What is it about a title story? It always feels, to me, like the key to the collection. And while it’s true that sometimes a title story is my favourite in a collection, other times, as with “Dance of the Happy Shades”, I wondered why it was selected to bestow
This one was recommended by the Children’s Books Panel on CBC’s “The Next Chapter” December 20/2010, which consisted of Michele Landsberg and Ken Setterington chatting with Shelagh Rogers about some of their favourites. I think I could read for a solid year fuelled only by TNC recommendations! Adwoa Badoe’s Between
Shifting past the halfway mark in this collection, I find myself as interested in drawing lines between stories as I am in following the lines drawn within the stories. And perhaps it’s partly because I have recently pulled my copy of The Lives of Girls and Women off my shelves
If I was trying to convince readers to try Alice Munro, choosing this sampling of three stories might not be the best way to approach the matter. Each is stuffed with sadness, with resignation and despair to season the blend. But it’s as though there is also a dash of
Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion Knopf, 1987 I first read this as a teenager. I’d already been reading a lot of adult literature, even if I was still regularly re-reading childhood favourites like the Anne books and still discovering some classics like K.M. Peyton’s Flambards stories and
