When I was a girl, I heard Gordon Lightfoot's albums often enough that I knew the words to his songs as well as I knew the lyrics on my Sesame Street records. Once, my mom brought home a recording from the library: one of his ballads with an illustrated book
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
On one hand, I could have counted the books about same-sex romances and suicide that were available to me as a young reader twenty-five years ago. Not that the two themes necessarily coexist in the same work (as they do, for instance, in Skim and Monoceros), but each of the
Perhaps Hélène is not a likely hero. She is "only eight years old, a bit florid in colour, with bluish veins on a body that weighed twenty-three kilos, holding back a mind that was always trying to run off to faraway, pitiless realms". Oscar sounds like a more heroic name,
Sometimes the slimmest books are the ones that take the most time to read, demand the most focus, insist on a cup of coffee rather than a glass of wine. Stella Sandford's How to Read Beauvoir struck that alarm bell for me. All the more loudly as I have not.
