Author: Monique (Page 3 of 123)

The Porcelain Moon by Janie Chang

June 24, 2024 / Monique

The Porcelain Moon follows the intertwined lives of two families during the final days of the First World War.

Pauline Deng is an illegitimate daughter, living with her Chinese uncle and cousin Theo in Paris. They run an antiques shop. Pauline is good with numbers and attractive, but her prospects are limited, and her uncle’s “first wife” is arranging Pauline’s marriage and return to China. Pauline secretly leaves for the town of Noyelle-sur-Mer, where she hopes to find Theo and convince him to negotiate her release from her uncle.

In Noyelle-sur-Mer, Pauline takes a room at Camille Rousell’s. Unbeknownst to her, the married Camille is Theo’s lover. Camille has married out of obligation and is secretly saving money to escape her abusive husband. She loves Theo but her situation is dangerous and she is determined to leave under her own steam.

These two women, trapped by marriage and the social obligations of the time, are bold and brave in their pursuit of happiness and independence. They are living during a well-documented time, but readers will be less familiar with the history of the 140,000 Chinese workers who were brought to Europe as non-combatant labour during the war. They were serving as civilians for the British and French, and faced discrimination and were subsequently written out of the history books.

The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang

June 13, 2024 / Monique

The Phoenix Crown is a spectacular confluence of two excellent historical fiction authors. I’m a big fan of Kate Quinn and had not heard of Janie Chang—even though she is a bestselling Canadian author. Oh goodness, I have a more to explore! (Thanks for the tip Rachael.)

The novel is set in San Francisco, 1906, just a before and after the earthquake, and subsequent fires, that devastated the city. Four women’s lives are intertwined based on their loose connections to a charming railroad magnate named Henry Thornton. Thornton claims to not be a very nice man, and that turns out to be the truth. He’s a collector and his objects are his heart. Too bad he collects women the same way he collects stolen Chinese treasures.

Thornton offers his patronage to Gemma (under-appreciated opera singer), Suling (Chinese embroidery legend and otherwise non-descript manager of the laundry), and Reggie (unknown yet phenomenal artist). His patronage represents career opportunities of a lifetime, but these women hardly escape with their lives. The forth woman? Botanist Alice Eastwood, who is a globetrotting, self-taught scientist, who is interested in Thornton’s prized plant, the Queen of the Night.

If you like historical fiction, then definitely give this book a read: The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang.

Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood

June 7, 2024 / Monique

Months ago I heard Suzanne Heywood interviewed on CBC Radio and her story captured my imagination. At seven, her father pulled her and her brother out of school in England and they set sail following Cook’s third voyage. Suzanne’s mother is seasick off the bat, they get hit by another boat before leaving the country, and their intermittent luck comes and goes from there.

What was promised as a year adventure, maybe 3 years, becomes 10. Suzanne does not have a romantic view of this adventure. Her younger brother John adapts more easily to no school. He learns the ropes (literally) and makes friends as needed. John is less than a year younger, but it’s the 70s and he’s a boy. Suzanne gets stuck in the galley making meals with her mother and running domestic errands (i.e., get mommy a G&T).

Imagine being away for 10 years of schooling. The lack of friends, the wayward lifestyle, the survival instincts needed to deal with storms, rollicking waves, life on a boat, customs and immigration—it’s crippling for Suzanne and also the catalyst for her plan to escape. It not all horrendous. There are some amazing moments, and she does live an incredible life at sea. But I’m amazed that young Suzanne was driven enough to figure out correspondence courses, when her family mostly couldn’t be bothered by whether the kids could do more than read, write and do a bit of math. Suzanne not only graduated, she graduated with top marks and got into Oxford University.

Wavewalker is a stunning autobiography about living someone else’s dream.

The Wreckage by Michael Crummey

May 28, 2024 / Monique

I had not read anything by Michael Crummey before, which is a shame, and now I’m hooked. The Wreckage starts with the trials and tribulations of a small village on Fogo Island. Sadie Parsons, the eldest daughter of a local Protestant family, finds herself falling in love with a Catholic boy named Wish, who has come across from St. John’s to run the movie projector. Local prejudice stands in the way, along with the fist of Sadie’s older brother.

Wish flees the Cove and follows the line of young men enlisting in the war. The Second World War is still in its early days, and Newfoundlanders (remember they were not yet part of Canada) were enlisting with the British army.

The story follows Wish from St. John’s to Nagasaki, where he suffers the brutality of a Japanese POW camp’s leader and barely survives the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the meantime, Sadie follows Wish from Fogo to St. John’s, but that’s where she stays, waiting for Wish’s war to end and finding her own sense of community among her new neighbours.

Sadie’s commitment to Wish is part blind faith and part blind stubbornness. I won’t spoil the story for you but the intertwining of these two stories is lovely and complicated. She drives the show!

Check out more about Michael Crummey on the Penguin Random House site.

