So Misguided

Plain words, uncommon sense

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Book Review: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

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The Miniaturist: “There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.” When the newly married Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam on a brisk autumn day in 1686 she is expecting to be warmly embraced into her husband’s household. Johannes Brandt is a wealthy merchant trader who is well respected, and Amsterdam is a glittery new start for Nella who comes from the country with a suitcase and her ancient, respected Oortman name. She soon discovers that her family name is likely the only reason she is there. Johannes’ sister Marin is a younger version of Downton Abbey‘s Dowager Countess, and she certainly runs the household, not a role Nella the new wife is going to assume.

Johannes is kind, but mostly away travellling, and his affections, when home are showered on his dogs, not Nella. The one gift he presents to her is a cabinet-sized replica of their home. Nella finds a miniaturist to furnish the rooms but, as cryptic package after package arrives, Nella’s wonderment shifts to eerie suspension. The miniatures of the household are exact replicas of the furniture and family members, and they are lovely at first. But then unrequested items like a small cradle arrive. It’s like the miniaturist knows the family’s deepest desires and secrets.

When Johannes’ favourite dog is killed and a long-time servant disappears, the artistry seems to turn to witchcraft. Nella is left wondering if the packages are benign predictions of the future or warnings of things to come. The whole experience is all the more alarming given that Nella is living in Amsterdam at a repressively pious time: puppets are banned, and even man-shaped gingerbread is forbidden. But false idols end up being the least of her concerns when Johannes is betrayed by a friend and arrested.

The Miniaturist is a beautifully written fairy tale with all the witchcraft and sugar plums you could possibly want. It’s beguiling. Fans of the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern will enjoy this story. I think readers of historical fiction, Sarah Waters or Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) will like it too.

Or check out what readers say on Goodreads

Book Review: A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

This shocking and disturbing account of a journalist’s capture and torture in Somalia in 2008 was one of the most celebrated books of 2013, making the Globe 100 and hitting all the notable lists. A House in the Sky reads like a novel, which allows the reader to step away from the narrative a little bit and pretend that this is a fictionalization (you need this survival technique to make it through the book). The strength of the harrowing adventure is in the authors’ ability to slam the reader back into reality at just the right moment.

Here’s the general rundown: Amanda Lindhout grows up in Red Deer, moves to Calgary, works as a cocktail waitress and raises enough money to travel the world. She’s got the travel bug and moves quickly beyond the minor inconveniences of the backpacker lifestyle and into the major challenges of being a fledgling journalist in Iraq then Somalia. Her solo travels across Sudan, Syria and Pakistan do not prepare her for the full-blown war in Somalia or for the captivating power Osama Bin Laden will have on Somali militant groups. She’s not safe the second she lands and by day four she has been abducted along with a photojournalist from Australia. The two are held captive for 15 months, and Amanda is starved, raped, beaten and tortured. Initially the violence is moderate, a way to show who’s boss, but as the months drag on and the families refuse to pay the ransom demands, life gets much, much harder.

The journey is unimaginable. Amanda’s fortitude is amazing. And I never, ever want to read this kind of story again and think “well, they chose to go there.” The bigger question is “why the hell do people do this to each other?” The answer is money. And that is a very sad answer.

Amanda’s story is certainly about personal mistakes and wrong turns but it’s also a reminder that the stories we hear on the news about journalists who are captured, tortured and sometimes beheaded on camera are just one small fraction of the madness going on. There is a deeper story about survival and sacrifice, both for the captors and the captives.

Book Review: The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson

A hilarious novel about a South African woman who knows too much, twin brothers (one of whom knows too little) and the foibles of the sanitation department, nuclear weapons programs, the Mossad, the Chinese, and the Swedish royal family. Think Airplane meets National Lampoon meets The Butler.

The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden: A Novel by Jonas Jonasson was a delightful read over the holidays. It’s ridiculous in a believable way.

Book description: On June 14th, 2007, the King and Prime Minister of Sweden went missing from a gala banquet at the Royal Castle. Later it was said that both had fallen ill: the truth is different. The real story starts much earlier, in 1961, with the birth of Nombeko Mayeki in a shack in Soweto. Nombeko was fated to grow up fast and die early in her poverty-stricken township. But Nombeko takes a different path. She finds work as a housecleaner and eventually makes her way up to the position of chief advisor, at the helm of one of the world’s most secret projects.

