Forest Has a Song by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and Robbin Gourley

Forest Has a Song is perfect for two occasions being observed today, March 21. It is the UN's International Day of Forests and also UNESCO's World Poetry Day. This beautiful collection of poems by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and watercolour illustrations by Robbin Gourley is great for any day, actually.

A girl and her dog spend time in the woods near her home through all four seasons. A spicy breeze invites them in. They play with spongy sticks and puffballs, ponder fossils and animal bones, listen to and watch birds and insects. All of the senses are engaged. Walking barefoot on moss: "I softly sink in velvet green. / Oh how I wish for socks of moss." Biting into a wintergreen leaf: "Snowflakes fill my mouth."

First person narration draws readers right into the moment. "I stop to read / the Forest News / in mud or fallen snow. / Articles are printed / by critters on the go." References to human culture are omnipresent.  A frog croons a marriage proposal and a slipper orchid is left by a Forest Cinderella. "Lichens are graffiti artists."

Gourley's bright paintings create their own separate, sustained narrative about the girl's life with her family. Time spent lingering over the artwork also works to appreciate each poem individually. My favourite spread ties poems on opposing pages together: Snowflake Voices and Colorful Actor. It shows the girl in falling snow against a background of evergreens, striding uphill towards bare birch trees. Her red boots and red mitts lead the eye towards the cardinal flying ahead.

"Each silver / snowflake / sings my name. / Guess what? / No two sound the same."

And here is one last poem, which I hope will charm spring into arriving here sooner rather than later:

April Waking
Ferny frondy fiddleheads
unfurl curls from dirty beds.
Stretching stems they sweetly sing
greenest greetings sent to Spring.

Instead of dwelling on the fact that it's -15C in Edmonton, one day after the official start of spring, I bid you all a happy International Day of Forests and World Poetry Day!

Jane, the Fox and Me by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault

Understatement can be powerful. Example: Jane the Fox and Me, a graphic novel by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault about a girl who is bullied at her elementary school in Montreal.

"Don't talk to Helene, she has no friends now." The words that Helene saw on the toilet stall door remain with her. They float scrawled across the bleak late winter street scene as Helene waits for a bus.

Helene encounters a fox while camping.
"Its eyes are so kind I just about burst. That
same look in another human's eyes, and my
soul would be theirs for sure."

Helen's escape is into the pages of Jane Eyre. "I have time to read something like thirteen pages between school and home."

Artist Isabelle Arsenault depicts Helene's world in charcoal shades. Vegetation is an extended motif representing mental health and well-being. When Helen's spirits lift -- a new dress made by her mother; an ice cream cone -- plants spring up around her, always gray. Even the new shoots in the window boxes of her apartment are a pale, smudgy gray.

The lush vegetation is in contrast to the sombre colour palette, creating a pleasing tension between exuberance and restraint. When Helene makes a new friend, things get better for her. Hope is visually represented -- but quietly, as befits this bookish child. A little sprout of yellow among the gray leaves, another of cyan: together they hold the possibility of green. It's absolutely lovely.

Readalikes: Harvey (Herve Bouchard and Janice Nadeau); Chiggers (Hope Larson).

For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu

For Today I Am a Boy is Kim Fu's tender coming-of-age story about a transgender Chinese Canadian.

Growing up with three sisters in small town Ontario, Peter Huang must play the role of honoured son. There is no way for Peter to express what Peter knows: that Peter is a girl inside. Their immigrant parents had high expectations for all of them. The girls would become doctors and lawyers. Peter would get rich and marry and have children to carry on the family name. 

Peter's voice is honest and compelling. Moving to Montreal after graduation, working at low-paying restaurant jobs, there is at least the freedom of anonymity. Yet adulthood is no easier than childhood or adolescence for a trans person in the 1980s. Disgusted by the physical appendage marking Peter's body as male, Peter avoids intimacy. 

"There was a deep-down, physical ache. The opposite of a phantom limb: pain because that thing, that thing I loathed, was always there. I had to use it and look at it every day. But more than that, pain because I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be noticed, in a way that both men and cooks were not. The hostesses at the Japanese restaurant wore makeup that made their eyes cartoonishly large and dresses in oriental prints that were slit to the upper thigh. They were required to wear their hair in high, old-fashioned buns. They were art. They were there to be looked at and admired and worshipped. I was there to serve a purpose, to make things. A workhorse. A man."

Fu does not neglect Peter's sisters. They are fully-realized individuals with their own challenges. It is with their support that Peter finds a way forward. For Today I Am a Boy is delicately heartbreaking and beautifully redemptive.

Readalikes: Annabel (Kathleen Winter); Money Boy (Paul Yee); First Spring Grass Fire  (Rae Spoon); Confessions of an Empty Purse (S. McDonald) and Wandering Son (Shimura Takako).

She Is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

This cover gives the
impression of a historical
ghost story. It is not
either of those things.

Marcus Sedgwick's writing is kind of hit and miss for me. It's not easy to say why, just a bad fit for my tastes. Usually, I like some aspects and dislike others within the same book. I've read five so far (mostly because they were chosen by my YA book group), and Revolver was the one I liked best, with some reservations. (See my review here.)

She Is Not Invisible is different. I loved everything about it: the two main protagonists, 16-year-old Laureth and her 7-year-old brother Benjamin; their clandestine departure from England to New York in search of their missing father, a writer; the vividly detailed setting; the power of obsession; the clues; the stylistic recurrence of number 354; and the subject of coincidence.

"Coincidences in fiction just do not work. And even in real life, they tend to fall into two sorts. The ones that are so pathetic that they don't excite anyone but you, and the ones that are so incredible that they are literally just that; unbelievable."

