Gosh, I am totally smitten with this book. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Atwood herself. It’s a total gem, covering Peggy’s childhood—growing up in the bush half of the year—through her teen and university years, the birth of Canadian publishing, and the successive peaks of her family life and career. I loved the intimate details, the inside stories, the quiet “guffaws” included in the recording as she laughs at parts of the story. I love the cover image and the various photoshoot images.
Book of Lives (rhymes with lies) is the finest example of a memoir that I’ve ever read. Snarky, blunt, and full of amusing anecdotes. It’s a love letter to her partner Graeme, a legacy for her daughter and step-kids, and a thank you to the array of people who influenced the formidable woman she is today.
My favourite Atwood works include The Penelopiad (Atwood’s retelling of The Odysseus from Penelope’s perspective) and Hag-Seed (her re-visiting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). But I’m keen now to read Old Babes in the Wood, The Testaments, The Heart Goes Last, and Stone Mattress. Here are the brief descriptions on the author’s site.Book of Lives reminded me of the many, many Atwood works that I have not yet read.
Whoever convinced Atwood to write and publish her memoir, thank you. It’s full of travel, birding, entomology, canoeing, baking, knitting, gossip, land conservation, creative influences, and family tales. I loved it.
If you have parents, they are aging. Let’s Talk About Aging Parents is a cheeky yet practical guide to having tricky conversations about retirement homes, dementia, taking car keys away, and the physical and mental challenges most older adults have with aging in place.
The book offers 27 prompts and roadmaps for having clear conversations with your parents and the other caregivers in their lives. There are jokes and asides to help ease the painful realization that none of this is easy. Medical issues often come to mind, but what about toxic sibling relationships? Age-proofing a house seems clear but what if your parents refuse help?
Laura Tamblyn Watts has advice and “plan Bs” for every situation. She’s a voice of reason in the otherwise fraught land of advice books. I starred a lot of paragraphs and made notes in the margin. I also recommended the parents in my life have a copy of their own. If we are all on the same playbook, then they can point out the approaches they would prefer.
Black Cherokee by Antonio Michael Downing is a story about resilience. Set in the 1990s, Ophelia Blue Rivers is left to be raised by her Black grandmother, who is the widow of a Cherokee Chief and the descendant of the first freed Black woman in South Carolina. Grandma Blue is no nonsense and Ophelia has her head in the clouds. But the two manage just fine until Ophelia is old enough to go to school. Her Black-Cherokee mix makes her the target of bullies at the Cherokee school. She is moved to Stone River to live with an aunty through high school, but her Black-Cherokee mix makes her to target of bullies at the all Black high school. She manages a bit better in the gifted program at the primarily white high school, but finds herself falling in love with a white boy, much to the chagrin of her family.
At every turn, Ophelia is left to wonder what family means to her, and how she will create a sense of belonging.
Antonio Michael Downing is the host of CBC’s radio program The Next Chapter. This is his debut novel and I hope it’s not his last. The writing is fresh and spirited. Ophelia is complex, Grandma Blue–who’s short on words–is even more complex. The book has some Toni Morrison vibes. Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye explored the psychological effects of internalized racism on a young Black girl in the 1940s. With Ophelia, we see the modern-day (1990s–yet very-present effects) of race and identity on one girl’s coming-of-age journey.
A Good Man is a solid Canadian western set in the late 1870s in the Canadian and American West, specifically around the border between present-day Montana and BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan. Not only is this an amazing western, but it’s also a political, historical novel about nationhood.
This period of time was full of crazy upheaval and the novel explores the political tensions as well as the personal dynamics between a few key characters.
Wesley Case, our main protagonist, is a former solider and the son of a Canadian lumber baron. Case leaves the North-West Mounted Police and, defying his father’s request to enter politics, settles in the American West as a cattle rancher. Case acts as a liaison between his former Canadian boss Major Walsh and the American counterpart Major Ilges. There are several unresolved conflicts between the Sioux and the Americans, the Fenians are still looking for independence from the British and making trouble in Canada, the American Civil War has technically ended in 1865 but there’s the general anxiety that the Americans now can turn their attention to Canada, plus there’s the commonplace violence between settlers staking claims and stealing claims. It’s a time of alliance building amidst mistrust.
