Excerpt from Reading Journal: Knopf Canada, 2014 Last night I finished reading All My Puny Sorrows, and when I woke up this morning, I was weeping. This doesn’t reveal how the book ended, because I read more than half of it last night, half-skimming the first half that
You might be tempted to call eight-year-old Egg Murakami enchanting or winsome. Even plucky or spirited. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Each of these terms does reflect Egg in some sense. But such descriptions suggest something young-Oprah-heroine-esque about her. Egg’s character is too fully rounded to simply select the
The cover of Christene A. Browne's Two Women pulled me back to a literary pilgrimage I made to Regent Park, in Toronto, after I read Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy. But Regent Park is not so much a character in this novel as the women themselves. Though, which two
Who is Agnes? Little, Brown and Company, 2013 "Criminal. The word hangs in the air. Heavy, unmoved by the bluster of the wind. I want to shake my head. That word does not belong to me, I want to say. It doesn’t fit me or who I am.
Rupert Thomson's Secrecy is suffused with deliciously disturbing images and scenes. A thin, dark ribbon of sky. Bared teeth with clumps of hair. A dead bird that dangles from a girl’s first like a flower needing water. A snake skin shed in a doorway. A secret passage. A stabbed countess. A
