Book Review: Dearly by Margaret Atwood

By Sara Hailstone

Margaret Atwood shifted the conversation of poetry with her four-line poem “You Fit into Me,” published in 1971. With the entrance of her image of a fisheye and hook into a collective literary consciousness, Atwood set the bar for her poetic compositions. With the recent publication of her collection of poetry Dearly, the world received poetry from Atwood for the first time in over a decade. Expectations were high. There have been mixed reviews. Some reviewers deem that with this recent book of poetry Atwood’s writing has fallen “short of [the] mark”; some take issue with the unsettling tone of the topical movement throughout the pieces; an impression of “the rapidity of writing,” that the pieces came to press too soon; that there is a lack of editing; or more significantly, that the pieces in Dearly signal an “inevitable decline in the work” of one of Canada’s most looked-to authors.

I did not feel disquieted by this set of poetry, rather, I felt inspired. I needed to read through the sadness and personal loss, a human layer laid down by an almost untouchable Canadian author. As a woman, her transparency of the aging process is also a necessary scope of voice needed for society, especially to give voice to representation of the female body that is not traditionally spoken of. “Things wear out. Also fingers./ Gnarling sets in./ Your hands crouch in their mittens, forget chopsticks, and buttons./ Feet have their own agendas.” And the tone of a dystopic writer seeps in: “Ears are superfluous:/ What are they for, those alien pink flaps?/ Skull fungus./ The body, once your accomplice, is now your trap.” An aging body that seeks calm, “a flat line you steer for.” We need to hear the language women have about their bodies and the conversations they have with them. This language takes back power while allowing women to be vulnerable. There is strength in that sensitivity. The world needs sensitivity now. The world needs authenticity. The world needs authentic art.

Atwood’s literary canon is weighed heavily. Some will omit Dearly from the list of best Atwoodian works. I argue to leave it in. Do not overlook it. Ironic would be becoming footnoted in your own repertoire.

Book Review: The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

By Sara Hailstone

Written over 60 years ago, Margaret Laurence brought to life the iconic character of Hagar Currie Shipley in The Stone Angel. The novel spans decades of Hagar’s life and brings the reader into the mind of an elderly woman facing the final throes of an emotionally isolated life. This old woman is suspicious of those around her, what they plan of her final days and pushes us head-on into the narrative of a past life ridden with turmoil and hardship. What cumulates is the old woman’s resistance to being placed in a nursing home. The Stone Angel is a novel in which the reader cannot take sides, or the reader will risk leaving the story not liking the main character — or they will love her very much.

Laurence has carved out a pedestal for Hagar with The Stone Angel as a memorable figure of modern literature. A difficult woman yet, a narrative that follows the hardship that she faced, especially around her final years. Society was not used to a story told from this point-of-view, and I think we needed it.

Hagar was the daughter of an ambitious and disciplined Scottish merchant, and it is evident from her childhood memories that she sought her father’s approval. Yet she married Bram Shipley whom her father disproved. She is disowned and her father dies without seeing her, saying goodbye, or even meeting his grandsons. Laurence authentically shows that we usually resemble those who raised us, hurt us, and despite our individual borders, we mirror them. Hagar lives like her father, without joy, strung between life events in a grueling cloud of grit and domestic perseverance. She does not share her inner self with her husband and sons, they do not receive maternal gentleness, and neither does her sister-in-law in later years. Her husband, an inconsistent and rough man with a brash temperament, mortifies Hagar and is resentful of her and her sons. Laurence displays a detailed narrative of intrafamilial dysfunction.

Late in life, Hagar is a fiery woman severely skeptical of the true intentions of care from her son Marvin and his wife Doris. In her mind, they are out to get her, and with a raging willpower, she’s determined they will not capture her. She possesses a critical tongue and unrelenting wit that leaves a memorable echo of this literary character. We see the consequences of a life without love.

The plot jerks around Hagar’s eventual temporary escape from Marvin and Doris. She takes a bus to a summer place she assumes will be habitable and a refuge from the fate of a nursing home. Facing the crux of her physical deterioration and surviving for some days in an abandoned mouldy space, exposed to the elements, a male neighbour finds her isolated and on the brink of social composure.

“He stares at me, and then I’m aware of myself, crouching among thee empty boxes, my cotton housedress bedraggled, my face dirt-streaked, my hair slipped out of its neat bun and hanging down like strands of gray mending wool.” She is covered in dead June bugs that she’s adorned herself with earlier in almost play, a theatrical crown, she could “die with mortification.”

