Owls Are Good at Keeping Secrets: An Unusual Alphabet

Animals with human characteristics have been appearing in picture books for so long that their place or purpose in a story is rarely questioned — readers accept and embrace the conventions around all permutations of ... Read More »

December 17, 2018 | Filed under: Kids’ Books, Picture Books

You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller

By Caelum Vatnsdal

The maxim that there are no small parts, only small actors gets inverted wonderfully in Caelum Vatnsdal’s You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me. This voluminous appreciation of the American character actor Dick Miller ... Read More »

December 13, 2018 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

Meet Tom Longboat

By Elizabeth MacLeod; Mike Deas (ill.)

Scholastic Canada’s biography series – picture books that profile trailblazing Canadians, including Viola Desmond and Chris Hadfield – stands out in the field of non-fiction kidlit biographies thanks to its appealing, comic-strip style. The latest ... Read More »

December 13, 2018 | Filed under: Kids’ Books, Picture Books

Northern Wildflower: A Memoir

By Catherine Lafferty

Reading Catherine Lafferty’s memoir Northern Wildflower, I kept wondering if my responses to it made me a morally reprehensible human being, a Donald Trump of the reviewing world. How can a story of growing up ... Read More »

December 13, 2018 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

Angela of the Stones

By Amanda Hale

Every now and then, a short story appears that manages, through the author’s sheer craft, to compress all the emotional and narrative heft of a novel into 15 or 20 pages. Alice Munro has built ... Read More »

December 13, 2018 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

Tread and Other Stories

By Barry Dempster

December 13, 2018 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

Raise You on the River: Essays and Encounters 1964–2018

By Barry Callaghan

Barry Callaghan holds a position in the Canadian literary firmament that is at once praiseworthy and unenviable. Callaghan wrested himself from the shadow of his father, CanLit icon Morley Callaghan, to create a varied career ... Read More »

December 10, 2018 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews

All the Lonely People: Collected Stories

By Barry Callaghan

December 10, 2018 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Fiction: Short, Reviews

Amateurs at Love

By Patricia Young

Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots is the third book of poetry from writer and artist Basma Kavanagh. “Ruba’iyat” refers to a grouping of “ruba’i” – poems in a classical Persian four-line form not unlike ... Read More »

December 10, 2018 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews