write through race, an expression that I like because it seems to offer hope or an eventual emergence. but I don't think anyone ever emerges from race, certainly not a Black man.

Racism, whether overt or in micro-aggressions, is never the point of these stories, but this is reality and it seems unavoidable.

        Standing on the street corner, waiting for the light to change, a person feels the sharp edge of the wind, and a car slows as it rounds the corner and someone sticks their face out the rear window and spits, Negre.

Music is a common thread tying these stories together, whether the characters are busking, or have touring gigs in venues across Canada and Europe, or are listening to the radio in cars stuck in Montreal traffic.

        The syncopation struck out geometric patterns in my mind. Y a pas deux calculs. Y a pas deux mesures. The drumbeat suddenly became very focused and unforgiving. It shot forward. Two guitars and the bass dropped out. The drums continued, four on the floor, insisting, with the hi-hat ticking stardust around each beat, making each beat shine and glimmer. The voice rose like smoke off the rhythm, like heat off the asphalt, or like an airplane off the runway. Ou on aime ou on n'aime pas. Ou on aime chaud ou on aime froid. Police sirens raised themselves out of the darkness and flashed off the windows of buildings. The horn section pushed its melody through brazen air. The traffic stopped. The students ran.

It's a slim book, only 208 pages, but it contains a world of lives. Its forward movement embraced and carried me like an ocean current. 

        I am populated by other people's lives. In my mind the lives blur into a vast anonymous sweep of existence, a movement. The idea that stories are about individuals, that they have protagonists and antagonists is a simplification that fuels the market. There exist no central figures. A person is nobody. No narrator, no voice. A story is a natural force, like the hurricane, that flings individual names apart.  

I want to swim back and start again from the beginning.  

Giller chances: HIGH - Kaie Kellough was awarded the Griffin, Canada’s most prestigious poetry prize, earlier this year for his Magnetic Equator. Dominoes at the Crossroads has the potential to receive the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Has that double-whammy ever happened before?

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.

Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories by Maria Reva

Knopf Canada, March 2020

A collection of interconnected, darkly funny stories set in Ukraine, both before and after the fall of the USSR. The people are mostly residents in a poorly-built ten-storey apartment building. One of the ongoing characters is Zaya, an endearing orphan with a harelip growing up in a state-run institution. Simple drawings illustrate some of the stories. 

"The funniest, most politically astute book I've read in years... Bang-on brilliant." If you pick this up based on this blurb by Miriam Toews on the cover, you will have been steered in the right direction. Maria Reva balances humour and pathos like a boss and absurd Soviet bureaucracy makes perfect fodder. 

In 'Letter of Apology' a poet was overheard making a political joke and so a government underling goes to extraordinary lengths after being tasked with getting a written apology, even though his rank isn't high enough for him to know the content of the joke.

        Normally I had a letter of apology written and signed well under the thirty-day deadline. I took pride in my celerity. Even the most stubborn perpetrators succumbed when threatened with loss of employment or arrest. The latter, however, was a last resort. The goal these days was to re-educate without arrest because the Party was magnanimous and forgiving; furthermore, prisons could no longer accommodate every citizen who uttered a joke.

In 'Novostroika,' a resident is thwarted in his attempts to convince city hall to connect heat to their new building because their address is not in the records. Meanwhile, at his job in a canning factory, he is supposed to come up with a way to make green beans triangular so that they will fit more snugly together in a can.

Everyday life requires ingenuity. Wages are paid in lamps and perfume. There's a strong desire for elements of Western culture. Bootlegged music is copied onto x-ray film and sold on the black market. 

        Before the Union fell apart, the foreign films that made it into our country were dubbed by the same man. You could hear his dentures slap against his gums. No matter the character -- man, woman, toddler -- same droning voice. It flattened the characters' joy and sorrow, made us doubt their confessions. Did the heroine really love that man as much as she said? Vowing to die for him was going a bit far, wasn't it?

        Sometimes the dubbing lagged so far behind, you had to guess who said what, guess how the film ended.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - The writing style is smart and lively. The message has universal appeal: warning against what can happen if we allow our democratic rights to erode; reassurance in the changing nature of history (bad times don't last forever); and inspiration in the resilience of human beings.

