No matter how dilgent one has been with one's read-o-lutions, February is not the shortest month but the longest test. If it had a chapter heading? In which all your good bookish intentions will flake away like paper splinters from the spine of a well-loved paperback. And, yet, my February reading, one
Sarah Ellis' Outside In is her seventeenth novel for young readers, and readers who discover her through this unusual work will undoubtedly be keen to investigate her backlist. Groundwood Books, 2014 The cover captures the hint of mystery which lurks beneath the story, for Lynn encounters Blossom and
Angie Adbou handles multiple narrative voices very well. Readers familiar with her earlier novels, The Bone Cage (2008) and The Canterbury Trail (2011) will know this, having inhabited narratives from varying perspectives. They will also know (as will readers of her 2006 collection of short stories, Anything Boys Can Do) that
Ater a year of new-new-new, January has been filled with the familiar, the known. It's not been about making new-shiny-library-residing friends, but about becoming better acquainted with long-time residents of my own bookshelves, remembering what drew particular authors onto my MRE (MustReadEverything) list and particular books onto my shelves. Have
As much as these stories focus on solitary characters who observe, from the margins, they long for something else; Walt and Mr. Jones are ultimately preoccupied with relationships. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Margaret Sweatman's Mr. Jones openly confronts duplicity. "His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d