They share a jug of red wine and Hagar relays her life story to this stranger. A final testament, perhaps an opportunity with the reader for redemption. The situation is unsettling and compelling. Laurence’s prose can point us in these damning final moments to introspection, witnessing what a hard life for women and the aging process does to our relatives.

Laurence composed The Stone Angel as one of five books set in the fictional town of Manawaka. After writing about Africa, Laurence felt a need to come home to her writing and depict what she knew. The other novels, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners. Born in Neepawa, Manitoba in 1926, Laurence became a household name with her novels mirroring and embellishing rural Manitoba society. She did spend some time in Africa and England but finally settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974 where she died in 1987. She has won two Governor General’s Awards for fiction. She crafted unforgettable and legendary characters who have rightfully taken their place in the fabric of a Canadian literary canon.

The meaning of Hagar’s name is “flight” and “forsaken.” She is a “stranger and one who fears.” Hagar was also a biblical figure in the Old Testament, a handmaid to Abraham’s wife Sarah and in other understandings, a concubine driven into the desert with her son Ishmael. I wonder if the name of the character ever came up with Laurence in conversations on banned books and plot development. In her later years, Laurence broke silences surrounding the banning of The Stone Angel from schools. Due to perceived ‘blasphemous’ and “obscene” language by fundamentalist Christians, Laurence stood by her work as a cautionary tale, also one reflective of a culture she herself grew up in. Laurence was put to the test, she remained as committed to her writing as she did to the character development of Hagar. Another layer is laid in appreciating the tenacity of this Canadian classic.

As Canada’s population ages, The Stone Angel can hold its place of relevancy for Canadian readers. Mayhap Hagar will stand firm giving us a point of reference for those around us who have faced years of isolation and are enduring the final days of health crisis. For women, a stubborn and introspective voice is maybe exactly who readers will need to turn to in facing their own domestic snow globes of living. The Stone Angel allows us to see exactly through Hagar’s eyes to witness a life from the telling of an unreliable narrator. We are even revealed details that Hagar herself does not want us to know. We do not have to root for her, we merely have to watch, she herself will challenge our thinking. She, herself, will challenge our reading.

Book Review: The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart

By Sara Hailstone

Respected Canadian author, Jane Urquhart wrote her debut novel titled, The Whirlpool, which was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1986. It was the first Canadian novel to be awarded France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Award), following publications of the novel in various languages and across European countries.  

Urquhart established a successful literary career following her debut novel. Her later novel,The Underpainter won the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction and The Stone Carvers was a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. A Map of Glass was a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. She has a collection of short stories titled, Storm Glass and four books of poetry. Urquhart lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, and sometimes resides in Ireland.

The Whirlpool has been reviewed with a lens of motif, plot structure, and characterization. Some have found the poetic language of the text to be inaccessible and that the plot whips around, spiraling like a whirlpool in and of itself. Characters have been noted for their eccentricities and layers of varying obsessions that either consume or isolate them. However, I found this novel finds reprieve in the poetic connections of nature that extends the Canadian landscape into a literary consciousness and further the wondering that is centered around the language development of a character referred to as “the child” who has been deemed to portray qualities of Autism.

Fixed on the churning whirlpool two kilometers downstream of Niagara Falls in the summer of 1889, the reader is pulled into the entangled lives of several enigmatic characters and their individual obsessions.

Maud Grady is an undertaker’s widow. The man had been fixated on spiders and their webs, setting a tone for the structure and plot line that the very characters will become caught up in. Maud meticulously catalogues the belongings of those taken by the falls and the river while continuing to run her former husband’s business. She has a mute son who develops language throughout the story. The progress of his language development loosely mirrors B.F. Skinner’s hierarchy of verbal behaviour that constructed the pillars for behavioural science and understanding of autism.

The boy requests, labels, and carries out reciprocal exchanges, labelling actions and objects within his environment. When he begins to categorize, he seizes objects within the house, arranging them in piles and associations. In a deeper sense, he turns his mother’s carefully compartmentalized world upside down by opening the belongings of the fall’s victims and combines the items by similarities. An awakening for his mother, she sees the bigger picture of the world differing from the way of being she had traditionally tried to honour and pay homage to. I think the behaviour of the boy, alone, is integral in revisiting this classic text in relation to representations of neurodivergence in literature.