Within the personal stories, we have similar tensions and alliances, especially love triangles, friendship triangles, and collegial triangles. The most satisfying being that between Mrs. Ada Tarr, Wesley Case and Joe McMullen. Case and McMullen met in the police and Case convinced McMullen to join him in starting the ranch. Case was the money man and McMullen had the needed skills and experience. They have the strong friendship of frontier men who sweat side by side during the day and get under each other’s skin at night. Mrs. Ada Tarr is the object of their affections, although it’s clear Case’s are romantic and McMullen’s are platonic. They are a dynamite trio.
Contrary to that is the triangle of Ada, Case and Michael Dunne. Dunne is a hired hitman, initially working for Ada’s husband, lawyer Randolph Tarr. (There’s another set of trios: Randolph, Ada, Dunne and Randolph, Dunne and Gobbler Johnson.) Tarr has failed to properly help Gobbler Johnson win a property claim and Gobbler has taken to giving Tarr death threats. Tarr hires Dunne to take care of it. In the duration of that contract, Dunne falls for Ada’s kindness, which he misinterprets as love interest on her part. So when Tarr dies, Dunne thinks Ada is now free to love him. It more than raises Dunne’s ire to learn that Case has swooped in on his beloved.
The plot is slow in unfolding, but it’s against the backdrop of the complex and slowly unfolding political tribulations Case, Walsh, and Ilges are observing between their governments and the various Indigenous communities being displaced from their traditional territories, starved, and shipped off to unfavourable reservations. The other triangle is Case, Walsh and Sitting Bull.
After defeating Colonel Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa Lakota crossed into Canada to escape the US forces hunting them down. The Canadian government was in a tricky position of not wanting to disrespect their stronger neighbour to the south but wanting to appear neutral. Major Walsh, at least in the novel, is quite sympathetic to Sitting Bull’s plight and does his utmost to feed and provide ammunition to the Indigenous people seeking safe harbour within Canadian borders (and, uh, on their own damn land anyway). But Walsh is ultimately forced to bend to his own government’s pressure to push Sitting Bull and his people back across the border to the US.
Yes, the book is a slow read but, my goodness, the skilled writing is worth it. If you like Cormac McCarthy, Jack Keroauc, or Kazuo Ishiguro, then you’ll love the intense style, bleak themes, and poetic prose of A Good Man.
Also, from a modern-day perspective, I don’t think many Canadians understand their history. Here are a couple of lowlight moments.
The American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865. The British Empire, including Canada, had been officially neutral in the American Civil War, but many in government aligned with the South. A “United” States was a more powerful neighbour than many wanted. [Micheal Dunne enters the story here as an everyman for a powerful Canadian who’s on the side of the Confederates.]
So Canada was a neutral but active base for Confederate spies, plots against political figures, and supply operations. We were trying to play both sides, in an attempt to reinforce Canadian independence and nationhood. Remember Canadian Confederation only happened in 1867, as a measure of collective security. The US had several policies aimed at pressuring Canada into political union with the US (sound familiar?). [Case’s early days as a solider highlight these tensions well; and set up a nice piece of blackmail that makes its way into Dunne’s hands later in the novel.]
Following the Civil War, the US continued to have armed conflicts between Indigenous warriors trying to defend their homelands and US forces pushing them off to make way for farming and industrial progress, mining, and the general stripping of resources in the name of settlement. [Case moves from eastern Canada to the wild west and we pick up the political story from there.]
Canada was doing the same. The Northwest Mounted Police formed in 1873 and was created to assert sovereignty and bring “law” to the western territories. They were a military-style force, crucial in policing settlers and aiding (strong-arming) treaty negotiations. We starved Indigenous communities into submission then introduced the Indian Act of 1876 as way to relieve Indigenous people of their self governance. [Walsh is hard-nosed and driven by passion. His allegiance to the British crown is in conflict with his personal alliance with Sitting Bull and this makes for an interesting third-act of the novel, especially as Case tries to act as an advisor to Walsh.]
Territorial dominance was a big deal.
The British Empire was also the hated enemy of the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-nationalist society, based in the US, that aimed to achieve Ireland’s independence from Britain by capturing Canadian territory and using it as leverage. There were a series of Fenian scares, armed incursions or raids into British North American during the time of this novel. In today’s secular society, it’s easy to forget that, predominantly Catholic, Irish people in Canada faced a hostile reception from the ruling class of British Protestants. [The anti-Catholic sentiment is subtly noted in the novel with a nod to the Orange Order, but the prejudice against the working class, and low-paid labour force, is clear throughout.]
