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:
The Certainties follows two different people in two different times, whose lives intersect briefly in 1940. The man, our main narrator, is a road-weary traveller who is fleeing Paris. The war is looming, people are disappearing, he has already been held in a volunteer work camp and been released, and now he is sneaking into Spain with two friends.
At a small village cafe, he briefly meets a little girl named Pia.
His story unfolds over a treacherous 48-hour period where his life is held in flux by the police and visiting German officials. Pia’s life is a flash-forward to the 1980s. She’s living on a remote island in the Atlantic, working in the kitchen of an inn, and having a casual romance with a local builder. There is a wedding, a storm, and a shipwreck. Bit of people’s lives wash ashore while life carries on. The juxtaposition of some of the scenes is masterful.
What we learn about the man is that he’s a German intellectual, living large in Paris, cavorting with various philosophers and artists. Two of these connections are his current travelling companions. I can’t really say he was “living life.” He’s a bit of a downer and is told so by his sister. On the run, he does brave things and stupid things. And either way, the trap is laid, and he knows it.
There are beautiful passages about bridges and mirrors, all part of his thesis and work. He reflects on the various interpretations of Narcissus. Our narrator is self-absorbed, but he teaches us that the Narcissus story is much more nuanced.
Bridges and mirrors — what it means for two sides to be connected, reflected…
Pia is also on the run, but only from herself. Her mother, a journalist, disappeared when Pia was young. She has moved around from job to job, never setting down roots. She can pack up her room at the inn in 10 minutes. For her, there are small tragedies and large traumas that sit quietly with her.
My favourite moment in the story is a spoiler so I won’t share. It’s a heart-breaking pause.
Hunter has woven these stories so loosely that it might feel frayed, but we are getting only a glimpse of two lives lived. I felt the sadness and weight of loss while reading The Certainties, and reading the acknowledgements after was like the second shoe dropping.
To me, the novel is about love and philosophy, and looking in the mirror and seeing a reflection of yourself, another self, your own self.
It’s a story of great sadness. Many times, I felt melancholic. What do you think about when it’s the end? What will you miss the most? Who are you? Which self will be remembered? When I think about philosophy, it’s this deep look into the nature of knowledge and how you live with what you know.
The Glass Hotel is Emily St. John Mandel’s awaited novel. Her previous was Station Eleven, which won the Arthur C. Clark Award, the Toronto Book Award and was nominated for several others. Station Eleven was about a pandemic. The Glass Hotel is about the collapse of financial markets. Hm.
Station Eleven was genius. And I was holding my breath for The Glass Hotel. It’s so hard for an author to deliver one masterpiece after another. I love love love The Glass Hotel.
Description: Vincent is a bartender at a remote resort in Caiette, BC. The hotel is absolutely gorgeous, with a stunning glass lobby and restaurant that looks out at the ocean. This is where she meets the hotel’s owner Jonathan Alkaitis. Alkaitis works in finance and leaves Vincent with a $100 tip and a proposition that leads to her becoming his wife. Well, technically they are not married. Her job is to be young, beautiful, attentive. And she’s everything Jonathan needs her to be. He’s the ultimate scam artist and running a Ponzi scheme that collapses. He takes a lot of people down with him. But ultimately this is not a sad book, nor a suspenseful book. It’s really about what it’s like to lead alternate lives, or rather to recognize there are different realities to each life. That’s the part I loved.
Favourite moment: Everyone underestimates Vincent, the trophy wife. But she’s smart, knows she’s playing a role, and does it perfectly. There’s a moment when Jonathan’s daughter Claire has exposed his crimes.
When it did finally collapse, when he was finally trapped, the wrong woman was there with him. Although Vincent impressed him, at the end, despite not being Suzanne. The tableau: His office in Midtown, the last time he was ever in that room. He was sitting behind his desk, Claire crying on the sofa, Harvey staring into space, while Vincent fidgeted around with a coat and shopping bag and then sat and stared at him until he finally had to tell her: “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”
“Yes,” Vincent said.
Claire, from the sofa, still crying:”How do you know what a Ponzi scheme is, Vincent? Did he tell you? Did you know about this? I swear to god, if you knew about this, if he told you …”
“Of course he didn’t tell me,” Vincent said. “I know what a Ponzi scheme is because I’m not a fucking idiot.”
He thought, That’s my girl.
page 235, The Glass hotel
Perfect read for anyone who loved Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, or anything by Michael Lewis.
I’ve been a fan of Andrew Kaufman’s since I first read his first book All My Friends Are Superheros. I discovered the title on my friend’s shelf, borrowed it and went down to the Beaches in Toronto. This was a 1-sitting kind of book.
Coach House Books has a 10th anniversary edition out, which is lovely, but come on … look at that original cover!
My other favourite Andrew Kaufman book was The Tiny Wife. I have the little purple edition below. Again there’s newer editions with different covers but hey, you show up early and get the early edition right!
In The Tiny Wife, a bank robber demands everyone give up the object of greatest significance to them. One survivor’s tattoo jumps off her ankle and chases her around. That’s nothing. Poor Stacey Hinterland soon discovers that she’s shrinking and nothing can keep her from losing herself.
The Waterproof Bible was hilarious. But now I’m gushing and I wasn’t intending to talk about every book — there’s more! Anyway, Andrew Kaufman’s writing is quirky and funny. It’s is right up my alley. There’s always some twist of magic realism and wild imagination. And it’s the same with his newest book The Ticking Heart.
Two hours and seventeen minutes into his forty-third year, Charlie Waterfield realized he was lost. He was standing at the corner of Euclid and Barton in downtown Toronto. He could have walked home if he’d wanted to. He probably should have. What prevented him from doing so was the painful realization that he was lost inside the one thing it is impossible to escape: his own life.
opening paragraph, The Ticking Heart by Andrew Kaufman
