Sixteen-year-old "Mouse" Bradford feels like a monster, with her companion, Alice, her humpback. How fitting, then, that there are bars on the windows of Bath Ladies' College, the boarding school to which she is sent in late 1963. "My God! It looks like a prison," her father says, driving up
When Gloria Steinem said that there "is no one I respect more in the trenches---or on the page", she was speaking of Michele Landsberg. Between 1978 and 2005, she wrote more than 3,000 columns for "The Toronto Star", fired by the injustices that she observed around her. Some of these
Suzanne Robertson's Paramita, Little Black has been nominated for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. And lucky for me, because I would not have read this slim volume of verse had it not been. Lucky for me, because it's another reminder that poetry doesn't have to be this far-away thing that
Dundurn, 2011 The ReLit shortlist was announced earlier this week, but I'm still reading from the longlist. Farzana Doctor's Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011) was also nominated for the Toronto Book Award. That's fitting because the setting plays an important role in this story, but much of the drama
Lauren Davis' novel, Our Daily Bread, opens with an excerpt from a sermon, delivered in Gideon in 1794, which directs the righteous in attendance to cast out the wicked. Wordcraft of Oregon (US); HarperCollins (CAN) Send them to the mountains, "the wild places of their wickedness", the reverend