So alliances, strong-arm tactics, and spying is at the heart of both the political and personal stories in A Good Man. The grit and historical depth of the times are presented in the frontier/violent landscape of the novel, making it an unforgettable story and deeply deserving of its accolades.
A Good Man is the last book in what critics call the frontier trilogy: The Englishman’s Boy (1996, Winner of the Governor General’s Award), The Last Crossing (2002, a CanadaReads winner), A Good Man (2011, a Globe and Mail Best Book).
Now, if you were forced to read The Englishman’s Boy in school, then you may, like me, have avoided reading any more Vanderhaeghe. But this book is so much better. Again, it’s slow. But it’s masterful. I picked it up because of the opening:
Thoughts of Mother early this evening. She came back to me complete, the memory like a fist slammed to the heart. Father always called her “the dragon without scales” to diminish her, but he was like the wolf blowing on the brick house of the third little pig. She did not tumble or collapse under his scorn, not once.
Carol Off is the former CBC Radio host of As It Happens and she was one of my favourite interviewers. Off had a way of talking to people and challenging them, while still being respectful. But over her decade and a half of interviews, Off noticed a change (and challenge) in how the right co-opted words like democracy, freedom, truth, woke, choice, and taxes. These six words form the basis for the chapters of the book. Off’s take is wide ranging, from history and politics to the meaningful ways that her childhood and parents informed her own world views.
I very much enjoyed listening to her interview on the On Rights podcast, presented by the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg. Carol Off grew up in Winnipeg, as did I, so I have some bias there.
The premise for At a Loss for Words is that if we lose our shared vocabulary then we no longer have a shared understanding; we cannot express ourselves or converse with those opposed, nor can we in turn understand those who do not share our opinions. I was reminded of a lot of forgotten history nuggets, learned a few political lessons, and enjoyed a lot of fine writing. This book is a keeper. It kept me up at night, and I want to keep it around for reference.
The Paper Birds by Jeanette Lynes is historical fiction, from a Canadian perspective. Many readers of WWII history will know about Camp X, a spy training facility near Whitby, Ontario. But they might not know about the prisoner-of-war camps in Canada, nor about the Canadian women who worked under the Official Secrets Act in small facilities and converted private homes.
This is the story of Gemma Sullivan who works in an “office” job in the summer of 1943, with 4 other women, working to break codes. They meet daily at the “Cottage” and are given intercepts to break, but they have none of the machinery of Whitby or the prestige of Bletchley Park. It’s just their pencils and wits. The women have diverse talents in mathematics, logic, and literature. But they don’t share much in common, which leads Gemma to wander off during a lunch break for some alone time. During her walk, she is led by a stray cat to the edges of a prisoner-of-war camp where she strikes up a conversation with a prisoner. Fraternizing with the enemy has steep penalties and, given her intelligence work, it could be very bad news for Gemma. But she is drawn over and over to the handsome prisoner at the fence.
The Paper Birds is a quiet love story. There are no big dramas here, just the underlying tension Gemma feels about all the lies and lives she is upholding through her job.
I was not familiar with Jeanette Lynes before but she’s a Canadian author and has several books that have won or been nominated for awards in both fiction and non-fiction. So I’m keen to find more of her work.
What a lark! Butler and former Buddhist nun Helen Thorpe is yet again forced to play detective. This time she is compelled by her philanthropic employer Mr. Levine to join him as a participant in a group called Close Encounters for Global Healing. The group is run by Mr. Levine’s son David, who is in a bit of a bind. The group is meant to bring together a diverse set of participants who go through a series of exercises that help them find common ground. The “wealthy” person has bowed out and David needs a stand in, but nobody can know that the stand in is his father. Helen goes along for reassurance and security, since Mr. Levine is actually ultra-rich and needs a butler—that said, he is ultra kind, but still should not really be unattended in public settings. But Benedict Levine wants to see what his son loves about facilitating this workshop.
Turns out that the participants are unlikely to find common ground. There’s a burnt-out environmental activist who is down about everything, an internet troll who is a vile teen, a clued-out shopaholic, a white nationalist who claims he was just trying to get his girlfriend’s approval, and a dude arrested for his participation in the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. The warring and bickering starts immediately and doesn’t end until two people go missing. Now poor Helen is left to figure out a plan. Thankfully her handy butler friends, Gavin, Murray and Nigel, are on hand to lend a hand.
