Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

Sweeter Life

By Tim Wynveen

The song remains the same in most rock and roll novels. Often thinly veiled memoirs, they’re crammed with a few anecdotes of life on the road but little of the human mechanics that make good ... Read More »

January 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Waterborne

By Joanne Soper-Cook

Like Frederico Garcia Lorca and playwrights Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge, Newfoundland writer Joanne Soper-Cook instinctively understands the deep-rooted relationship between person and place. No matter where people find themselves, we are told, they ... Read More »

January 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Karnival

By Michael Mortensen

From its evocative opening sentences to its startling yet inevitable finale, Karnival, the debut novel from American expatriate and long-time Toronto resident Michael Mortensen, weaves a compelling spell. Mortensen draws on his 15 years of ... Read More »

January 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Dutch Wife

By Eric McCormack

From the novel’s first image – a stall-keeper idly winding an endless parasite out of his belly – this is vintage Eric McCormack Gothic. That horrifying “Guinea worm,” along with other curious phrases such as ... Read More »

January 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Tom Thomson’s Last Paddle

By Larry McCloskey

In Tom Thomson’s Last Paddle, Ottawa author Larry McCloskey puts an intrepid pair of 12-year-old crime-solving girls, Dani and Caitlin, on the trail of a wilderness mystery that’s rooted in Canadian history. The girls, on ... Read More »

January 12, 2004

Tess

By Jocelyn Reekie

Writing in the voice of a character living 150 years ago, a contemporary author has tricky choices to make about language and idiom, and about attitudes to social issues on which public opinion has changed ... Read More »

January 12, 2004