An absolutely beautiful and poetic story about a young art historian growing up in Toronto in the 20s and 30s and being shipped off to war in the 40s.
I listened to this as an audiobook and the phrasing of the sentences sounded more like poetry than prose. I loved all the art references and side notes about how different colours came to be used in art. And I got swept away in the love story and tragedy of this young man.
If you liked the beauty of Tom Lake, the historical references of The Sleeping Car Porter, or loved CS Richardson’s previous book End of the Alphabet, then give this a read.
Christine Estima’s debut work is a wonderful read. The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society weaves together the stories of many generations of women from an Arab family as they flee the Middle East in the nineteenth century, settle in Montreal, and then visit or return to their roots. These women are connected through time by their culture, their bravery, and their tenacity. The book is a collection of short stories but they feel connected like chapters of a novel. This is an impressive work.
Christine Estima draws on her own Lebanese, Syrian and Portuguese heritage to write incredible multicultural portrayals, especially of living in Montreal. There is also a dark undercurrent of cultural stereotypes and biases about women, but Estima’s characters challenge those notions and find a place for themselves.
The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society is a serious yet delightful book. It has an unusual trim size (7″ x 6″) making the whole package unique.
If you love poetry, philosophy, art history, and personal memoir then this book is for you. It’s a quiet, gentle reflection on what it means to engage with art, why art has the capacity to enchant and haunt us through centuries, and where Renaissance religious art can find relevance in today’s busy, modern world.
I had the pleasure of listening to a conversation between Jeannie Marshall and The Tyee’s culture editor Dorothy Woodend on May 4, 2023 at Upstart & Crow. Jeannie struck me as a gentle yet powerful writer. Full of curiosity but also caution.
Jeannie lives in Rome and for a long time avoided visiting the Sistine Chapel, and yet Michelangelo’s famed ceiling was something her grandmother in Canada wished to see, it’s a place 5 million people a year visit. Her first visit, after the death of her mother, was as frustrating as she imagined. The ceiling is busy, the place is busy, it’s overwhelming. But something kept drawing her back time and again.
This book is really a masterful unfolding of layers of art history, the impact of religious wars and intolerance, and the power the Catholic church had over her family. All Things Move is a remarkable personal journey but also a wonderfully thoughtful, philosophical look at the role of art in our lives.
I find my thoughts returning to Jeannie’s musings and meditations on what it means to create a work of art that transcends time, and what it means to view and engage in that art.
Her publisher Biblioasis has crafted a fine book. It’s glossy pages show off different images of Michelangelo’s frescoes, along with gritty street photos of Rome taken by fellow Canadian and author Douglas Anthony Cooper.
I’d say this is a book about learning to look, taking time to relish small details in order to—over time—see the full picture.
So I was primed for a book on loss, celebration, language, art, philosophy, undertaking intellectual pursuits for the pleasure of it, joy, inner life and cultural constructs for how we should live or what should act as the moral compass. I’m not done with this book. Thank you Jeannie Marshall.
Berry Pickers is a heartbreaking novel about a young 4-year-old Mi’kmaw girl who is stolen from her family by a heart-broken woman. It’s July 1962 and little Ruthie is sitting on a rock while her family picks blueberries at a farm in Maine. The woman who takes her raises her as Norma. It’s an emotionally fraught childhood that doesn’t quite make sense until Norma learns the truth.
This novel is a great debut by Amanda Peters. It’s raw, emotional, riveting and full of trauma on all sides. What makes someone think they can take another woman’s baby? What makes someone carry on the lie? What grief does the family go through?
I enjoyed the East Coast pacing of these families’ lives and celebrated the resolution at the end. Totally worth the read.
This is a story about knowing who you are and not abandoning hope and love.
Louise Penny is one of those authors that gets me hook, line and sinker, every time. I find her Chief Inspector Gamache so charming that it’s hard to not read each instalment in a single day. Yes, I binge read Louise Penny.
In this book (18th in the series), Gamache spends most of his time in Three Pines. Drama and murder has come to his door step. This book is a psychological thriller. It has some Silence of the Lambs characteristics. No cannibalism, but it’s steeped in psychological horror.
Without giving too much away: the story is told through a series of flashbacks to one of Inspector Beauvoir’s first cases with Gamache. Two children have been abused and their mother is murdered. The older child is convicted of the murder but Gamache suspects the younger was as involved, if not more. Memories of that tragedy are brought to the forefront in a present-day discovery of a mysterious painting locked away in a hidden room above the village bookstore. The children, now grown, are involved in the discovery but the danger to Gamache is unclear. There’s some psychological warfare happening right under his nose but it’s a puzzle within a puzzle that Gamache just can’t solve. It’s about revenge, but who is seeking the revenge? Gamache has enemies.
Louise Penny is a fabulous writer. The Gamache books have always woven in art and music, along with politics and suspense. There’s less politics in this one and more psychological thriller. The series has steered that way since an absolute page-turner two books ago, The Devils Are Here, which was set in Paris, France. If you’re new to Louise Penny and don’t want to go all the way back to book #1 then I’d start partway through the series at #7 A Trick of Light.
Hench is a hilarious and snarky novel about a woman who works for a temp agency. The twist is that the temp agency hires henches for villains. Anna is particularly good at data entry.
There is also a temp agency for meat (hired goons) and it’s called The Meat Market.
Hench was recommended to me by my brother-in-law. It’s the perfect mix of bureaucracy and superhero/villainy.
Since I was already reading A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, I decided to listen to the Hench audiobook during my daily walks. It was definitely a great way to experience this novel.
