★ Whoosh! A Watery World of Wonderful Creatures

In this delightful picture book, celebrated author Marilyn Baillie adroitly combines children’s love of playing in water with their fascination for learning about animals. Baillie, the former editor of chickaDEE magazine, once taught science at ... Read More »

March 19, 2014 | Filed under: Picture Books

I Was There the Night He Died

By Ray Robertson

Following 2011’s Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, which was nominated for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction, Ray Robertson returns with a novel that considers themes of death, loss, and self-harm, ... Read More »

March 17, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Complicity

By Adam Sol

To read poetry is to be implicated in the scandal of its creation. The poet writes lines, directs the movement, but it’s the reader’s imagination that resolves the poem. This is readily apparent in these ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Poetry

Writing with Grace: A Journey beyond Down Syndrome

By Judy McFarlane

In Writing with Grace, Vancouver’s Judy McFarlane addresses issues of intellectual disability and what it means to be a writer. Although the young woman McFarlane mentors self-identifies as Cinderella-Princess-Grace, the rest of the world is ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood

By Kerry Clare, ed.

“Mom” is such a loaded word. Girls grow up absorbing, as if by osmosis, the mother-child relationships around them; then, suddenly, it’s their turn to enter motherhood (or not, as the case may be). I ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1984

By Nicholas Bradley, ed.

The lost art of snail-mail correspondence often reveals the true personalities of those involved, especially when the exchanges are off-the-cuff and conversational. Al Purdy was a voluminous and candid letter-writer who, during his lifetime, saw ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Fields of Exile

By Nora Gold

Certain political issues are so combustible, so emotionally fraught, that debate – even discussion – about them feels perilous. High stakes narrow fields of vision, as if individuals have been outfitted with blinders to anyone’s ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Grayling

By Gillian Wigmore

Reviewing first fiction is an activity filled with trepidation, particularly if the author is an award-winning writer in another genre. B.C.’s Gillian Wigmore is just that, a prolific and highly regarded Canadian poet whose Soft ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What Makes this Book so Great? Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy

By Jo Walton

Among Others, the 2011 novel from Montreal-based Welsh writer Jo Walton, was something of a delightful oddity. A fantasy novel masquerading as a Bildungsroman, it was steeped in a love of reading and an acknowledgement ... Read More »

March 13, 2014 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels