“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
Bigamy, fraud, prison: the life of Frederick P. Grove reads like a novel. His 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh both does, and doesn’t, hint at the unconventional choices he made in his own life. In one sense, it feels like a quintessential early Canadian novel. It even begins
New in paperback last month, I just squeaked in with my bought-in-hardcover read of Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man. I wanted to read it for fun—no notes—and carried it around in my stack for most of the past year, while other books nudged in line in front. The opening chapter
Of the summer books I mentioned earlier, seven I’ve read, one was recalled to the library for another reader, and three are underway (the Rabagliati graphic novel, Seven Twilights and Jubilee). I also picked a children’s book to reread (a nostalgic favourite—Jean Little’s Stand in the Wind) and a
There’s that two-story brick building downtown on the corner—where family members bought my Great Aunt wedding gifts when she was a young married woman, where my mother bought her schoolbooks in grade thirteen, where I admired the Hummel figurines when I was a girl. Over the decades, both name