The novel’s wrapped in a prologue and epilogue that feature the life of poet Robert Browning and his death in Venice, which has stumped some reviewers. A line of continuity is threaded through the width of the plot trajectory through the character of Fleda, who loves Browning, and nooks her life experiences throughout the novel to lines of his poetry. Fleda is the wife of David McDougal, a military historian infatuated with Laura Secord and the war of 1812. The couple have just sold their large manor house to relocate and build a new home by the whirlpool, and have camped out in a tent by the pool for the summer. They encounter a man named Patrick, a poet suffering from writer’s block who works for the government in Ottawa. He’s come to live with his aunt and uncle in Niagara Falls and discovers Fleda in the woods by the whirlpool when he is out in nature seeking reprieve and inspiration in nature. He finds passion and an awakening of the writing process in Fleda, and so begins his narrative obsession with the lady of the woods. In turn, all characters are entangled in obsession like a web, one that chokes them out or opens them up painfully.

This novel is complex and simple simultaneously. As readers, we can observe with distance how the human responds to others, how they contemplate being viewed, and how they wish to be responded to and viewed in turn, especially when this wanting is not achieved or met.

Thank you to Jane Urquhart and Cloud Lake Literary for the opportunity to write an honest review. I highly recommend The Whirlpool as a must-read and study in pursuing the canon of Canadian Literature and Canadian storytelling. 

Book Review: Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlen

By Sara Hailstone

“For reasons which will become clear soon enough, I cannot tell you my name. Nor can I tell you the name of the city in which I live.”

Thus is the reader ushered into the perimeters of a novel that will attempt to package an unbelievable story into something palpable, a story made believable through the craft of storytelling amongst the domestic. Our Lady of the Lost and Found, written by Diane Schoemperlen in 2001, is narrated by an unnamed successful writer who finds solace in the comfort of her home and single life.

“People often ask me how much of my fiction is autobiographical, how much of what I am writing is actually the real story of my own life. I freely admit that some parts of each book are true but I am not about to say which parts or how true.” The reader is enticed to learn if threads of this novel are true; yet, we cannot know the writer. And the writer carefully places the reader within the firm grip of a reliable narrator. “I cannot tell you the titles of my books because then you would be able to figure out who I am.” Strung through carefully laid facts, we are to believe the narrator: “I am telling you all this now because I want you to know from the outset that I am a normal, rational, well-educated, well-adjusted woman not given to delusions, hallucinations, or hysterical flights of fancy. I do not drink or do drugs. The only voice I hear in my head is my own. I want you to know from the outset that I am not a psychotic, an eccentric, a fanatic, or a mystic. I want you to know that I am not a lunatic.”

It is on an ordinary Monday morning in April that the writer enters her living room to water plants and finds a woman standing by her fig tree. Dressed in white Nikes and a blue trench coat and holding a suitcase, she quietly introduces herself as the Virgin Mary. The visitor is tired and explains that she needs a place to stay for a week to rest. Mary wants to rest in ordinary solace and the writer has established the perfect domestic oasis for this need. The encounter is mundane and human; Mary is not an apparition or a figment of imagination. She will stay under one condition: the writer must not reveal that Mary was there. “If people find out that I have been here, that I have talked to you, eaten with you, and slept in your house, they will descend upon you in droves.” Mary outlines the chaos that would rain down if the masses found out about this visit. “If you break this promise to keep my visit a secret, your life will never be the same. Do I make myself clear?” And so, under these conditions, Mary stays.

         The two women find gentle reprieve in each other’s company without crossing boundaries. The writer navigates her understanding of one of our society’s most iconic cultural and religious figures. Chronicling Mary’s presence in civilization for the last two thousand years, Schoemperlen folds the narrative together with fact and fiction, propelling the reader to wonder at the extraordinary within the ordinary of daily life.

         Diane Schoemperlen has established an impressive and solid portfolio of work of Canadian literature, having published three novels and seven collections of short stories. She began submitting poetry and prose to Canadian publications in the seventies, and completed a degree in English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Her first novel, In the Language of Love, published in 1994, was composed of one hundred chapters, each one based on one of the one hundred words in the Standard Word Association Test, which was used to measure sanity. Schoemperlen’s 1998 book of short stories, Forms of Devotion, won the Governor General’s Award. Her second novel, Our Lady of the Lost and Found was published in 2001. Schoemperlen’s 2017 book, This is Not My Life, tells of her love for a prison inmate. The archives at Queen’s University house more than 150 short stories, essays, plays and manuscript drafts of novels. Diane Schoemperlen was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Ontario and now resides in Kingston, Ontario.