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 Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer

Bilal Tanweer's interconnected short stories set in contemporary Pakistan made my Bestest Books so Far list, midway through 2014. I read the whole book again today and I love it even more.

The Scatter Here Is Too Great is about loneliness and community, our inner lives and our exterior interactions. It's about the way "stories give us reasons to connect ourselves to the world," and the way creating art can heal our wounds.

The narrative centers around a few of the people who are affected by a bomb blast at an intersection in Karachi, although most of them have sorrows that are completely apart from this tragedy. For example, a father knocked down by the explosion is thinking of his estranged son:

"You desperately wish to see your son and tell him you are fine. You want to hold his hand like the time when he was a ceaselessly crying newborn and you were alone in the hospital room sitting next to his cot feeling a kind of raging joy, an awe, as if you were looking at Life itself, a presence of something divinely new, as if you had just begun a life outside yourself, and nothing, not even death, could damage all your dying rotting parts that you felt each day."

Another man grieves for his long-dead father, who once told him:

"A city is all about how you look at it. We must learn to see it in many ways so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city."

The characters are tenderly portrayed, flawed and so very believable, seen from a variety of vantage points. Seen through Tanweer's eyes, even garbage is beautiful:

"The sea at 11:00 A.M. was one Karachi dream that came true each day. It was one part of the city that remained as it ever was: a vast desert of water meeting a uniform spread of gray sand that shimmered with litter in sunlight: plastic bags lolled their heads in the constant wind, half-buried glass bottles stuck their radiant necks out of the sand, varieties of seaweed lay wasted like old mop cloths, and the sea breeze was forever at work scrubbing sand on everything that interrupted its movement."

It's a powerful book with a big heart that made my own heart feel bigger.

Readalikes: Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo); Five Star Billionaire (Tash Aw); In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin); Love Enough (Dionne Brand); and Between the Assassinations (Aravind Adiga).

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

With too many other books currently on the go and a looming TBR, I nearly abandoned Claire of the Sea Light when I was about 30 pages in. But because I greatly admired another of Edwidge Danticat's novels, The Dew Breaker, I persevered. I am so glad that I did, because it only took a little longer to get me totally hooked. Claire of the Sea Light is a radiant and worthy novel.

Claire is a girl who disappears on her seventh birthday in a small town in Haiti. Danticat starts there, then circles back and around in a way that imitates the singing game Claire played with other little girls on the beach that evening.

One character and then another steps to the middle of the story and we gradually get a sense of Claire's place within a larger, interconnected community. There is a gay storyline that is particularly heartbreaking, but also linked to the redemption in the final pages. Very rewarding.

Readalikes for those wanting entwined narratives: Is Just a Movie (Earl Lovelace); How to Paint a Dead Man (Sarah Hall); The Lighthouse (Alison Moore); Ghana Must Go (Taiye Selasi); Visitation Street (Ivy Pochoda); and The History of Love (Nicole Krauss).

For another take on contemporary life in Haiti, plus historical context, I suggest reading In Darkness (Nick Lake).

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists is about a mixed group of newspaper people -- reporters, editors, foreign correspondents, publishers and readers -- and about a small international English language newspaper headquartered in Rome. Canadian author Tom Rachman has created a kaleidoscope of 11 interlocking short stories, each one focused on a different character. Each story is titled with a newspaper headline and ends with a clever twist. The novel spans the 50 years of the paper's existence, right up to today's decline of print journalism.

A typical Roman street, taken on my last visit there.

The setting is so vivid that I not only got to walk the scenic streets of Rome, but continue right along inside the homes of people who live there. Private lives and work lives are contrasted with extraordinary insight.

Reviews of this book mentioned the humour, but as I listened to the audiobook narrated by Christopher Welch [Recorded Books: 9 hr 45 min] I felt it was more poignant than funny. I empathized deeply with the characters and was saddened by their troubles. After I had finished the audiobook, I read the paper book and discovered that some parts made me laugh. So I learned something new about myself. The visceral experience of audio can override my brain's recognition of what is comical about human foibles.