The highlights are that Nombeko is super smart and is in a shitty position (literally) as an assistant in the sanitation department in South Africa. The idiot managers can’t count and she has powerful math skills. Through a series of events involving self defence and a pair of scissors she learns to read. I can’t reveal too much! She inherits a jacket lining full of diamonds and accidentally gets run over. She is found at fault and is basically sold into servitude to a drunk who’s in charge of South Africa’s nuclear program. He can count but barely. His father has paid off the university to get his son the engineering degree that’s landed him in this position. Nombeko saves the day and her own skin by helping him develope six nuclear missiles in the 1980s, then voluntarily dismantle them in 1994. Unfortunately the counting part means there is a seventh missile that only a few people know about, including Nombeko and the Israeli secret service. She masterminds a plan to escape to Sweden but a misdirected package of antelope meat turns out to be the seventh missile, which she manages to safeguard in Sweden for over 20 years, with the help of twin brothers, one of whom has a vendetta against the King of Sweden and the other who doesn’t exist since his father never declared his birth to the state. Honestly it’s all terrifically unbelievable but the writing is fantastically funny.

2 Cookbooks, 2 Novels

Four books that I loved and haven’t had a chance to review:

Pucker by Gwendolyn Richards
Canada’s Julia Child brings citrus fans a melody of recipes from breakfasts to mains, drinks to sweets. It’s is tart and tangy with recipes like Lemon Bourbon Sours, grilled grapefruit, Citrus-Braised Pork Shoulder Tacos, and Lime Sugar Cookies. Yum yum yum.

Dirty Apron Cookbook by David Robertson
Fans of this Vancouver-based restaurant and cooking school will recognize many of the recipes in this amazing cookbook that features 80 of the school’s time-tested signature dishes. The pulled pork is delish and I barely managed to take photos of the dish before we gobbled it up.

Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Spend a week with this stressed out mom and all will look well in your world. Mary Rose, aka Mister, is home alone for the week with her two young kids while her wife travels for work. It’s a mix of family drama, swimming class, personal reflection, parenting of aging parents and general stress management. My comments on this title for the Vancouver Sun Book Club are here and there are 4 weeks of book club discussions plus our chat with author Ann-Marie MacDonald.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
A delightful, and sad tale, about two young people whose paths cross during WWII. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. He create miniatures of their neighbourhood so that Marie-Laure, who is blind, is able to navigate her way around. He also makes small puzzles for her and in one is a gift that she cannot reveal to anyone. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. The love of this radio and its mechanics draw Werner into Hitler’s service. As the two are drawn from their homes, their lives intersect in a really lovely yet tragic way.

Book Review: Mr. Jones by Margaret Sweatman

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Mr. Jones by Margaret Sweatman is a Canadian spy drama set in the 1950s and 60s when McCarthyism and paranoia was rampant, the Cold War was well underway, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson shared the political stage in Canada, and the CIA was reaching its long arms into every country. This is the story of Emmett Jones, war vet, Japanese expert and member of External Affairs, who suffers the indignation of being investigated by the RCMP and the FBI, repeatedly. The question for the reader is whether he’s a spy or just idealistic.

Emmett Jones is a Canadian born in Japan, who fought in WWII with Bomber Command, and was disillusioned by his involvement in the bombing of German citizens. Post-war he meets a young idealistic man named John Norfield whose Communist ideals are of interest to Emmett. Smart but directionless, Emmett appears to be “trying on Communism” but still questioning the merits propounded by the zealous supporters he encounters. Plus there’s a woman he’s hot for who is in the mix so his intentions are opaque.

Norfield disappears and Emmett gets the girl. Emmett has joined External Affairs to focus on Japan, and I’d love to say they live happily ever after but Emmett is recalled from his post in Japan, is accused of espionage and later investigated.

As the book description says: “Evoking the classic works of le Carre and Greene, Sweatman’s novel is a shattering exploration of a past where world governments threaten annihilation while training housewives in the proper techniques for sweeping up radioactive dust.”
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Sweatman’s setting for the novel is a fascinating part of Canadian history that is often under taught in schools in lieu of America’s more colourful involvement in the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it’s also the early days of NORAD, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the arms race. Pearson’s involvement in the peace process is noteworthy and an interesting backdrop to the personal drama of Emmett Jones.

“Set in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of rampant paranoia, Mr. Jones peels back the polite veneer of Canadian society to reveal a nation willing to sacrifice its own. A time of fear, a time of ‘peace’ at the onset of the nuclear age, it is the era of McCarthyism, when governments alleged there was a communist under every bed and a traitor in every friend.”

Is Emmett a spy or not? Is his wife? Is his bestfriend? Is the Japanese man who he befriended a spy? Will that man reveal the great secret they share? The wonderful thing is the tension Sweatman creates with the what ifs but also the layers of possibilities infused in the writing. Emmett Jones is a man with two lives. He has two families: a son in Japan born to his lover, and a daughter born in Canada to his wife. The birth of his son predates his marriage but remember this is the 1950s and things certainly would not have been easy for his son. Do his scruples in love reveal duplicities elsewhere in his life?

