When a passage on page two is just breathtakingly powerful, readers’ expectations soar. It seems impossible to imagine reading beyond this passage without stopping to reread, or not reading it aloud to a friend sitting alongside, or not tapping the stranger sitting next to you, pointing and saying “Check this out”.
Debra Komar creates a narrative which manages to straddle the line between scholarly analysis and page-turner, relying upon court records, newspapers, and other historical documentation to gather evidence surrounding the murder of 14-year-old Annie Kempton in Bear River, Nova Scotia in 1896. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 “This book
Like his first novel, Touch, The Lobster Kings showcases Alexi Zentner’s penchant for storytelling. Knopf Canada, 2014 Readers who learn that this novel is a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy "King Lear" might expect the tale to distance readers, with the original story centuries old and memories of stilted
Excerpt from Reading Journal: Knopf Canada, 2014 Last night I finished reading All My Puny Sorrows, and when I woke up this morning, I was weeping. This doesn’t reveal how the book ended, because I read more than half of it last night, half-skimming the first half that
You might be tempted to call eight-year-old Egg Murakami enchanting or winsome. Even plucky or spirited. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Each of these terms does reflect Egg in some sense. But such descriptions suggest something young-Oprah-heroine-esque about her. Egg’s character is too fully rounded to simply select the