Anna is bored but also likes to play it safe. Unlike her friend June (who does field work), Anna is happy at her laptop. But she’s soon thrown into the fray when her evil villain boss kidnaps a kid. Anna becomes collateral damage when the kid is rescued by a superhero who collides into her and shatters her leg.
Left unable to work, Anna finds herself ruminating on just how much damage superheroes actually cause to their communities. Her data analysis is surprisingly revealing and soon another mad-genius villain is interested in her work.
I mean, come on, this is a novel about a data nerd who is able to weaponize her snark! Totally up my alley.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets The Thursday Night Murder Club.
Molly the maid is the perfect scapegoat for a murder. She’s innocent to the world and befriends some bad eggs. But people shouldn’t underestimate Molly. She sees and remembers everything, yet she’s invisible to most. Just a maid.
Nita Prose’s debut novel is a great twist of a story. It has all the quirks of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. We see the world from Molly’s point of view. “The truth is, I often have trouble with social situations; it’s as though everyone is playing an elaborate game with complex rules they all know, but I’m always playing for the first time.” And it has the fun twists and turns of the best cozy mysteries. Yes there’s a murder, but it’s not a blood and gore, spine-tingling thriller. It’s a mental puzzle. And like Richard Osman’s The Thursday Night Murder Club, Nita Prose has given her readers many splendid characters.
I was on the third floor, cleaning my rooms. Sunshine was cleaning one half of the floor and I was tackling the other. I entered Room 305, which was not on my roster for that shift, but the front desk had told me it was vacant and needed to be cleaned. I didn’t even bother knocking since I’d been told it was empty, but when I pushed through the door with my trolley. I came face-to-face with two very imposing men.
Gran taught me to judge people by their actions rather than by their appearances, so when I looked upon these two behemoths with shaved heads and perplexing facial tattoos, I immediately assumed the best of them rather than the worst. Maybe these guests were a famous rock duo I’d never head of? Or perhaps they were trendy tattoo artists? Or world-renowned wrestlers? Since I prefer antiques to pop culture, how would I know?
Chapter 7, The Maid
“A smart, riveting, and deliciously refreshing debut.” —Lisa Jewell
Find The Maid at your favourite bookstore or learn more at NitaProse.com or the publisher site.
How fun is this title! I love the jacket cover and heard amazing things about this book. It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s Toews at her peak. Awesome. Usually I don’t go in for the hype but this time I wholeheartedly agree.
Fight Night is told from 9-year-old Swiv’s perspective. And she is a smartass. Swiv lives with her pregnant mother (who finds herself single and very preggers with “Gord”) and her elderly Grandma (who is a total card and cheeky, sassy, funny). Swiv is expelled from school, seems not to be the first issue, and she and Grandma are homeschooling. They assign each other writing assignments and have editorial meetings. It’s great.
“Gord” is the temporary name for the baby and there is a lot of stuff hung on “Gord” but Swiv is a protective big sister already and tries to keep the adults in line.
It’s a slow moving but very quirky look at a little family of women who are surviving in their own way, fighting the good fight.
The peak of hilarity is when Swiv and Grandma go to the US to visit her nephews. There’s a runaway wheelchair incident, an accident at a nursing home, and a hot young guy who gives Grandma his phone number.
A fantastic read, bit of magic realism—you know—werewolves, Indigenous magic.
Description: Joan has been searching for her missing husband for 11 months and 6 days when she stumbles upon a church revival tent and the preacher turns out to be her husband Victor. Well, Victor is not Victor, but Reverend Eugene Wolff. And his manager Mr. Heiser swears to the police that Wolff has been with them for 3 years. This is not true.
Joan and nephew Zeus set out to rescue Victor, along with the help of an elder named Ajean. Along the way they learn to beware of the Rogarou (a werewolf-like creature that haunts the Métis).
There are so many great monsters in this novel. And Dimaline weaves in traditional stories of the Rogarou with European tales of the Big Bad Wolf and other wolf lore.
No matter which community claimed them, rogarous were known for some specific things. They smelled odd, like wet fur and human sweat. They were men turned into beasts for any number of reasons—each one unique to the storyteller. They were as notoriously bad at math as they were obsessive. A rogarou, try as he might, could only count to twelve. Put thirteen things by your door and he would be inclined to stop and count them. But since he could only get to twelve, he could never count the entire pile, so he was doomed to start again and again, stopping at twelve and returning to one. Eventually, he’d give up and go away, forgetting he’d ever intended to enter. At least that was the theory.
Chapter 13, Hide and seek, page 190
Perfect readfor anyone who loved Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster, or Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals.
Indians on Vacation follows Bird and Mimi through the streets of Prague where they look for signs of Mimi’s Uncle Leroy, who decades ago sent postcards to the family from around the world.
Mimi loves to travel. For her, it’s an adventure. And she is never arm’s length from her travel guidebook. Bird likes his creature comforts, and travel isn’t comfortable. The room is hot. The train trip too long. The river is no better than the one at home. He has quite the share of personality quirks, and his “demons” natter at him throughout the trip. If you’ve travelled, you know this couple–you might even be this couple 😉
The pair’s wanderings through Prague bring up chatter and memories of past trips, of how they met, of home, of that sense of belonging, family and identity. It’s a simple plot that unfolds a complex history.
I enjoyed the subtly of this novel. The small jabs at tourists, the need to see things other people have seen, to buy the thing or memento. There are funny moments mixed with poignant insights, and overall it’s an enjoyable read.
Here’s a representative quote: “I’m sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress.
‘My god,’ she whispers, ‘can it get any better?'”
Indians on Vacation is perfect for fans of Canadian Literature (Thomas King is an icon). If you enjoyed Less by Andrew Sean Greer, you’ll probably enjoy this too.
And if awards are important, this book kicked butt:
