As a screenwriter and a playwright, it's not surprising that Tracy Barone's debut novel, Happy Family, reads like a series of scenes. Little, Brown and Company, 2016 The first unfolds on August 5, 1962. "The pregnant girl enters the Trenton Family Clinic, looking like she parted the Red Sea to get
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
If it's true, that “new thoughts only happen at the edge of what we already know”, then Malcolm Sutton's Job Shadowing has provided me with plenty of new thoughts. Book Thug, 2016 Job Shadowing is a novel which pools at the edges of the shape that I recognize as fiction. It would be
Celine and Julie are negotating the borders of girlhood, wandering back and forth across dotted lines and territories both more and less available to them as the years pass. They trade L.M. Montgomery's girlhood classics for "Law and Order" and Our Bodies, Ourselves, while readers follow in their footsteps in narratives which alternately
It's clear from the beginning: one might long for escape from this narrative, might opt for a bloody end rather than endure more misery. House of Anansi, 2016 "No one but a fool could look so happy in a miserable house, could they? The mice here probably throw
