In the early 1980s, in a sixth-grade classroom in rural Ontario, a teacher used Edgar Allan Poe's stories to supplement the assigned reader for that year's English studies: a bitter experience for me as a young reader. I loved books - they were my best friends at that time - but
Readers have an elevated view of the events in Cary Fagan's A Bird's Eye. "Over streets, over the buildings of the university with the zigzag pattern on their roofs, over the playing fields towards the downtown." And, yet, readers glimpse, in the opening chapters, all the characters necessary for an
In an effort to manage out-of-control stacks of reading, I try to choose disparate stories in the mass of current reads. Slipping Emily Schultz's The Blondes in with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah seemed like a good bet. A fantastic tale of a plague which seems to infect blonde women. Ifemelu
In bookish synchronicity, when a friend and I met one summer morning to go book-shopping, each of us had begun reading A Beautiful Truth the previous evening. We had both read only about 50 pages, so were hesitant to commit to loving it too soon, but we shared that excitement
When I pointed out Matadora to a friend in a bookstore last weekend, she scrunched her nose. "Who wants to read a book about bullfighting?" Well, readers might turn to Elizabeth Ruth's third novel for many other reasons. (So, if you're scrunching your nose too, please read on.) First, she was mentored
