When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald

When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald
Simon and Schuster, January 2020
Audiobook (10 hours) read by Phoebe Strole

Courage is what makes a hero out of Zelda, a slightly-built 21-year-old White woman with a cognitive disability.

After their mother dies of cancer, Gert assumes care for his younger sister Zelda. People assume Gert is a thug on account of his looks, and he has in fact teamed up with some unsavoury characters in order to make ends meet financially, but he is also attending college on a scholarship. Zelda is obsessed with Vikings, and she sees the world through a Viking filter. Her voice is unique and appealing.

        In many legends, where heroes had to defeat powerful villains, the villains always hurt innocent people who the hero loved. And once a hero is pushed too far by the villain, the hero goes to battle. The hero in a Viking legend is always smaller than the villain. That is what makes it a legend.

Promotional blurbs and reviews have compared this book to The Silver Linings Playbook, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Those comparisons will give you a fair idea of the kind of feel-good story this is, told in first person by a disadvantaged person overcoming great odds. 

The problem for me is that I couldn't quite believe in Zelda as a real person, adorable as she is. The real people that I know with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder are not so perfectly innocent and altruistic as Zelda. She does, however, need rules. Sometimes stress causes her thoughts to become disordered:

        Shhh! I told my thoughts. Stop flying around. Stop trying to smash yourselves against the inside of my head. They kept flying, since I had to think to say to stop. Thinking more just made the thoughts flying around louder and louder. They were gunshots and exploding bombs.

Zelda navigates sexual attraction, her first job and increasing levels of independence. There are also Grendel monsters in the form of bad men in her world, men who steal treasure hoards and act dishonourably. Zelda is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect the people she loves.

Giller chances: LOW - Lots of readers (and audiobook listeners) will enjoy this heartwarming story, however.

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.

No Going Back by Sheena Kamal

No Going Back by Sheena Kamal
Audiobook [9 hours] read by Bahni Turpin
HarperAudio, April 2020

Third in a series featuring Vancouver private detective Nora Watts, a woman of mixed heritage -- a Palestinian mother and an Indigenous father -- who is (somewhat unsuccessfully) dealing with past trauma. You don't need to start with the first book, The Lost Ones, because you can get caught up on what's happened previously through clues in the third. Still, it's best to do so. Part of the appeal here is getting emotionally invested in the character development through the series, plus the plot in No Going Back is tied to activity in the previous books.

There isn't much humour in this atmospheric novel, but I did chuckle at the following passage:

        He wanted to go to Alberta and see a new purple coloured ribbon of light in the aurora borealis that scientists are calling Steve. Even though it's now known that Steve is actually a 25 kilometre-wide concentration of hot gases, he still thinks it's worth a trip to Alberta, which is insanity. Nothing is worth going to Alberta.

Noir thrillers aren't my usual fare but I do appreciate a feisty female lead who isn't great at interpersonal relationships. She's an outsider, a recovering alcoholic, living amidst the social disorder of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. She is still in the process of discovering her own self worth. The suspenseful audiobook is performed by the incomparable Bahni Turpin.

Giller chances: LOW - I would say the third in any series doesn't stand a chance at a literary prize, but then there's Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, third in the Cromwell series, that could prove me wrong by winning the Booker.

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.

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Harper Perennial, April 2020

How do residential school survivors cope with the trauma they've experienced? In this heartbreaking, hopeful novel, Michelle Good brings five characters to life to answer that question. 

Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Howie and Clara have grown up in the same church-run institution on the northern coast of Vancouver Island. They were forcibly taken from their families at a young age, then kept from them until they either succeeded in escaping, or were aged out on their 16th birthdays. At that point, they are given a bus ticket to Vancouver and left to fend for themselves.

Chapters shift between the five, following them forward through decades as they move in and out of each other's lives. People who haven't had a similar experience cannot fully understand them.

        She looked at me and reached for my hand. "I knew you had a story. You know, my dad went to one of those places. He would never talk about it. Not to anyone, not even my mom. She was Metis, so she didn't have to go. My dad gave up his Indian status so they couldn't take me there.

In their later years, Lucy and Kenny talk about what will later become the largest class action suit in Canadian legal history, which was on behalf of residential school survivors.

        "They call us survivors."
        "Yeah."
        "I don't think I survived. Do you?"

Human beings are amazingly resilient, but trauma leaves scar tissue, and the effect is intergenerational. My heart opened to these wonderful characters. I feel like I've been given insight into the challenges that the real people who survived residential schools continue to face.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - I hope this important book makes the longlist, and is promoted to readers through other methods too. Pick it for your book club! Settler Canadians like me have much yet to learn about the contextual realities of Indigenous lives in this country.

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.

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.

The Library of Legends by Janie Chang

The Library of Legends by Janie Chang

Audiobook [11 hours] read by Emily Woo Zeller 

HarperCollins, April 2020

Compulsively readable historical fiction with fantastical elements.

The story opens in September 1937 in Nanking during the second Sino-Japanese war:

        The approaching aircraft were too far away for Lian to tell whether they were Chinese or Japanese. A moment later, she didn't need to guess. The spiraling wail of sirens churned the air. Then the bombs began falling, like beads slipping off a necklace.

        She had been on her way to the train station. She'd gotten off the rickshaw to buy a steamed bun for breakfast. Now she stood outside the bakery as though rooted to the pavement, uncertain what to do. The nearest air-raid shelter was two blocks away, across from the railway station, its entrance already besieged. Even if she were willing to abandon her wicker suitcase, she would never reach the shelter in time.

Nineteen-year-old Hu Lian, a university scholarship student, had intended to take the train to Shanghai to meet up with her mother, who was fleeing the fall of Peking. But during the time it took her mother's letter to reach her, thousands of refugees have already been flooding the International Settlement area of Shanghai. 

As a consequence of the uncertainties of war, Lian ends up joining her fellow students in the evacuation of their university instead. They are to walk westward for 1,000 miles, travelling by night to avoid aerial bombing and sleeping on floors in meeting halls and temples. Classes continue along the way, whenever possible. It reminded me of the flexibility required of education during a pandemic. 

The group that Lian travels with consists of over a hundred students plus professors and staff. Each student has been entrusted with a single volume from an ancient collection of myths and legends. They are to carry this cultural treasure to safety along with them. 

It soon becomes apparent that guardian spirits are making a similar journey, and that a supernatural being is travelling with the student refugees. The fantasy elements are beautifully woven into a plot that also features murder, betrayal, political manipulations and romance. 

Giller chances: MEDIUM LOW - It's a hopeful page-turner with a great message about the supportive power of community during hardship. Genre fiction doesn't fare well in literary prize judging, but this book will please many readers.

NOTE: I recommend the immersive experience of the audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller. 

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.