For example, there's the chapter "The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists," in which two Americans are each hoping to get a Cairo stringer assignment. I felt bad for poor Winston Cheung, who was in over his head and annoyed by Rich Snyder, a blowhard opportunist. Yet check out this dialogue:

"I remember when I was in the Philippines during People Power back in the 1980s, and everyone's all, like, 'Oh man, Tagalog is so hard.' And I'm, like, 'Bull.' and within days, I'm, like, picking up chicks in Tagalog and stuff. That was after two days. Languages are totally overrated."
"So your Arabic must be excellent."
"Actually, I never speak foreign languages anymore," he explains. "I used to get so keyed into cultures that it was unhealthy. So I only talk in English now. Helps me maintain my objectivity."

In "Global Warming Good for Ice Creams" a cranky corrections editor fusses:

"GWOT: No one knows what this means, above all those who use the term. Nominally, it stands for Global War on Terror. But since conflict against an abstraction is, to be polite, tough to execute, the term should be understood as marketing gibberish. Our reporters adore this sort of humbug; it is the copy editor's job to exclude it. See also: OBL; Acronyms; and Nitwits."

The Imperfectionists is perfect: smart and funny and thought-provoking.

Readalike: A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan).

First Spring Grass Fire by Rae Spoon

First Spring Grass Fire by Rae Spoon is one of those hard-to-categorize books: autobiographical fiction in the form of interlinked short pieces. Spoon is a transgender singer-songwriter who grew up with a schizophrenic father in a strict Pentecostal family in Calgary. Spoon's protagonist, also named Rae, rejects religion and finds a hard-won salvation through music in this poignant coming-out novel.

Spoon describes attending an immense Christian rally in the opening piece:

"Looking out over the crowd around the stage, [Billy Graham] exclaimed, with sweat pouring down his face and a tremor in his voice, that heaven was going to be exactly like this meeting, like church, only it would never end. It would go on for eternity. This was the beginning of doubt for me. I was nine years old and the best option that'd been presented to me was an eternity of Christian contemporary music. My mind was full of places in books where people didn't have to wait for the school bus with numb legs in the cold all week just to spend the weekends inside of a church imagining hellfire. I begged internally for the option of non-existence."

The way that landscape shapes our lives comes through in several of Spoon's stories:

"I couldn't run away from home in a city that was so expansive and cold. You could run for half an hour and not even get to the end of your own neighbourhood, and all of the neighbourhoods looked the same, so it didn't really feel like escaping at all. Instead I was trying hard to become nothing, eating only a granola bar during the day and then hardly anything for dinner."

The two dozen stories that make up First Spring Grass Fire hop scotch from young childhood into early adulthood. There are subtle connections between each vignette and a stronger link between the first and last piece, giving a graceful completeness to the work. Spoon's wry humour and lack of sentimentality add to the appeal. I liked this book very much.

Readalikes: One in Every Crowd by Ivan Coyote; What Night Brings (Carla Trujillo); This Is a Small Northern Town (Rosanna Deerchild); and Nobody Cries at Bingo (Dawn Dumont).

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

An island where men prefer selkies over human wives is the setting for Margo Lanagan's atmospheric new novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island. Enchantment subverts the natural order and takes a hard toll on the entire community.

The tale unfolds in a leisurely way though a series of interconnected first-person stories, spanning several generations. The characters are thus explored from various angles, starting with the central figure, Misskaella the witch. We first meet her through the fearful eyes of a young boy, Daniel Mallett, who nearly wets himself when he must pass by her old form as she knits blankets out of seaweed on the beach. (Lanagan tantalizes with details like this; the reader must wait to discover the why of this unusual craft.) The next tale flips the perspective 180 degrees to Misskaella Prout's point of view, beginning with her difficult childhood. I immediately felt sympathetic.

Rollrock Island feels as real as the people who live there. This is from the opening page, in Daniel's voice:
"And down the cliff we went. It was a poisonous day. Every now and again the wind would take a rest from pressing us to the wall, and try to pull us off it instead. We would grab together and sit then, making a bigger person's weight that it could not remove. The sea was gray with white dabs of temper all over it; the sky hung full of ragged strips of cloud."

I recommend The Brides of Rollrock Island to adults and teens who enjoy magical stories, legends retold, a vivid sense of place, well-developed characters, and a plot that frames moral questions. It certainly has dark undertones, but it isn't as harrowing as Lanagan's Tender Morsels.

Readalikes: Snake Ropes (Jess Richards); The Scorpio Races (Maggie Stiefvater); Chime (Franny Billingsley).

