Delicate and deliberate, these stories are sometimes startling and always moving. In some, the darkness is overt and inescapable; in others, quietly pervasive and creeping. A passage from "Welcome to Paradise" seems to whisper of the author's motivations: "Even now I like ghost towns and abandoned houses, places that seem
It's no secret that Mazo de la Roche loved to read. So, we have sassy young Adeline pulling out a book on the ship which takes her from Ireland to the wilds of what-would-soon-be-Canada. There's at least one literary reference in each of the volumes, and sometimes these are endowed with
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life (2017) Arranged as though composed over a twelve-month period, this would seem to be the perfect book to read slowly, meditatively. To allow the pages
How comforting it must have been, with WWII well underway, for Mazo de la Roche to bring home her characters safely, from the front of WWI. The Whiteoak men return and bring with them a fellow serviceman, who takes a position in their household and, just like that, wartime is
Do you ever feel the weight of your stack? Many of the books I've been reading have been rigorous and demanding. Commodore Ajith Boyagoda's story of imprisonment in Sri Lanka, Marcelino Truong's memories of coming-of-age in Vietnam between 1961 and 1963, Shirin Ebadi's work for human rights in Iran, Solmaz
