Whitney Moran

I can say without a doubt that Amber Dawn is the only author I’ve ever read who’s quoted Sylvia Plath while using a Sharpie to colour in the scuff marks on her Value Village stripper pumps. She’s also one of the bravest voices I’ve ever heard. How Poetry Saved My Life is an undeniably intense […]

“The law was a folktale that’s changed every time it was told.” How do you follow up a novel like February? Well, if you’re Lisa Moore–coming off a Canada Reads win–you might want to challenge yourself. And what better way to do so than to take a genre typically unassociated with literary merit, and pump […]

Where was this book when I was 23? To women who take time out of their quarter-life crisis to watch Girls and cry-laugh, I highly recommend this self-deprecating memoir. There’s one catch: unless you’re of the belief that giggles are the best medicine, you can’t expect this book to actually help you in any traditional […]

Originally performed as a monologue, Confessions may appear to speak to a very specific, minority audience, but it’s this kind of misconception he book challenges. As Wearing comes to understand as an adult, “So long as the rest of society can get over it, the ‘gay’ part doesn’t matter nearly so much as the ‘parent’ […]

“I heard someone say that once a girl opens her legs she can never close them again.” Fans of Berger’s award-winning Maidenhead will (sort of) know what to expect with Little Cat, a collection of the author’s first two novellas, Lie With Me and The Way of the Whore. In the former, the reader is […]

“We are all horrors under the skin.” And it is around that brazen literary perspective that Rosie Garland fashions her titillating Victorian tale, bringing to life the filthy underbelly of Dickensian London from a satisfying humanist perspective. Though no stranger to the margins of gothic performance art—she moonlights as alterego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen—this […]

I really wanted to like this book, but I found the stories in Eat Your Heart Out to be, overall, a bit weak and repetitive. Boland is obviously rooting for the underdog here. Her characters are victims—people-in-progress just trying to get their shit together. Depicted over and over again are half-uttered intimacies between men and […]

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the fact that I almost didn’t read it because it bore a Chatelaine Book Club sticker. Life After Life taught me to swallow my pride, dump my prejudices and get back to judging a book by its first sentence, not its cover. This is an […]

“Faith is like imagination. It sees something where there is nothing.” Grace McCleen is an exquisite new author who comes from a fundamentalist religious background. This, combined with an English degree from Oxford, a keen eye for the childhood experience and a mastery of description—turning trash into one little girl’s paper-and-glue paradise—makes The Land of […]