What an assured and attractively variegated collection of stories. Set in Toronto and small-town southern Ontario, Kristyn Dunnion’s 13 short pieces are marvellous feats of pacing and styling bolstered by vibrant characterization and enviable turns ... Read More »
December 7, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews
It’s hard to imagine from today’s vantage that some of Édouard Manet’s most celebrated paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, with its female nude picnicker gazing defiantly at the viewer, were decreed artistically worthless when ... Read More »
December 3, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The non-fiction book A Home Away from Home explores the ways in which wild animals are taken from their natural habitat and spotlights the people who are trying to help them regain some semblance of ... Read More »
December 3, 2020 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Kids’ Books
Linda first meets Paul at the cast party for a no-budget production of Beckett’s Happy Days in which Linda stars. Paul approaches Linda and asks if she’s any good with a canoe. When Linda begs ... Read More »
November 30, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Sixteen-year-old Annaka has spent the last 10 years going by Anna, but when she and her mother move from Halifax back to her hometown of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to take care of her Nan, her ... Read More »
November 30, 2020 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
Coming into Catherine Bush’s Blaze Island is akin to entering a world with a large cast of characters, not unlike a Charles Dickens novel. While Dickens’s novels are cultural artifacts of their time, Bush’s book ... Read More »
November 26, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Sixteen-year-old Sam – the protagonist of Toronto writer Rob Shapiro’s new YA novel – is a bit of an outcast. Bullied by his peers and largely overlooked by his parents (when they aren’t disparaging him), ... Read More »
November 26, 2020 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
The highlight of the U.S. Democratic National Convention in August was supposed to be the confirmation of Joe Biden’s candidacy for president. Instead, a young boy with a stutter – whom Biden, a fellow stutterer, ... Read More »
November 23, 2020 | Filed under: Kids’ Books, Picture Books
Years back, I remember listening to Kate Braid read poems from Turning Left to the Ladies and being awed by the way she lyrically broke open the male-dominated world of construction – a field in ... Read More »
November 23, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews
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