         Schoemperlen has been weighed heavily for the shifting of this novel between accounts of a monotonous life, and the lack of trauma of the middle-aged author; dialogue between two women—one human, another supernatural in essence—that shifts into confessional narration while encoding segments of Mary’s life with meditations; historical accounts; discussions of the Pythagorean theory; and the nature of truth and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Past reviewers have noted that Mary is not allowed to speak among three hundred pages of narrative shifts and authorial balancing. Reviewers have also argued that the sublunary backstory of the narrator’s personal essence disrupts achievement attempted by weaving in historical and theoretical discussions that strive to contextualize the believability of Mary staying with a writer for a week. One reviewer noted that, “the supposed core of the story, meeting the mother of God, isn’t strong enough to balance the tangents.” These tangents, in my opinion, were intentional and serve a greater purpose in giving depth to the structure of the plot and narrative voice. The reader is intended to navigate the ledges of fact and fiction. The tangents are based on “actual documented accounts,” as stated by the author in the book’s acknowledgements. The writer-narrator contemplates that the opposite of fact might not be fiction, the opposite space is a place “where literature comes from.” She articulates that this place, a “threshold bridge at the border between the real world and the other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended.” We are to wonder of these spaces between Schoemperlen’s tangents and the narration. That is the beauty of the text.

         Perhaps the author wanted readers to locate Mary in either space. The miraculous accounts, relayed with a basis of documentation and a baseline of the writer-hostess, represent Mary as both passion and reason. I found, as a female reader, the life of the writer-hostess peaceful and her state of independence refreshing. She single-handedly created a space that Mary would want to take shelter in. Not bound by trauma or trigger, the writer created a home that could birth this story, that could house both the divine and the ordinary. I needed this story. I needed those tangents and those “mundane” bits. I recommend others to find peace there in their reading too.

Book Review: Kamila Knows Best by Farah Heron

By Sara Hailstone

Farah Heron presents her rendition of Jane Austen’s Emma with her book Kamila Knows Best. Kamila Hussain is just like Emma Woodhouse in that she plays matchmaker with members of her social circle and is connected to a wealthy clique in Toronto’s modern boroughs. As an accountant with her father’s firm, she also cares for her ailing father and is known within her society for throwing elaborate and detailed theme parties. She is the total package: with good looks and an impeccable wardrobe, she is admired and perseveres through the stereotypes of her career, offering cutting-edge and fresh takes on getting a feminine foothold against the current of an overwhelmingly masculine industry. She is whole in person and is not looking for marriage.

Heron slowly teases out a romantic arc for Kamila, but her character strives for more in a world that, despite its contemporary setting, still limits expectations of women. Kamila asserts her desire to take over her father’s company upon his retirement. In a narrative flushing out childhood issues, Kamila Knows Best is a vibrant coming-of-age story of a woman from a South Asian Toronto community.

Inspired by Jane Austen, Farah Heron has carved out her own style of romantic comedies depicting families from South Asian communities. Her debut novel, The Chai Factor, was widely praised, as was its follow up, Accidentally Engaged. Her debut young adult novel, Tahira in Bloom, was deemed the best rom-com of the year by USA Today. Heron’s narrative style stands out as an entry for readers into lives of art, food, family, and love.

In painting the world of a charismatic woman enmeshed in vibrant settings, with Kamila’s lush Bollywood-themed parties and exquisite interior design, Heron offers us entry into this world through food. During the pre-planning of her Bollywood movie night, the reader follows Kamila into a train-of-thought of menu decisions and witnesses the handmade preparations of appetizers. (She has chosen chili-paneer kebobs and vegetable momo dumplings with chili-ginger chutney.) When Kamila struggles with making cooking mishaps, Rohan, her endearing family friend, steps in and saves the day. Their teamwork results in a scrumptious party and a growing romance between the pair. At the end of the novel, Heron lists the full recipes of the dishes presented in the text. Readers can try out the food in the book, a unique inclusion that further allows intimacy.

Overall, the parallel that Heron draws between Emma Woodhouse and Kamila Hussain transforms this first impression rom-com into a text of necessity within a Canadian canon in giving voice and representation to South Asian communities. Firstly, Kamila thrives within a family dynamic of being taken care of while caregiving for her father. But, if autonomous, Kamila would flourish on her own. Her personality is not confined to construct. Kamila is independent in social orientations and career. She also does not exhibit fluency within the feminine domestic domain only but transgresses gender expectations by being a successful accountant. She is not looking for marriage and love to fulfill her being, but it comes to her nonetheless.

Thank you to Farah Heron and Hachette Book Group for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: In A New York Minute by Kate Spencer

By Sara Hailstone

Kate Spencer provides her readers with a novel of escapism with the allure of New York City with In a New York Minute. We meet our feminine protagonist, Francesca (Franny), in a moment of turmoil after she is laid off from an interior design job and makes her way despairingly home with her box of personal belongings. On the ride home, her silk dress is caught in the subway doors and embarrassingly yanked apart as the entire back of the dress rips, exposing her to New York City. Franny and a helpful pregnant woman try to piece the dress together with a hair clip when Spencer’s knight in shining armour, Hayes Montgomery III, steps in and offers Franny his expensive Gucci suit jacket.

