Sometimes, when I begin reading an Alice Munro story, I am overwhelmed by a sense of "there it is". It's a feeling of immediate and undeniable recognition of familiar elements. Like the beginning of "Nettles", which begins with firmly rooting the reader in a time and place. It is summer.
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
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
As a fan of Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories, I was wriggling in my seat over the mere idea of Girl Runner. But then the anxiety crept in: there would be no Juliet, and perhaps much of the magic was hers. Just as the same river can't be stepped in twice, an
In discussing the different kinds of love which the Vietnamese language distinguishes between, Kim Thúy's Ru lists thích, which means "to love by taste". Random House Canada, 2014 (One may also love without being in love (thuong), love passionately (yêu), love ecstatically (mê), love blindly (mù quáng), or love gratefully (tình nghīa)
