Slow States of Collapse

Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s debut collection, Slow States of Collapse, comprises mostly short, confessional, free-verse lyrics. The book is divided into five sections, some held more tightly together than others by a thematic or referential constant. The ... Read More »

March 29, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

Fluffy Strikes Back (A P.U.R.S.T. Adventure)

By Ashley Spires

After five books about Binky, the flatulent cat who yearns for intergalactic adventures, author-illustrator Ashley Spires launches a new spin-off series, introducing readers to Fluffy Vandermere, the head feline at P.U.R.S.T. (Pets of the Universe ... Read More »

March 29, 2016 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Righting Canada’s Wrongs: Residential Schools

By Melanie Florence

One of the challenges confronting Canadian youth is the legacy of their country’s horrific treatment of its First Nations. The deliberate, determined attempts to annihilate aboriginal ways of life culminated in the creation of the ... Read More »

March 29, 2016 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction

Settler Education

By Laurie D. Graham

Laurie D. Graham’s second collection of poems requires a bit of mental pinball to follow its complicated construction of the past and present. Until I read the poems in conjunction with the endnotes and references, ... Read More »

March 28, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

Songs of Exile

By Bänoo Zan

Bänoo Zan immigrated to Canada in 2010 from Iran, where she taught English literature. The poems in her debut collection are not overtly autobiographical, but nevertheless powerfully convey the immigrant experience. The language is spare, ... Read More »

March 21, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

Little Dogs: New and Selected

By Michael Crummey

Many Canadian fiction writers started out as poets. Rarer are people like Michael Crummey and Steven Heighton, who write poetry and prose in tandem. A grim warning: only a few of the greatest writers (Thomas ... Read More »

March 21, 2016 | Filed under: Poetry

Away Running

By David Wright; Luc Bouchard

The new novel by Luc Bouchard and David Wright tackles the subject of racism and adversity faced by American football players in the early 2000s in Villeneuve, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Paris. Away Running also ... Read More »

March 21, 2016 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Look Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts

By Esta Spalding; Sydney Smith (illus.)

Screenwriter, poet, and author Esta Spalding dips her toe into the ocean of children’s writing with her debut middle-grade novel, the first in a series about a family of loosely related children who have been ... Read More »

March 21, 2016 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Maya

By Mahak Jain; Elly MacKay (illus.)

It takes considerable talent for an illustrator to do justice to the peacock, to come even close to matching nature in rendering its most exquisite bird. With their textured and evocative illustrations in Malaika’s Costume ... Read More »

March 18, 2016 | Filed under: Picture Books