Susan Juby’s writing is so masterful and funny. This is book #3 in the series and the quirks of Helen Thorpe are as delightful as book #1 and book #2. I hope there’s another Helen Thorpe mystery in her pocket.
Shane Parrish’s book Clear Thinking is my best nonfiction read so far, well for personal development. He outlines the four default responses that lead to poor decision making and how to create safeguards and routines to ensure intentional, deliberate choices are made instead. The four, instinctual, defaults are emotion, ego, social and inertia.
When we have an emotional response, it is to feelings vs. facts. Stress, fatigue, hungry, anger can all trigger an impulsive reaction.
When we have an ego response, it is a reaction to threats to our self-worth or status.
When we have a social response, it is to conform to group norms. That need to belong can block independent thought.
When we have an inertia response, it is about resisting change by doing nothing. Maintaining the status quo.
The next part of the book deals with the ways you can overcome those defaults with self-accountability (taking responsibility for your actions, no more “it’s not my fault”), self-knowledge (knowing your strengths and weaknesses and adjusting for your biases), self-control (mastering emotions and taking a pause before reacting), and self-confidence (trusting your abilities and taking action).
The last part of the book is about the decision-making process. Much of this section is similar to an online workshop Shane Parrish ran through his Farnam Street blog. It’s a 5-step process for making better decisions. The first step is actually defining the problem in a clear and specific way to ensure you are solving for the right issue. He has lots of tips for exploring solutions and avoiding binary (do it, don’t do it) options. Then evaluating the options gets full treatment in the book with clear steps on how to gather info (not too much, and from diverse sources but ideally as close to the source of expertise). The execute stage is about when decisions are either reversible or irreversible, consequential or inconsequential and how knowing what type of decision it is can then impact the speed of your decision. And last is learning from your decisions–documenting your process vs. “resulting” or assuming if it worked out that it was more than chance.
Clear Thinking is a great book to read if you are in the early stages of a big decision: do I seek out a higher position, do I invest a chunk of money into something, do I move cities. If you’re in the middle of a big change, then this might be too much, too late in the process. But if you’re interested overall in how you react to the world around you—everything from retorts at work to major decisions—then this is a self-help book mascarading as a business book in the best possible way.
The Maid’s Secret—the last book in the Molly the Maid series—features a wedding, a heist, and long-held family secrets. It’s a wonderful goodbye to our favourite maid and an excellent cast of supporting characters: Mr. Snow the hotel manager, Cheryl the delinquent maid, Mr. Preston the former doorman and Molly’s grandfather, Angela the bartender and friend to Molly, Detective Stark, and sweet Juan the fiancé.
Molly and Juan are quietly planning their city hall wedding when they are derailed by the filming of an Antique’s-Roadshow style tv show called Hidden Treasures. The Regency Grand Hotel is hosting the event and staff are invited to bring in their treasures for review. Turns out one of the trinkets Molly brings from her Gran’s collection is worth millions. Before Molly can wave a duster, her rags-to-riches story becomes a media sensation and she’s the target of an art heist and death threats. Poor Molly. Luckily, Gran’s diary comes to the rescue in more ways that one.
There are 4 books in the series and they are all heart-warming whodunnits. Check out NitaProse.com for the scoop.
The Break is a heart-breaking debut novel about the trauma of missing and murdered women. The story is set in Winnipeg’s North End and begins with Stella, a young Métis mother, witnessing a rape from her baby’s bedroom window. It’s winter, she is shaken, she has two young kids asleep (then crying), and she does call the police but is otherwise too frozen to take action.
The police take their time to respond and by the time they do, Stella feels ignored and dismissed by them and her white husband, who’d prefer to believe it was gang related and not their business. That said, one of the policemen, Officer Scott, is a Métis. He works to understand what is happening with this crime but never truly learns the full story.
Told through a series of shifting narratives, Vermette introduces the reader to Stella’s Kukum (grandmother) and her aunties (Lou, a social worker, and Cheryl, an artist). We are also introduced to Phoenix, a teenager who has slipped away from a young detention centre, and her uncle, a local drug dealer/gang member, both of whom are known to Lou and Cheryl’s children. Then through a series of connections we come to understand the true scope of this tragedy, the number of women who’ve died, and the intergenerational grief that continues to haunt this family.
This is a sad and shocking book to read but it also offers insights into the non-fiction stories about missing and murdered Indigenous women, the landfill search for the remains of First Nations women in Winnipeg, and “Every Child Matters.”