The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

When my YA book discussion group chose to read Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories, I had already  placed it on hold at the library because it was shortlisted for the Canadian Governor General's Awards. (The group occasionally reads adult titles, like this one, that have appeal for teen readers.) I didn't end up making it to the discussion because I had to work that evening, but I hadn't yet read the book anyway. I've only just now finished it, actually, having several other books on the go at the same time.

I liked The Juliet Stories very much. The weird thing is that I never noticed that the book is a series of interconnected short stories until I'd finished it. I assumed it was a novel and didn't read the inside flap or back cover until today: "A stunning new novel-in-stories set against the backdrop of the political turmoil in 1980s revolutionary Nicaragua." The 's' on the end of 'Stories' should have clued me in. I love story-cycles in general but this is the first time I've read one all the way through without noticing the format. When I'm reading short stories, I usually read them one at a time, interspersing them with other reading. And that's exactly what I did with The Juliet Stories, putting it down between chapters.

One of the things that I read in-between was a post on the Ken Haycock blog which looked at readers who skip between books like I do. It's actually about how books in digital format allow companies to track reading behaviours.

"Barnes and Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science fiction, romance and crime fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend to skip around between books." (Your E-Book is Reading You.)

Anyway, back to Carrie Snyder's wonderful stories/novel. The nuances of family relationships - between siblings, between husband and wife, and between parents and children -- are deftly delineated. Setting -- both time and place -- is another of Snyder's strengths, especially as seen through a child's experience.

"Ronald Reagan is the president of the United States of America. He is fighting the commies. Commie is short for communist, a thick plank of a word that is used often and ominously on American television; on American television communist means evil. But Juliet takes her definition from Gloria, who says that communists are people who share everything. (Imagine fighting against people who share! It is the punchline to a joke. Juliet writes a skit on the subject, and Keith plays Ronald Reagan with gusto: "I declare a war on sharing! There will be no more sharing!")"

Later, when Juliet's family moves from Nicaragua to Canada, there's a whole new cultural environment to negotiate. "Hockey is a violent sport that rewards angry men and boys. Ringette is an unsolved feminine mystery."

Snyder's memorable characters and poignant insights into family dynamics make The Juliet Stories a very rewarding book -- whether it is approached as a single novel or as individual stories.

Readalike: The Forrests by Emily Perkins

The Finder Library (Volume 1) by Carla Speed McNeil

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.

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

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.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

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 is 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.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

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.

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

Not a dictionary, but a novel written in a series of vignettes documenting the feelings and day-to-day negotiations of a romantic adult relationship. Each diary-like entry is a prose poem titled alphabetically with a noun, verb or adjective: aberrant, abstain, abstraction, abyss, acronym, adamant, etc.

The tale is shaped around the consequences of an infidelity. It is told in first person without names, nor very many clues about the gender of either partner, an ambiguity which reinforces the universal nature of the subject. Levithan even references Jeanette Winterson's famously non-gender-specific novel, Written on the Body in the poem 'blemish, n.' In my interpretation of the text, however, I kept seeing two men. This may be because I know the author is gay and his previous books have had gay central characters. (This is also his first clearly adult novel after a string of successful YA titles.)

Here's an excerpt from the poem 'woo, v': "I told you that it was ridiculous to pay thirty dollars for a dozen roses on Valentine's Day. I forbade you to do it. So that day, when I went to pay for lunch, what did I find? In my wallet, thirty singles, each with roses printed on it."

Not every scene is so sweet, of course. It's a candid examination of the nature of human partnerships. It is absolutely charming.

Readalikes on the subject of love with a similarly unusual format (albeit different tones): The Incident Report by Martha Baillie; The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson; Watercolor Women, Opaque Men by Ana Castillo; Anthropology by Dan Rhodes; The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson.

Cool Water by Dianne Warren

Set in the sandy hills of southern Saskatchewan and the fictional village of Juliet, this refreshing novel is told in a series of interconnected stories. Family farms are dying, but people still have a connection to their roots on the land and many are finding the transition to the 21st century a bumpy one.

A horse escapes from his transport trailer when a stranger passes through Juliet... A pregnant teenager plans to marry the baby's totally irresponsible father... A young farmer ponders the identity of his birth mother... A bank manager worries about families whose lives will be affected by foreclosures... A wife jumps to the wrong conclusion when she finds a phone number in her husband's pocket...

