What Jane Ozkowski captures beautifully in Watching Traffic is the very sensation embodied in the debut novel's title: Emily is overwhelmed by motion even while in a state of stillness. Groundwood Books, 2016 It's the summer after high-school gradulation, and Emily is working at a catering company, making egg-salad sandwiches and
Excerpt from my reading journal: Having read all of Jane Hamilton's novels, and having waited since 2009 for another, I was pretty psyched for The Excellent Lombards. Grand Central Publishing, 2016 My favourites were The Short History of a Prince and The Book of Ruth, which I read
Massacre, killer, murder: when these words appear on a novel's first page, readers are fore-warned. And, yet, the first third of Sara Taylor's Boring Girls (2015) is a coming-of-age story. "It was becoming more and more apparent that I had been right all along. No one could truly understand me, unless they got
It might seem to be, at first glance, a quintessential CanLit passage, a poetic description of the natural world. Linda Leith Publishing, 2016 But the opening passage of The Company of Crows reveals more about Karen Molson's debut novel, than one might think. "Thin grey lines fan out across the
In which I discuss some of the skinny volumes, which have nestled into my bookbag (while longer works, like Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, were left at home. Vivek Shraya's God Loves Hair is illustrated by Juliana Neufeld, a full-page image introducing each of