Mr. Jones is a fantastic piece of historical fiction, and a top-notch spy drama, set in Canada.

Buy it from Goose Lane Editions: http://www.gooselane.com/books.php?ean=9780864929143

Guest Post: Many Paws Author Susan DeGarmo on “The Change”

Many Paws is a light-hearted, interactive pop-up book about menopause that readers can alter for themselves or to give as a gift to the wonderful women in their lives who might need a good laugh between hot flashes. Below is a guest post from altered book artist and author Susan DeGarmo.

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When I was about 47 years old, I put some eggs on the stove to boil. I went downstairs to my office to grade papers and before I knew it, I heard explosions coming from my kitchen! I ran up and saw exploded boiled eggs sitting in a pan with no water. Exploding because I left them in there and totally forgot to take them out.

That year when I had my yearly check-up, I told my doctor I thought I was going crazy! I couldn’t remember the simplest things. I was starting to leak when I laughed, I sweated in bed, had hot flashes in the day, my eyesight was getting worse and my middle was spreading! She patted my hand and told me that I was going through the change. I couldn’t believe what she was saying! At 47 years old I started getting “old”. She handed me a paperback book that she said would help me understand what my body was doing.

That night I relaxed in the tub and picked up the book and began to read. The words were sweet and delicate. “You’re still a woman even though you can’t have babies anymore.”
I couldn’t take it! I tossed it in the trash.

My doctor wouldn’t give me anything to get rid of the symptoms. “It’s perfectly normal”, she said. So, every day became a new adventure with the symptoms of menopause. Thank God my family still loves me!

Since I couldn’t find a book that shared the in-your-face experiences of menopause and getting older with a bit of humor, I decided one day while teaching my altered book class at a local design college, I would make an altered book on the subject and it would be about my experience. Why did I come up with that idea? It was freezing cold outside, my head was beet red, sweat was dripping down my face and my students looked at me like I had a third eye! I just shrugged and pressed on.

I found an old book that had a by-line: the years of change. I took that book and altered it to create “ManyPaws, the Years of Change”. Each week I did a spread in the book. Depending on what challenges I was going through, that is what I wrote about. We had a show-n-tell in the class every week to show off the work we did in our books. I showed mine to the students and there were lots of “yuck”, “my mom’s doing that”, and sometimes laughter. I wasn’t trying to appeal to them, just critiquing the pages.

At the end of the semester, we had an Altered Book Show. The students and myself would have our altered books on display for the faculty, staff , family and friends. Of course, my whole experience with menopause was there for the whole world to see. It wasn’t long before we heard laughter. Not only from the moms and older women of the college, but from their husbands! Oh no. I was totally embarrassed, but come to find out, they liked it! They started telling their stories and wanted a copy for themselves or to give to their girlfriends. So that’s how all of this started.

imageSusan DeGarmo is a truly creative spirit. Born and raised in Memphis Tennessee, Susan “was always makin’ something’ from nothin’,” according to her grandma. While teaching an altered book class at a local college, she had a hot flash and decided to create Many Paws.
Her book and greeting cards are available for sale on manypawsforwomen.com or Amazon.com

Help Onca Publish Its First Work

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Onca is a brave new publisher of speculative fiction with a passion for the printed book. Based in BC, Onca Publishing was founded by Shed Simas, a former Master of Publishing student of mine who has worked for several BC presses, doing editing, production, design and marketing. Now he’s launched his own publishing house and is doing a crowdfunding campaign to get his first title on the printing press.

As a lover of speculative fiction–science fiction, fantasy, dystopian–and literary fiction, the first book, and focus of the campaign, is a limited edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with original art from comic artist/illustrator Asher J. Klassen, and painter Marissa Brown.

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Help Shed raise $11,000 to print the project:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/onca-classics-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde

More at OncaPublishing.com

Book Review: Will Starling by Ian Weir

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Sweeney Todd meets Frankenstein in this romp through the underbelly of London, 1816, when grave-robbers are digging up bodies and selling them on the sly to anatomists and surgeons eager to understand to inner workings of the body and that fine line between the living and the dead.

Will Starling by Ian Weir opens with a macabre scene. The great, and godlike, Dionysus Atherton stands in a public square waiting for the hangman to do his business. “Dionysus Atherton consulted his timepiece, and made a note: the subject dropped at one minute past eight … All movement finally ceased at 8:48, and death was pronounced at two minutes past nine.” Such are the interests of surgeons, or rather this surgeon in particular who is keen on chasing life to its outer reaches in hopes that science can pull back the subject from death’s icy grip. Once they cut down the body, can Dionysus Atherton secretly bring it back to life?

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley hasn’t yet written Frankenstein but resurrection is in the air.

