Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

I love the title of Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, Tell the Wolves I'm Home. It's about family relationships and so I expected the wolves to be dysfunctional parents along the lines of Karen Russell's stories in St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Brunt's wolves, however, are the difficult things in life and learning to face them instead of running away.

It takes place in New York in 1987, but I consider Tell the Wolves I'm Home to be a historical novel because it's about AIDS before AZT treatment. Attitudes toward homosexuality have come a long way in the past 25 years too.  

June is 14 when her beloved uncle Finn dies. (Finn's pet name for June was Crocodile, which reminded me of another of Karen Russell's books, Swamplandia!, which is totally irrelevant and featured alligators, not crocodiles. Sorry.) June is awkward and lonely at school, estranged from her older sister, and their parents are buried in work. Comfort comes from an unexpected source when Finn's longtime lover, Toby, contacts June. She had not even been aware of his existence while Finn was alive, although she did see him outside her uncle's funeral.

Brunt's focus is on family dynamics and the shifting relationships between two sisters in their teens, as well as love, loyalty, grief, and shame. There were the same themes in Swamplandia!, come to think of it. Maybe it's a relevant comparison after all, even though there is no magic realism in Tell the Wolves I'm Home. They are both fabulous books.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

When Jake Marlowe learns that he is the last werewolf on Earth, he is ready to give up and die. Unfortunately for his suicidal ambitions, there are two groups fighting to keep Jake alive.

In writing The Last Werewolf as Jake's personal journal, Glen Duncan gets right inside what it's like change from human to monster every full moon, "doing the lunar shuffle." Werewolves are randy creatures so there's plenty of sex. Jake's cock does a lot of twitching in response to a "sly" or "clever" cunt.

"It had been ten days since I'd fucked Madeline. Ten days takes my kind to the edge. On the Curse you're desperate for sex with a She (if you're straight, that is; there are, naturally, gay werewolves -- one resists 'queerwolves'), while off the Curse your regular libido's amped up by the frustration of not having had sex with a She."

While werewolves are all but extinct, vampires are plentiful. They are not the sparkly type. They also don't go in for revenge. "Not on any kind of principle but because nine out of ten times they just can't be bothered. All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its ... motivation. Thus vampires spend a lot of time lounging around and staring out of the window and finding they can't be arsed." Just to be clear, however, the vampires in Jake's world are very dangerous.

Duncan's witty prose kept me engaged despite occasional scenes of graphic violence. After it snowed, for example, "the undisturbed fall was deep (and crisp, and even)." On the Cornish coast: "The beaches are shingle and stone and even a full day of sun leaves them literally and figuratively cold. The onyxy water would be mildly amused by you drowning in it."

My favourite line: "Reader, I ate him."

Readalikes: The Eyre Affair (and the rest of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde), Sharp Teeth (Toby Barlow); Bite Me (Christopher Moore); and American Gods (Neil Gaiman).

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Barbados author Karen Lord drives Redemption in Indigo with the voice of a storyteller experienced at controlling her audience: "A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily. I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscience with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing."

There is nothing awkward or untidy about Lord's retelling of a Senegalese folktale. It feels both timeless and fresh, neatly packaged in under 200 pages. 

Paama abandoned her husband Ansige after 10 years and moved back in with her family in a village in Africa (or maybe the Caribbean?). Gossips try to get the dirt from her, but Paama will not be drawn in. "The village longed for word on just what was the situation with Paama's marriage, but no-one could break past Paama when she decided to be earnest. She had the talent of speaking many things with little meaning, the gift of red herrings."

The truth is that Ansige is a prodigious glutton who cannot see past his own selfishness. "Ansige unreeled the tale of his tribulations, thoroughly ransacking the truth and then dipping into the bag of embellishment and sprinkling with a free hand." He is the buffoon of the story.

When Paama is given a supernatural stick that controls the powers of chaos, a djombi with indigo skin comes looking for her. This trickster holds humans in contempt, but finds he has things to learn from them.

Readalikes: For a similarly strong storyteller's voice, but without supernatural elements, try No Sweetness Here (Ama Ata Aidoo) or The Long Song (Andrea Levy). The Icarus Girl (Helen Oyeyemi) has some elements of African folklore - a nonhuman being who takes the form of a child - but in a more contemporary setting. The Icarus Girl is also darker and less straight-forward than Redemption in Indigo. For trickster stories from a different part of the world, I recommend the graphic novel collection Trickster: Native American Tales (compiled by Matt Dembicki). Ansige also reminded me of the much scarier glutton in Skeleton Man (Joseph Bruchac).

Note added July 14, 2012: Gav and Simon have a great interview with the author and then discuss the book on their podcast, The Readers.

Chloe and the Lion by Mac Barnett and Adam Rex

Is it the author or the illustrator who is more important in the creation of a picture book? That is the conflict in Chloe and the Lion. Author Mac Barnett and artist Adam Rex duke it out on the pages after Rex draws a dragon instead of the lion that Barnett called for in the text. Poor little Chloe, the ostensible star of the story. She really has to put her foot down to get proper attention from either of them!

Rex uses photoshop to pull together artwork made of paint, pencil, wood, fabric and modelling clay. The wooden stage sets reminded me of Edmonton Public Library's wonderful Storytime Station videos.

Fun for all ages. See the book trailer for Chloe and the Lion here for a preview.