Readers who love interwoven stories, a complex cast of lonely characters, and a strong sense of place will find lots to appreciate. The tone is hopeful and heart-warming, in spite of hard times in the community.

Readalikes: A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker (for short stories in a similar southern Saskatchewan setting); A Song for Nettie Johnson by Gloria Sawai (more small-town Saskatchewan stories); Runaway by Alice Munro (for plumbing the depths of ordinary individuals and their intimate relationships with others); Annabel by Kathleen Winter (for another community - in Labrador - shaped by the landscape).

A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

These retold fairytales are as dark as the original German tales... except with smarty-pants authorial asides and warnings:

"Are there any young children in the room? If so, it would be best if we just let them think this really is the end of the story and hurried them off to bed. Because this is where things start to get, well... awesome. But in a horrible, bloody kind of way."

Comments like this will help young readers to process the scary parts, reminding them that it is "only a story" and allowing them to brace for goriness ahead. There are toes chopped off, fingers chopped off and even children's heads chopped off. Parents cannot be relied upon to treat their offspring well. Dangerous men and women masquerade as kindly helpers. Hansel and Gretel learn to rely on their own wit and courage over the course of their adventures through nine different stories.

I was transported to my own childhood, when I was about 7 or 8 and read through bound collections of fairytales that I found under a bed at my grandmother's house. Some of the books actually were supporting the bed, which had only three legs. I spent many hours lost in them, shivering over the gruesome parts, weeping for poor maidens and delighting in the coloured plate illustrations. I remember water babies and crystal mountains. Wicked ice queens and cruelty of every kind. White pebbles forming a shining path in the moonlight. Ants assisting with impossible tasks. Brothers turning into swans and trees giving advice.

A Tale Dark & Grimm will appeal to readers from Grade 3 and up who have bloodthirsty tastes and appreciate dark, Lemony-Snicket-type humour. This would also work well as a family read-aloud.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

In a series of interconnected stories, a portrait of Beatrice Hempel emerges. Her mother is a Chinese immigrant and her father was mixed caucasian American. It took me a while to warm to Beatrice, who is rather baffled by life, bumbling along in her role as a young teacher in a junior high school. I was won over by her good-natured honesty in her interactions with her students. In the second story, Accomplice, I cheered her courage in choosing This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff for her Grade 7 English class study. When challenged by a parent who objects to the use of profanity in the book, she defends her choice eloquently.

Beatrice isn't sure she is cut out for the teaching profession. In Yurt, a story about a teacher who comes back to visit after taking a year of stress leave, Beatrice muses that a teacher has no time for wallowing in wretchedness. "The curriculum was always marching on, relentlessly: the scrambling dash from one unit to the next, the ancient Egyptians melting into the ancient Greeks, the blur of check marks and smiley faces, the hot rattling breath of the photocopier, book reports corrected shakily on the bus, the eternal night of parent-teacher conferences, dizzy countdowns to every holiday, and the dumb animal pleasure of rest. One could be quite unhappy and never have the chance to know it." She finds herself looking "longingly at a patch of ice on the pavement," realizing that "if she were to fall and fracture her leg in several places, then she wouldn't have to go to school."

One story takes us back to Beatrice in her early teens and the final story is an encounter years in the future with a former student. The stories together give glimpses into the events that shape Beatrice's journey through life. Very satisfying for readers like me who love intimate character portrayals and lyrical language. I enjoyed her writing so much that I'll include another quote:

"At the entrance to the library, Ms. Cruz sat behind her enormous wraparound desk. It resembled a sort of cockpit, its high sides studded with librarian paraphernalia, Ms. Cruz wheeling expertly about the interior in her ergonomic chair. The desk had two levels; the lower level was intended for the librarian's use as she tried to do her work, while the higher level was meant for those standing around the desk and bothering the librarian.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Two protagonists are at the center of this series of linked short stories: Bennie Salazar, a music producer in New York City, and Sasha Blake, his assistant who happens to be a kleptomaniac. Swirling around this pair is a loose galaxy of other people connected to them across time and across the planet. Their stories are told in fragments and through multiple perspectives. Egan has created a fabulous cross-genre hybrid, slipping from present to past to future - where wired pre-verbal toddlers form a sizable consumer market. One story is told in a slide presentation, another is a magazine article with extensive footnotes. It all comes together in a marvelous tapestry of a novel about the pivotal events that shape our lives and the shifting nature of identity as we get older. Highly recommended, especially to readers looking for something different. If you find my blog postings too short, here is a long review at the NYRB by Cathleen Schine.