Atherton, although a colourful figure, is not the protagonist, we leave that role to Will Starling, who works for a rival surgeon and is endowed with the gift of gab. What follows is “the reckoning of WM. Starling, Esq., a Foundling, concerning Monstrous Crimes and Infernal Aspirations, with Perpetrators Named and Shrouded Infamies disclosed to Light of Day, as set down by his Own Hand in this year 1816.”

Author Ian Weir, like in his debut novel, the acclaimed Daniel O’Thunder, deftly crafts a historical tale of twists and turns, with some pot boiler elements, and huge literary merit. This is a fun read for anyone who loves a good story, plus there’s some great slang and a few useful etymology points you can use at upcoming holiday parties.

Will Starling’s narrative reminds me a bit of Sherlock’s Dr. Watson, but Will is much more gossipy, into the ladies and not above boasting about himself and roasting his friends and family.

Published by Goose Lane Editions, Will Starling should be easy to find on all the “Must Read” tables in bookstores.

If you liked Cataract City by Craig Davidson, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon or The Harem Midwife and The Midwife of Venice, then you’ll like this book too, especially since all these authors have lovingly provided jacket cover quotes. “Crackerjack novel … no one else in Canada today writes like Ian Weir … his characters are as engaging as the Artful Dodger or Fagin or Martin Chuzzlewit.”

The End of an Era? Big Publishers Pulling out of Canada

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CC-License Photo by Markus Spiske / www.temporausch.com

A couple of midweek shockers in the Canadian publishing world. The first is that David Kent is leaving HarperCollins Canada and the second is that Simon Schuster’s Canadian publishing program is in question amid key layoffs.

The Big 6 in book publishing are:
1. Hachette Book Group, leading US trade publisher currently embroiled in a dispute with Amazon. Imprints are Grand Central Publishing and Little Brown and Company, among many others.
2. HarperCollins, has a publishing group in Canada, is a subsidiary of News Corporation, and includes imprints like Harper Perennial and William Morrow, among many others.
3. Macmillan, is a conglomerate of several leading publishing imprints like Farrar Straus and Giroux, St Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and WH Freeman, among many others.
4. Penguin Group, with operations in Canada, merged with Random House, and includes imprints like GP Putnam’s Sons, Plume, Prentice Hall Press, Puffin Books and many others.
5. Random House, now including Penguin, is owned by Bertelsmann, has operations in Canada, and includes publishing groups like Crown Publishing, Knopf Doubleday and Random House Children’s Books, plus many others.
6. Simon & Schuster, the publishing operation of CBS Corporation, also has operations in Canada, and includes imprints like Pocket and Scribner, among many others.

So what’s going down in the Canadian market? Is there a Harper Collins + S&S merger to come, like we saw with the Random Penguins? Or are the US operations taking over control of the Canadian publishing groups in order to find economies of scale?

If the Big Six are seeing 1/3 of revenues coming from digital and “big data” and sales analytics are on the rise, then it seems plausible to me that the Canadian operations will wind down in order to maximize revenue (and reporting) for the North American market through the US headquarters. Any one in a betting mood? Toronto friends, what’s the word on the street?

Honouring Wayne Tefs

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From the Winnipeg Free Press Friends to honour late author Wayne Tefs

Quote: The launch of the last novel by the late Wayne Tefs will be a gathering of some of the many people whose lives were touched by the prolific writer, editor and teacher.

Barker (Turnstone Press) is the story of a carnival barker travelling the Prairies during the Depression. The book launch, starting at 3pm on Saturday, October 4 at McNally Robinson Booksellers, will include readings from friends and colleagues, including David Arnason and Dennis Cooley.

Tefs, who died this month after living many years with cancer, wrote novels, short stories, memoirs and hybrid fact-based novels during a career in which he also edited several anthologies of short stories and helped many of Turnstone’s writers get their manuscripts ready for publication.

James Sherrett was one of those writers who worked with Wayne to get his manuscript ready for publication by Turnstone.

What started as a chapbook published by Jesse James Press (founded by Jesse Simon, James Sherrett and Scott James Montgomery, with me acting as the Press), Up in Ontario won the Heaven Chapbook of the Year in 1996, one of the Manitoba Literary Awards, and later became a full-length novel of the same name.

Wayne Tefs was instrumental in mentoring James as a writer and later editing Up in Ontario. I remember Wayne as a kind, funny and friendly man who enjoyed Sunday morning hockey and who was very generous with his time. I’m sure he’ll be missed by literary pals David Arnason and Dennis Cooley, and I wish I could join them at McNally next weekend. I was very sad to hear a few weeks ago that Wayne wasn’t looking great and then to hear that he’d passed away at the fine age of 66.

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Moon Lake and Red Rock are two of my favourite Wayne Tefs novels and I’m looking forward to reading Barker.

Farewell, Wayne.

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