On Browsing by Jason Guriel | Book Review

May 3, 2024 / Monique

On Browsing by Jason Guriel is part of the Field Notes collection published by Biblioasis. Field Notes are long-form essays packaged into beautiful, slim volumes.

On Browsing is a nostalgic look at how teens and adults used to spend their lazy weekend afternoons: browsing the bookstore, video store, record store, or just wandering the mall. The dying art of “just browsing” may be scoffed at by teens, and even most adults, today. But Guriel makes a good case for the serendipity we have lost in the slow, meandering pursuit of our next book, film, record or neat purchase. Digitization of culture and the relentless scrolling through algorithmic selections means we miss the hidden gems.

There are obvious advantages to online ordering and expediting your Starbucks order via the app. But I do miss window shopping, having my eye on something, just looking, seeing what’s out there … and having a person vs. a bot curate my selection and ask questions before making a recommendation. When everything is personalized to me, I miss what hearing and seeing what someone else loves.

I’m glad that events like the East Van Culture Crawl exist. I love going to Upstart & Crow to see what books they are fawning over. And I miss the lazy Saturdays wandering along Commercial Dr. to get coffee, check out the record store, wander through the magazine shops and then settle into whatever find was uncovered. Those purchases have memories attached to them, making the experience much richer than downloading a song or ebook or pre-ordering my chai latte. So yes, Jason Guriel, I’m with you on the walk down memory lane. Those were the days.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane | Book Review

April 30, 2024 / Monique

Hard to beat Stephen King’s blurb, “Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.”

Set in the summer of 1974, during Boston’s heatwaves and on the eve of the desegregation of schools, there is a murder of a young Black man on a subway station in “Southie”, a neighbourhood known for poverty, drugs, and housing projects. The Irish immigrants and descendants of Southie are in an uproar about sharing their school and having half of their kids bussed to a nearby Black school. So on the surface the novel is a police drama and the crime seems to be that four Irish-American teens have attacked an up-and-coming Black man, whose only crime was having his car breakdown in the wrong neighbourhood while he was en route home from his retail management training program.

That indeed is the crime, but the novel unveils the systemic racism and rule of law that undermines the welfare of those four teens who are fed lies from early on and jacked up on drugs fed to them by the neighbourhood watchmen who are running girls, guns, and drugs.

The Irish mob has a stronghold on the community of Southie until Mary Pat’s daughter is one of the teens on that subway platform. Mary Pat is one tough Broad and she has now lost both husbands and both children to Marty Butler’s gang of thugs and way of life. She disrupts his shit in a way that not even the police can, and it’s her story of hate, poverty and crime that is the real power of the novel.

This is America’s version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where human folly and racism lead to greed and cruelty at a scale that is nauseating.

If you enjoyed The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters or Hell of a Book by Jason Mott then Small Mercies explores the same depraved indifference to human life, and the corruption the erodes democracy and exacerbates inequality, poverty, and division among communities.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is published by HarperCollins Canada. And NPR has a a great, indepth review.

True Biz by Sara Nović | Book Review

April 30, 2024 / Monique

Fantastic story about a group of teens making their way through high school. In their case, it’s River Valley School for the Deaf, and unbeknownst to them changes are afoot.

Charlie is new to the school and has only a beginner’s grasp of sign language because her parents operated on the hope that her cochlear implant would bring the promised hearing that the doctors preached.

For hearing readers, the novel is more than revelatory. In fact the author’s note has quite a list of schools for the deaf that have closed over the last decade and throughout the book are references to how the Deaf community is forced to struggle.

Charlie is assigned to Austin, the school’s undisputed king of the school. Austin comes from a long line of deaf family members. He’s the opposite of Charlie when it comes to signing and he lives almost exclusively in the Deaf community. Austin’s world goes wonky when his parents have an unexpected pregnancy and the baby is born hearing.

February is the school principal and she assigned Charlie and Austin as buddies in the hopes that they’d teach each other new things. Feb’s parents were deaf and she is a champion for the kids and the school, but so many things are out of her control.

If you liked the film CODA and the tv series Wednesday, then this novel set at a boarding school for deaf students is up your alley. It’s charming and has all sorts of deviant behaviour. I learned a lot about sign language, disability and civil rights, and the continued injustice that the Deaf community faces.

True Biz by Sarah Nović, perhaps ironically, is an enjoyable listen.

Maame by Jessica George | Book Review

April 3, 2024 / Monique

This book is as beautiful and colourful as its cover.

Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi, but for Maddie, it means woman. That is her family nickname. She is not the head of the household, but she is the most responsible. Her mum regularly spends a year in Ghana running a family business, then returning to London for a short time. Maddie’s older brother James is away working and travelling in the music industry, and he never picks up on the first ring. Maddie is busy working as PA in a hectic theatre company but is otherwise at home caring for her retired dad who has Parkinson’s.

