Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

Southern Stories

By Clark Blaise

There’s a telling scene in “A North American Education,” one of 13 stories in Southern Stories, the first volume in a new series of Clark Blaise’s collected shorter works. The teenaged narrator and his father, ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Wife Tree

By Dorothy Speak

Dorothy Speak’s first novel, The Wife Tree, is probably not the book to read if you’re feeling pessimistic about relations between men and women. While the book ends with Morgan Hazzard, its 70-something heroine, ready ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Cover Me

By Mariko Tamaki

A striking deadpan humour sets the narrative tone in Toronto writer Mariko Tamaki’s fiction debut, Cover Me. Over the course of lunch with her wise-cracking father in a downtown Chinese restaurant, narrator Traci Yamoto describes ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What We All Want

By Michelle Berry

Michelle Berry’s two short-story collections are informed by a sharply mordant edge, their haunting characters anything but typical van-owning suburbanites. Her skilled first novel continues to dig over that terrain. What We All Want is ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Water Wings

By Kristen den Hartog

Kristen den Hartog’s dark, tender first novel reveals her as a sort of literary younger sister to Alice Munro, plumbing the landscape of small town southern Ontario to turn up stories of sexual discontent and ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels