Carol Bruneau’s collection of short stories A Bird on Every Tree gloriously explores the complex relationship people have with the place they call home. Through the lens of teenage angst, many of us see ourselves having a great big-city life and never returning home. However, tragedy, heartbreak or failure sometimes has us return to the […]
Book review
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Review: Snapback Volume 1: Fuseki
Go is a war-like strategy game popular in Korea and China played with black and white stones on a 19×19 grid—it is not Chinese checkers. The game is at the heart of Christian DeWolf’s Snapback Volume 1: Fuseki, along with Felix and his gang of Go fanatic friends at their Annapolis Valley High School. Shortly, […]
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Review: The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl
In 2006 a four-year old Massachusetts girl died of a drug overdose after being prescribed medication to treat her ADHD and bipolar disorder. A highly public trial followed, in which the girl’s parents were convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison. Sue Goyette’s fifth book of poetry takes this story and runs […]
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Review: When The Saints
Sarah Mian’s debut novel, When the Saints, is a sly and funny book about a scrappy family living through some trying times. Tabby Saint is the tough and admirably resourceful protagonist who returns to her home of Solace River, Nova Scotia, after being more or less abandoned years earlier as a child. She returns to […]
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Just Kids, Patti Smith (Random House)
If Ian Edelman, the creator of HBO’s How to Make it in America, thinks his show’s sucky protagonists and their loft-living artist friends are having a tough time of it in the Big Apple, he might want to travel back to Patti Smith’s 1970s New York, where bloody walls and lice were as much part […]
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Bite Me, Julie Albert and Lisa Gnat (Pinky Swear Press)
Mixing humour into cookbooks is a tricky thing, unless it’s The Star Wars Cookbook and you’re making Wookie Cookies (they’re actually not bad). Too many puns can make your stomach turn, but here it’s easy to ignore the clever intros and occasionally raunchy jokes, and focus on the recipes and full-page glossy photos. Written by […]
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Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Michael Pollan (Penguin)
Depending on from where you are approaching Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, the author has either finely distilled his exhaustive research on the industrial food chain and North America’s often counter-intuitive eating habits into approachable, easily digestible rules to govern food choices—or he has severely dumbed down his message. If you’ve read Pollan’s previous works, The […]
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Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, Syr Ruus (Breakwater)
On page one, readers awake with 45-year-old Emmanuel to his feeling of detachment from his own life. His disorientation deepening, Emmanuel takes a wrong turn, ending up in a stranger’s driveway. He’s mistaken as a long-awaited familiar. This sets him off on a personal quest to regain his bearings, meaning and purpose in life. Ruus, […]
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The Prescription Errors, Charles Demers (Insomniac)
A dark novel centred around an obsessive-compulsive young Vancouver man, Daniel struggles to maintain his own fragile sanity while those around him fall apart. Also an activist, Demers skillfully weaves in lesbian parenting and free-speech arguments, aging activists and neighbourhood politics, seeming sincere and not forced—the way politics entwine our real lives. Demers’ Vancouver settings […]
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The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave (HarperCollins)
Nick Cave has created one of the most sorrowfully pathetic, misogynistic jerks to ever grace the printed page, and that takes talent. Philandering beauty product salesman Bunny Munro would make Martin Amis proud, with his chronic masturbation and obsession with Avril Lavigne’s vagina. Boozing, sexing and all coked-up, Bunny is caught off guard by his […]