This is a smart, funny, sad, beautiful book about a young woman growing up, and fighting microaggressions at work and family friction at home. In some ways Maddie is comforted by the sheltered upbringing orchestrated by her religious mother and her Ghana traditions, but in other ways Maddie is ready to break out on her own.

When her mum returns this year from Ghana, she encourages Maddie to move out of the house. The rollercoaster that ensues has a hint of Bridget Jones’s Diary as Maddie aims to reinvent and improve her social life (and love life). It’s joyous, funny, awkward and heartbreaking. But it’s also a story of depression, social anxiety, and grief. It’s about growing up Black and dealing with stereotypes.

Maddie’s parents moved to London as an opportunity for their children. But with an ill father and an absent mother and brother, Maddie has to navigate her identity solo. Her ability to speak Twi is mocked by various aunties, she has to deal with the “I’ve never dated a Black girl before” comments, a roommate questions her full-day of hair washing. The beauty of Maame is that Maddie loves to write and she has stories to share; the novel is presented as her telling her story through a mix of interior monologue, emails and texts, and background stories.

I think ultimately this is a story about belonging and the relationship you have with yourself. Maddie is worthy of so many things—especially positive attention from family, coworkers, and friends. I’m so glad she comes into her own.

The audiobook is great: https://www.audible.ca/pd/Maame-Audiobook/B0B1KJ4M3X?eac_link=mJg7UvxCdz4Q&ref=web_search_eac_asin_1&eac_selected_type=asin&eac_selected=B0B1KJ4M3X&qid=3FCSwMGe0W&eac_id=145-2640021-0791633_3FCSwMGe0W&sr=1-1

In Search of Perfumes by Dominique Roques | Book Review

April 3, 2024 / Monique

Travelogue meets memoir in this fascinating trot around the world in search of 17 of the world’s most precious ingredients that make up the majority of perfumes on the market.

Dominque Roques is a master sourcer of natural ingredients like rose, vanilla, vetiver, Peru balsam, and frankincense. Each chapter is dedicated to a different country and ingredient: Laos for benzoin, Madagascar for vanilla, Venezuela for tonka bean, India for patchouli, and more. At each stop, Roques introduces the reader to the properties of the ingredient used in perfume and to the politics of the country and to the small communities of people responsible for cultivating these luxury materials.

This is a story of small farmers, tree tappers, distillers, and producers who source the best ingredients, often with traditional tools and techniques. And their counterparts in the luxury food and fragrance industry who create amazing scents based on those source materials. The book is travelogue, history lesson, political science, agriculture and climate science rolled into one.

It’s a beautiful book to listen to, and I must order a print copy for reference.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks | Book Review

March 18, 2024 / Monique

That old adage “write what you know” applies here. Tom Hanks’ debut novel showcases how legendary films with star-studded actors are made—basically on the backs of over-worked, highly skilled women. The multi-part story makes this novel feels like it’s actually a movie made into a book.

Part 1 is set in the late 40s, post-WWII. Bob Falls returns from war and meets his young nephew and namesake. Little Robert is a fantastic artist and uncle Bob takes Robby to Clarks Pharmacy and buys him comics and a milkshake—then he skips off to have a few beers with his motorcycle buddies and gets run out of town.

Cut to 1970 and Rob is an illustrator for an underground comic publisher in Oakland, CA, where he one day gets a letter from his long-lost uncle and it inspires him to draw his uncle’s story as a comic. In this case, flame-thrower Bob Falls becomes the alternative-comix antihero Firefall.

Cut to the present day and Bill Johnson, legendary director has optioned the rights to the comic book and is turning it into a superhero movie: Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.

Cue the cast: The rest of the book profiles various stars of the film, the director’s assistants, gofers, and everyone key to the production.

I think this would be a difficult book to read with the asides and footnotes, but Tom Hanks’ narration in the audiobook guides the way. As the creator, he emphasizes what’s important vs. an aside, and the myriad cast read their various parts, which helps this drama unfold in a comprehensible way.

It’s easy to see this as a story of men: Bob who goes to war, Robby who becomes the comic artist, Bill who directs the production with the original star OKB who gets fired in favour of Ike Clipper, etc. But I read this as a love note to the women who run the world. The opening part features Bob’s sister and mom to Robby. She nurtures the young boy’s artistic talent and looks after her brother. In following sequences, we meet Bill’s best hires: his director’s assistant Dace Mills (Candace, plucky shop assistant), who then hires superstar Al Mac-Teer (Allicia, hotel front desk staff extraordinaire), who then hires Ynes Gonzalez-Cruz (ride-share driver turned expert hand at problem-solving). We meet Wren Lane who is the title-lead Knightshade, and becomes part of the director’s inner circle. Each of these women are masters of their domain and they are rewarded for it. I wish more of the book’s reviews highlighted what I saw as a humble man bowing to the great women around him.

See the publisher’s description or check out the book on audible.