In a humorous and plot-catching turn of events, Franny and “Mr. Hot Suit” are recorded by a bystander and the encounter goes viral on social media. What follows is a roller-coaster romantic plotline of crests and dips between Franny and Hayes. An opposites attract archetypal plot and folded in with pure humour and the enduring qualities of female friendship in the city, Spencer provides rom-com readers of the genre with a pleasing text that could be taken along as a feel-good vacation read. 

Kate Spencer is well-known for her award-winning podcast Forever35, where Spencer and her friend Doree Shafrir navigate self-care for women with both comedy and wit. Her freelance work can be found in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. Author of the memoir The Dead Moms Club, Spencer’s debut fiction novel In a New York Minute gives off Sex and the City vibes, taking readers along on a similar escapade of love, sex, career, and friendship.

I enjoyed the novel as it offered me a moment of escapism that I appreciate from the act of reading. My one wish with In a New York Minute would be to envision Franny’s personal growth extending beyond the confines of the text as a strong woman who dove head-first into starting her own interior design business after proclaiming so on live television. I imagined, because of the exposure of the viral moment with Hayes, that Franny would be given opportunity and a firm list of clients to jumpstart her business in a capacity beyond the plotline where Hayes is her first client and in turn is responsible in helping push forward her dream. Witnessing a female protagonist step into that growth as an entrepreneur would have been inspiring and would have left a long-lasting textual impression on me as a reader.

Regardless, the novel flowed with personality and organically braided in the endearing and humourous aspects that having a circle of strong female friends can have on the quality of life for women—I appreciated that feminist layer of the text.

Thank you to Kate Spencer and Hachette Book Group for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: The Recovery Agent by Janet Evanovich

By Sara Hailstone

Content warning: guns and violence

Janet Evanovich is well known for her mystery series featuring strong female leads paired with the comedic relief of masculine counterparts. Born in South River, New Jersey in 1943, Evanovich made a name for herself with the creation of her first strong female lead, Stephanie Plum, a sharp-tongued Jersey girl who pushes her way into tracking down bail jumpers by blackmailing her own bail bondsman. Plum’s character led to a series and the cookie-cutter template for Evanovich’s New York Times bestsellers. Evanovich is now a household name. The Recovery Agent is the first book of a new series in alignment with this Evanovich template. Now, Evanovich introduces readers to the duo of Gabriela and Rafer.

Gabriela is a recovery agent, retrieving missing treasure, family valuables, or stolen property for the rich. Evanovich thrusts Gabriela into the throes of personal crises with a hurricane that has levelled her family’s home. With the supernatural guidance of an ancestor named Annie, Gabriela’s family wants her to find Blackbeard’s treasure map that will lead her to the Ring of Solomon. Annie had sent a message to Gabriela’s grandmother with knowledge of a historical diary that the infamous Blackbeard had: a diary with a map to the famous treasure sought by others. With this long-kept family secret, Gabriela would be able to help the family start over after devastation. But first, Gabriela has to find the treasure in a case in the basement of her old house where her ex-husband Rafer lives. He insists on joining her when she comes to retrieve the map and case.

Rafer is funny. With his quick-witted interjections and stubborn persistence in helping protect Gabriela while simultaneously driving her crazy (much like the dynamics of their marriage of antler smashing), the duo takes on the jungles of Peru and are soon trekking across various geographic hotspots, dodging snakes, going toe-to-toe with drug cartels and cults, and finishing with the climax of facing an unhinged antagonist who has stalked them throughout the plot. The Recovery Agent throws the reader in hard; they hit the ground running. 

The Recovery Agent meets the genre’s needs and is an anticipated first book of a new series for devoted readers. A text suited for escapism and entertainment, it secures the plotline with historical anchors. It took me some time to feel emotional ties to the characters and I read courageously through a template feel, but investment in the characters was not fully achieved as I knew they would always be okay. I appreciated Rafer’s comic relief and the chemistry between he and Gabriela that moves the narrative along. With the inclusion of a supernatural subplot, I was impressed with the experimentation in cross-genre writing between mystery and the elements of magic realism found in literary fiction. I could be stretching and inserting my own creative wondering into my reading, but those familiar with the mystery genre will walk away satisfied and wanting more. 

