Poems for a Girlhood, it's subtitled. But it's actually for girlhoods. For the author's. And Reena Virk's. At least, for what of Reena Virk's girlhood is known and what can be imagined. She was murdered on November 14, 1997 when she was fourteen years old. At least eight teenagers participated in her
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
Like Anne Tyler, the only plot that Marina Endicott has is the passage of time. The events in her novels are ordinary happenings, but there is a delicious sense of unspooling when one falls into one of her narratives. Doubleday Canada, 2015 Close to Hugh is structured over a week's time and
For weeks after reading Frances Whiting's Walking on Trampolines, my vocabulary was peppered with LuluBelle-isms. That's how I thought of the habit that young Lulu and Annabelle had, of mashing-up synonyms to intensify the meaning of each individual word. Gallery BooksSimon & Schuster, 2015 (2013) "I'm starmished," I would
Reading about Sabrina Ramnanan's love of Anne of Green Gables made me really want to read the debut novelist's Nothing Like Love. And it's a good thing that I understood this about her reading past, because it prepared me perfectly for her prose style. Random House CanadaDoubleday Canada, 2015