Readalikes are tough for this one. Other story-cycles (Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich) stick more closely to place or time or people than Egan does. The X-Indian Chronicles by Thomas Yeahpah has a similar variety within the stories, but is quite a bit darker and grittier. Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway or Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden might work for a reader who wants more journeys to adulthood that cross culture and class.

Interesting that I'm reminded of three works by Aboriginal authors, even though there is no Aboriginal content in VFTGS. The qualities I'm matching are nonlinear storytelling, verve, humour and a melancholy tone.

Empathy by Sarah Schulman is another story set in New York and told in an avant garde style with a central theme of identity. Fault Lines by Nancy Huston, The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw and The Hours by Michael Cunningham are examples of novels told in shifting viewpoints and time periods that are connected only by the reader, not the protagonists.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Australian author Geraldine Brooks was inspired by a real object, a lavishly-illustrated medieval Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. The book escaped destruction several times and those saviours included Muslim librarians and Catholic priests.

The fictional account begins in Sarajevo in 1996, when the war in Bosnia has just barely ended. Hanna Heath is an Australian rare book expert hired to examine and restore the haggadah. During the conservation process, Hanna discovers minute clues to the book's enigmatic past. In a series of flashbacks to progressively older times, the artifacts uncover the mystery of the book's history and creation.

The present-day storyline revolves around Hanna's troubled relationship with her mother, a world-renowned neurosurgeon, and Hanna's romantic involvement with Ozren Karaman, chief librarian of the National Museum and custodian of the haggadah. The romance aspect rather detracted from my overall enjoyment of this book, but that is a minor quibble. I loved the glimpses into earlier times and the puzzle-solving aspects of the story.

Readalikes (well, I can't think of any book really similar... so consider these tangential readalongs): The Spanish Pearl by Catherine Friend (for readers who enjoyed the section with the lesbian romance set in Moorish Spain); Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay (for those fascinated by the pigments used in the haggadah); The World to Come by Dara Horn (for a Jewish experience told in two timelines); Fax from Sarajevo by Joe Kubert (for what Ozren Karaman's experience might have been like while his city was under siege); and Accordian Crimes by Annie Proulx (for another narrative that follows an object through history).

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

'Near novel' and 'story-cycle' are the terms I've heard used for books like Olive Kitteridge. It's a collection of connected short stories that, when taken together, form a novel. Elizabeth Strout's near novel is set in a small town on the coast of Maine. Her stories deal with the big things -- death and love -- as well as the small details of our existence.

Olive Kitteridge is the one constant character in these stories. I took a dislike to her in the first story and was uncertain about continuing the book as a result. I'm glad that I gave her another chance because I grew to appreciate this cranky, no-nonsense math teacher. In "Basket of Trips," Olive stands next to a woman named Molly as they both wait outside the church after a funeral. Molly says of the new widow, "Such a nice woman. It isn't right." Olive thinks this is a stupid thing to say. "Stupid -- this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right. But she finally answers, 'She's a nice woman, it's true.' "

In "A Little Burst," at her son's wedding, Olive thinks about the different perfumes women are wearing, "including one that all day has smelled like that bug spray Off!" I have smelled that very same perfume and wonder how anyone can find it attractive.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

If you enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, winner of the Man Booker Prize last year, then you will probably like his new collection of gritty short stories. They are set in the Indian southwestern coastal city of Kittur, during the time period bracketed by Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 and the assassination of her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991.

Caste and social class continue to play an important role in modern India. These stories are mostly about the underdogs of society, the hard-working (and sometimes not-so-hard-working) poor, and all but two of them focus on men rather than women or girls.

I discovered that, even though I prefer (in general) reading about the lives of women, my very favourite story is "The Sultan's Battery," in which a snake oil salesman goes out of his way to help a young man who has no one else to whom he can turn.

Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Adiga on June 21, 2009.