Thank you to Atria Books of Simon & Schuster for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: The Theory of Crows by David A. Robertson

By Sara Hailstone

The Theory of Crows is David A. Robertson’s first adult novel, and offers a healing narrative of a father and daughter relationship that begins fraught with strain. Matthew, a middle-aged man, is presented in a state of existential crisis. He has been caught cheating on his wife with a co-worker through a series of inappropriate texts and workplace connections. Holly finds her father’s texts and observes the conflict between her parents, and she confronts her father, who was more present for her when she was younger. She spirals and becomes disconnected from her father and herself. Embedded within Matthew’s pain is a quiet spiritual detachment from reality, and yet, an ancient way of being propels him to seek connection with the microcosm of nature, the fabric of stars, the turn of leaf and wind. In recurring images like his father’s hand resting on his child’s belly, Matthew strives to find his breath again in a pit of regret, shame, and guilt.

When his father, Moshum, crosses over, Matthew and Holly set aside estrangement and seek out the family’s northern trapline to put to rest Moshum’s ashes and return him home. A gentle shifting between narrative point of view offers a steady stream of consciousness and a father’s gentle teachings.  

David A. Robertson has steadily carved out his space in literary circles within Canada and abroad as an author from the Norway House Cree Nation. With a portfolio of children’s books and texts for young readers, Robertson has made his mark as a prominent voice. His list of awards and accolades is long, among them the 2021 Writer’s Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award, The Globe and Mail Children’s Storyteller of the Year, two Governor General’s Literary Awards, the McNally Robinson Best Book for Young People Award, and the shortlist for the Ontario’s Library Association’s Silver Birch Award. Robertson is also the host of Kíwew (Key-Way-Oh), an award-winning podcast. I have encountered Robertson in humble settings, presenting his latest upcoming children’s book to the students in our school board and offering a compassionate and optimistic space for youth in conversations about residential schools while sharing his personal connections to the land.

The Theory of Crows offers knowledge that helps build allyship, telling us that the starting point is acknowledging that no matter what our background, we share something with everybody on the planet: “That you are human.” We can come together in the space of this text. As an educator, I was offered valuable insight into Holly’s experience of being Indigenous in a school setting. Learning new vocabulary like Indigeneity, a word that is used to “describe the state of being Indigenous” and which Holly uses to break down assumptions she has of what her elder’s counselling space would be like when she ventures in to sit with her.[1] This scene helped me contextualize what my students might be going through.

Next, profiling or tokenism, terms referred to when an Indigenous topic is brought up in class and the Indigenous student is called upon to validate and embody the components of the flow of that conversation. “How the fuck should I know?” Holly demands, before being sent out of class. I learned from this scene and strive to not actualize it in the setting of my own classroom. Lastly, I learned about blood memory: “It’s like your ancestors, their lives and experiences, living in you,” [Matthew] said. “Embedded into your DNA.” These teachings help inform me as an educator and better equip me if I introduce this text in a course.

Robertson’s depiction and honouring of sacred spiritual alliances further moves this text into current conversations surrounding the representation of and engagement with animals in literature. Rejecting the colonial framework that objectifies and flattens it into symbolism, Robertson sets nature free and depicts a way of walking in balance with the environment that can help shift current paradigms and society’s interaction with the world around it. Calling back to the title of the book, the theory of crows connects to land memory and crow knowing.

Your grandfather used to say that you could remember the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.

We are the extension of the land and exist together within reciprocal exchanges. We are the land; when we walk upon it, we become it and root down into blood memory and holistic being. With discrete layers of the ethereal and interaction with the spiritual realm, Robertson has crafted a first adult novel that will be shelved alongside canonic texts of literature. This is only the beginning.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

[1] Queen’s University Office of Indigenous Initiatives. 2023. “Decolonizing and Indigenizing,” https://www.queensu.ca/indigenous/decolonizing-and-indigenizing/defintions.

Book Review: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

By Sara Hailstone

Bad Cree is a debut novel by Jessica Johns and is a riveting account of one young woman’s confrontation with the supernatural and tragic events that caused the death of her sister, Sabrina. Set in Northern Alberta and Treaty 8 land, it tells the story of Mackenzie, who confronts the ability to transcend dream-time after she begins bringing physical remnants from the nightmares surrounding her sister’s death into her waking reality. Amongst the female familial bonds of aunties and cousins, Johns presents an empowering narrative of a family of women with strong matrilineal roots facing an enemy within the realm of the supernatural.

Jessica Johns is a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. As an interdisciplinary artist and writer, she has had pieces published in various magazines and anthologies. Johns is on the editorial board for GUTS—An Anti-Colonial Feminist Magazine and she sits on the advisory board for the Indigenous Brilliance reading series. This novel evolved from a short story titled Bad Cree that won the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.