I learned a new word (always a plus): "Apophenia is a fancy word, but all it means is that thing we all have inside us, a desire, a tendency, a need in fact, to spot patterns. The human mind is very good at spotting patterns. It's an evolutionary development."

The human mind is also very good at creating connections where none exist. What is real? What is pure coincidence? She Is Not Invisible is a quick and intriguing read. The questions it leaves are the very best part.

Readalike: Picture Me Gone (Meg Rosoff).

The Bear's Song by Benjamin Chaud

The Bear's Song is an amusing oversized picture book by French artist Benjamin Chaud. His intricate, whimsical artwork begs close inspection. So much is happening all over the place while Papa Bear follows runaway Little Bear from the forest to the city and right into an opera house. Little Bear is hidden somewhere on each page, creating a Where's Waldo sort of hunt for readers.

The colour scheme is mostly subdued shades of gold and olive and brown, evoking a bygone Belle Epoque era as well as old fairytales. The beautiful endpapers depict golden honeycombs covered in bees, foreshadowing the end of the story.

Foreshadowing tableaus are sprinkled throughout. Two woodcutters leave a single boot behind when they climb into a tree after spotting Papa Bear. Later, opera patrons scramble away from Papa Bear, dropping shoes in their haste. Red herrings include: a child's toy bear; advertising panels featuring bears with honey jars (also foreshadowing); a child in a bonnet with bear ears; and a man wearing a bear suit.

The Bear's Song could be understood without any text at all. There are only one or two sentences across the bottom of each page. The text includes some nice alliteration and internal rhymes like "snuffles his snout," "winter's whisper," and "a busy sort of buzzing beckons."

Little Bear is following a bee that leads him to the roof of the opera house, where he finds a jackpot: hives full of honey. There, "Papa Bear and his cub settle in to sleep. After all, hibernation is better with honey. And adventure is best enjoyed together."

Enjoy this with children of any age.

Jennifer Cockrall-King writes about beekeeping in Paris in Food and the City. I checked online to see how expensive it is to buy honey from the hives on the roof of the opera house. Wow! Fifteen euros (CAN$22.50) for a tiny 2-oz jar! Chaud's bears have every reason to sing while they help themselves to this specialty honey.

From the Palais Garnier website.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Nevada is Imogen Binnie's funny, gritty novel about a trans woman named Maria. Armistead Maupin's Anna Madrigal, one of the grand dames of trans women in fiction, grew up in small town Nevada. I wonder if this inspired Binnie to set the pivotal point of her novel in a similar location? Whatever the reason, it works.

Maria is just as wonderful as Anna Madrigal, even though they're opposites in many ways. Maria is more into books than sex. Mary Gaitskill, William Gibson, Michelle Tea and Rebecca Solnit are some of the authors she name-drops. She prefers punk clothing layers to silk and chiffon. Also, Maria tends to alienate people rather than mother them. She even picks fights with herself. Drugs are not really her thing either.

"Piranha's always got pills. She's always got something going on, some kind of illegal Robin Hood self-care. But obviously it's kind of a big deal. Heroin's the cul-de-sac at the end of Drug Street."

After several years together, Steph and Maria are breaking up. Maria hates her job at a bookstore in New York, so that's another part of her life that's broken. She has trouble sleeping and is overdue for a hormone shot. Alcohol might be the solution, except:

"She can't really drink forties any more. Her twenty-nine year old sad old lady belly can't handle it. But sneaking a beer into the movie is the point, not the actual drinking.
[...] That stereotype about transsexuals being all wild and criminal and bold and outside the norm and, like, engendering in the townsfolk the courage to break free from the smothering constraints of conformity? That stereotype is about drag queens. Maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear. She does sneak a forty into the movies, though."

(Does this remind anyone else of Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz?)

One night, Maria is so exhausted that she falls into a long, sound sleep.

"She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It's fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg's and write for two and a half hours."

(I like the way Binnie played breakfast wine for a laugh, but it turns out that early-morning alcohol is going to be a thing here in Alberta. Premier Alison Redford announced that bars can serve alcohol at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning. Canada is in the Olympic men's gold-medal hockey game. Must. Drink. Beer.)

"No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so is everybody, so it's not very interesting. She's been blogging since she was a tiny little baby, like eighteen or nineteen years old, when being online was just starting to be demystified into something Rupert Murdoch could make money from. She figured out that she was trans by blogging. Awkward."

Maria still has a lot to figure out. She sets off on a road trip to the West Coast, which is why she is in Nevada, as advertised in the title.

"Kate Bornstein was right when she said none of this gender stuff is real, but she didn't go far enough. All of this gender stuff is stupid and it's so complicated that it's impossible to make sense of."

Actually, Maria does a pretty good job of making it less complicated. It is about being yourself. It is about being human. And it's about the meaningful connections we make with others.

Readalikes: Valencia and Rose of No Man's Land (Michelle Tea); Godspeed (Lynn Breedlove); and The Beautifully Worthless (Ali Liebegott).

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty

Louise Doughty's psychological thriller Apple Tree Yard takes a compelling look at the dark places that exist inside us. It opens with a critical moment in court:

"The moment builds; it swells and builds -- the moment when I realise we have lost."

That moment is when perjury is uncovered. Doughty then takes us backwards, to the details of a passionate extramarital affair that led up to that point. The downfall of a love gone wrong.

The pacing is perfect: "it swells and builds." Not rushed. Inexorable.

Yvonne is a geneticist, a smart and capable woman. She loves her husband. She is happy in her life with him. What motivates her to get involved with a man who enjoys sex in risky places? The characters and their relationships are fascinating and utterly believable.

Readalikes: The Forgotten Waltz (Anne Enright); Sweet Tooth (Ian McEwan); and Before I Go to Sleep (SJ Watson).