Readalikes: For more picture books with cool multimedia collage artwork: Mirror (and many others by Jeannie Baker); 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore (and sequel, 11 Experiments that Failed, by Jenny Offill); and Here Comes the Garbage Barge (Jonah Winter). For more hilarious metafiction in picture books: Bad Day at Riverbend (Chris Van Allsburg); The Stinky Cheese Man (Jon Szieska and Lane Smith); and Wolves (Emily Gravett).

Also, dig up a copy of the Caldecott-winning classic Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty, which was obviously a source of inspiration for Chloe and the Lion.

Coral Glynn by Peter Cameron

Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You is one of my all-time favourite books, so I was excited to read Peter Cameron's new novel, Coral Glynn. I wasn't disappointed, even though about the only things the two books have in common is that they feature gay themes and society's misfits. They are also both short -- under 250 pages.

Coral Glynn is employed to nurse Mrs. Hart, an elderly woman dying of cancer, in a remote house in England, a few years after WWII. The woman's son, Clement, decides Coral would make a suitable wife for himself, even though he has only just met her. Clement has had a longtime relationship with another man, who is married and lives nearby.

Coral is likable, yet flawed, and I found sympathy for Clement, too. The claustrophobic domestic setting and societal constraints of the time add to the sensation of feeling trapped with few choices. Tragic stuff happens, there are lies and misunderstandings, and things work out differently than you might expect.

Readalikes: The Outcast (Sadie Jones) for a similar time and place with an element of dark suspense; Rough Music (Patrick Gale) for the tragedy of living closeted lives; and maybe Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) because the evil housekeeper in Coral Glynn is a match for Mrs. Danvers.

Railsea by China Miéville

Anytime I’m in the mood for something completely different, China Miéville’s genre-defying speculative fiction delivers. In Un Lun Dun, a young adventurer encounters predatory smog, sentient garbage and flesh-eating giraffes in a world beneath London. City and the City is a police procedural complicated by jurisdiction because two separate cities are contained in one folded bit of time and space. Railsea is a rollicking retelling of Moby-Dick, except with trains instead of ships and a giant ivory-coloured mole named Mocker-Jack instead of a whale.

Miéville’s language is as playful as can be. “There was a time when we did not form all words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now.”

Young Sham ap Soorap is a doctor’s apprentice on the moletrain Medes, captained by Abacat Naphi. “The Medes passed the clatter & clank of diesel vehicles like their own. Past the shrill fussy shenanigans of steam trains that spat & whistled & burped dirty clouds, like irritating godly babies, & others. The railsea: a vast & various train ecosystem.”

Captain Naphi lost her left arm to Mocker-Jack, so now that mole has become her obsession – her philosophy.

“Not every captain had [a philosophy], but a fair proportion grew into a close antipathy-cum-connection with one particular animal, which they came to realise or decide – to decidalise – embodied meanings, potentialities, ways of looking at the world. At a certain point, & it was hard to be exact but you knew it when you saw it, the usual cunning thinking about professional prey switched onto a new rail & became something else – a faithfulness to an animal that was now a worldview.”

“Shiverjay ran a finger down a rumour-list, past tales of the largest badger, albino antlions, aardvarks of prodigious size. Some had the names of captains marked alongside. Some had more than one: oh, those were awkward occasions, clashes of hunt. What to do when more than one philosopher sought the same symbol? It was notoriously embarrassing.”

“There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. On the whole, you were a leg person or an arm person: had one a tail to lose, a pair of prehensile tentacles, a wing or two, it would increase the possibilities for those vivid scars of philosophising.”

Encouraging a crewmember to get to the point, Captain Naphi asks him to “expedite this journey relevance-ward.” No need to rush, in my view. The journey is such fun! An adventure suitable for readers age 10 to adult.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

It's Canada Day and I regret that I don't have a uniquely Canadian title to blog about today...  Instead, I'll find Canadian connections with Jack Kerouac's autobiographical beat generation classic, On the Road. Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he grew up speaking French. My maternal grandmother was also born to French Canadian parents in Lowell.

For any of you who haven't read On the Road (I've only just got around to it myself, and mostly because it happened to be available on One Click, an eAudiobook database at the library) it's a rambling narrative about a group of young men who crisscross the USA with no money and a great deal of drinking. The emphasis is on experiencing all that life has to offer.

According to the social researcher Michael Adams, there are some marked differences between the personal values and worldviews of an average Canadian and an average American. An example has to do with the value placed on experience versus materialism. In Sex in the Snow (1997), Adams found that a Canadian was most likely to use an unexpected windfall of money to go on a big trip, while an American would be more likely to buy a nice car. Of course these are generalizations that don't hold true for every individual, and also probably evolve over time, but still, it's interesting.

In any case, Kerouac's Sal Paradise, the narrator of On the Road, is a writer on an existential search with little interest in material things. Kerouac has a great ear for dialogue. His prose is a delight for anyone who loves language and the whole thing is based on real people and events, which adds another layer of appeal.

The unabridged Recorded Books edition is 11 hours and 15 minutes long and Frank Muller is an excellent choice as performer, as he is a credible and enthusiastic storyteller. In spite of this, I found myself having to take a break partway through, switching to some podcasts. (Books on the Nightstand and The Readers... if I'm not listening to books, I'm listening to people talk about books.) Anyway, when my mood shifted and I was ready for it again, I enjoyed the rest of On the Road.