The reader ventures with Mackenzie through nightmares to the lake where the family spent time in the past with their kokum, who has also crossed over. We witness Mackenzie intervening in an attack of her sister’s body by a murder of crows and bringing a severed crow’s head back to the waking world. In another episode she is thrown in water and almost drowns, waking drenched and coughing. In preparing for the nightmares, Mackenzie’s family come together to help her journey into the subconscious realm.  

The strength of the novel lies in its underlying theme of the power of women and family to support each other through trauma. Further, Johns successfully weaves together a narrative of interconnectivity with her treatment of the physical environment, community, and characters. I took away from the novel a coming-to-know journey of spiritual alliance with animals like the crows. Initially interpreted as threatening, Mackenzie learns that they are guiding and protecting forces. These themes address current conversations surrounding land, environmentalism, reclamation of walking in balance with nature and portrays a journey only possible with the healing and embracing of feminine connections in the novel.

I highly recommend Bad Cree and can see this novel being added to course outlines and taught alongside novels like Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. Johns has contributed her voice and creative literary interpretation to a growing repertoire of Indigenous voices in Canadian society and beyond.

Thank you to HarperCollins for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: Code Name Sapphire by Pam Jenoff

By Sara Hailstone

Content warning: World War Two, depiction of concentration camps, death.

Hannah is a Jewish woman fleeing Nazi Germany after her husband Isaac is killed in a pogrom and she loses their unborn child. She is also a famous cartoon satirist under a male pseudonym who has ridiculed the Nazis through her artwork, which renders her need to flee Europe more urgent. Mirroring the plight of the rejected passage of the MS St. Louis in 1939, Hannah is turned back from Cuba to Belgium, where she seeks out help and shelter from her estranged childhood cousin Lily. In trying to leave occupied Belgium and prevent any trouble from befalling her cousin, Hannah has no choice but to join the resistance group known as the Sapphire Line and earn the trust of its enigmatic leader, Micheline, to try to secure connections and get herself out.

Based on the real-life leader of resistance group the Comet Line, Andrée de Jongh (who received the George Medal in 1946), Micheline grows the network to hundreds of individuals with her sharp wit and unwavering determination to undermine the Germans. When Hannah is checked for ID during a mission for the line, she shows them Lily’s card as cover—but in doing this, Hannah is the cause of Lily, her husband Nik, and their young son Georgi’s arrest. Imprisoned at the Breendonk camp near Mechelen, the family is soon placed on the list to be deported to Auschwitz. Hannah must do something.

Pam Jenoff pulls the reader through a suspenseful page turner in feeling out what it was like for the men and women who stopped a train full of prisoners en route to Auschwitz. Set during 1942 in Belgium, the novel navigates historical truths of resistance and bravery in situating relatable characters fleeing the Nazi fist through a fictional Sapphire Line. The historic Comet Line, an underground network of safe houses, coded correspondence, and organization in alliance with British intelligence quietly ushered 776 fallen Allied airmen out of occupied Europe. The Sapphire Line is envisioned further as the main characters work against all odds to stop a train leading to the infamous death camp with families trapped inside.

The author of New York Times bestsellers The Lost Girls of Paris and The Woman with the Blue Star, Jenoff shines with this new novel, which will rise to the surface with its strong characterization aligned with a spellbinding and heart-pumping plotline. Based on sound historical research and using creative license to situate compelling characters within historical context, Jenoff brings to light a moment of humanity and grueling reality when ordinary citizens and resistance fighters worked together to fight back against Nazi control.

The strength of Code Name Sapphire lies in engaging characters and their backstories that weave an intricate web between past and present throughout the novel. The plotline is layered with sharp turns that build momentum, picking up speed to throw the reader into the final hours in which they come face-to-face with the challenging decisions that the characters make under immense pressure. 

In the end, the characters are not fully likable because of the decisions they commit to survive. Jenoff expertly crafts ethical questions about what people are capable of doing when fighting for their lives. Her characters are flawed; inevitably, they are human, and they are not bent to serve idealized character arcs.  

I found that the ethical questions of the novel let the reader face themselves in wondering how they would act under such historical and moral circumstances and in knowing that the distance in reading about the historical imagining is not comparable to having lived through the actuality of the event itself. We don’t fully know what it was like. We don’t fully know how we would act.

The author’s purpose in writing this novel stemmed from a fascination with the fact that the Belgian resistance stopped trains and saved hundreds of people, even though some were caught again. For me as a reader, there is irony in coming across a novel that is set within the same historical circumstances of a book I am writing too, one in which a man whom my grandmother had loved was on one of those trains. Collision of the personal, fictional, and historical makes this novel much more profound for me and perhaps others.

I think, within the calamities of our own lives and present circumstances, we would hope that someone would stop the train and get us off. I think we would want to be brave enough and would not fully know how we would act if pushed to the brink to do whatever it took to get our family off the train.

Thank you to Park Row Books for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: Dissonance Engine by David Dowker

By Sara Hailstone

Dissonance Engine by David Dowker is a complex and intriguing book of poetry. The text is divided into four separate sections: 1) Time-Sensitive Material; 2) Chronotope, or Sorrow’s Echo; 3) Glossation; and 4) Orders of Multitudes. Dissonance Engine exists as an intersection between the physical body, language, machination of living, and life’s software programming of behaviour and social constructs. Understood as a “literary Necker cube,” the reader can view life from various two-dimensional cube-faces. Essentially, life in 3D shifts continuously and is not what it appears to be. Amongst this shifting, the reader can slowly glean a way of being: otherworldliness layered with engine and cog, and an ethereal ghostly fabric.

My reading of the text fluctuates between orienting to various schematics and matrices, to striving to find meaning of what Dowker is communicating with the mechanics of his text and message. What human meaning of existing can be extrapolated or achieved in facing the complexity of our lives and bodies functioning as engines of dissonance? Perhaps I can attempt, with this review, to move the conversation along into further acknowledging the meanings that are applied to this complexity and layered contemplation of the human condition.  

David Dowker is the author of three other texts as well as having been the editor of The Alterran Poetry Assemblage from 1996 to 2004. The titles and dates of his texts include Machine Language (2010); Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal, co-written with Christine Stewart (2013); and Mantis (2018). He was born in Kingston, Ontario but lives in Toronto. I did locate two readings of his poetry that Dowker has done on YouTube and highly recommend viewing these clips to access the tone and breadth of his poetic style.

Overall, Dissonance Engine functions as individual components in a machine that make up a whole—these components being the individual parts of the body and sensorial perception, schematics and societal structures, as well as an exploration of the actual mechanics of poetry. Poetics exist autonomously and as abstraction. The body exists as “a mobile eternity,” and a “ghostly double/ inscrutable as/ the encoded night.” In trying to achieve understanding, we wrestle with “the exhausted vault/ of the poetic.” I want, as a reader, to apply this discourse and structure of semantics to thinking and to languages that present in ways that Western society doesn’t primarily orient within. I wonder how an encounter with the engine of dissonance would result thereafter?

I pulled from the text that crouching amidst the cogs of a machine is a general human “eeriness,” or darkness that we try to avoid, smooth over, or repress in the crux of the human living experience. This darkness is encased inside the horror of failing muses, unoriginal and vain existences of imitation and superficial distraction. “The smoothness of the delusion is not an occasion for celebration,” Dowker writes. Further, we, as a human species, do not want “otherness” or “justification,” in our complicated situations. We suffer, quietly and within our ongoing daily life grind, “besotted with multiplicity and within us eeriness.” Despite our shadowed recesses, “our stubborn poetries seek like-minded reveries.” And, in trying to be perfect, or striving to deny our darkness, we become controlled by our “own system of devotion.” Yes, there is complexity of being and functioning; maybe the obstruction of dissonance would be released and pulled through, like a decalcified pineal gland, secreting, pooling, and flowing naturally through rock beds of being. As free as not knowing fully which way the wind will turn. In accepting the dissonance engine do we then briefly feel some harmony?

Contemplating Dowker’s multilayered creation inspires me to imagine the text further, extending beyond the parameters of the machine or block of book to witness ideas and philosophies unfold in real time with a character able to take on the structure of Dowker’s language. With the body as the “Necker Cube,” and the text hinged to a lifeline, how can we witness this body in motion, living and trying to be alive?

Thank you to Book*hug Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: 17 Carnations by Andrew Morton

By Sara Hailstone

Famed celebrity biographer, Andrew Morton, meticulously takes on the wartime life events of Edward VIII and broaches the politically concealed controversies of the royal’s interactions with Hitler and the subsequent cover-up of this uncomfortable chapter of British Royal history with Churchill, the monarchy, and Eisenhower afterwards. Laden with psychoanalytic and historiographical methodology of deconstruction, Morton digs through the topographical workings of a man born into royalty not fully embracing the bloodline and a figure associated with a dangerous political web of power dynamics, anti-Semitism, and defiance. Morton laid the foundation for groundbreaking biographies by revealing the secret world of Princess Diana, expectations of liberating narrative with 17 Carnations, in my opinion, does not illuminate a layer of storyline as ‘the biggest cover-up in history’ or seem fully shocking, or surprising in all facets of a leader and their association with Nazism.

Morton lays the groundwork in understanding how a member of the royal family could conceivably have been roped in by Hitler’s schemes, but the slow-winded unravelling of discussion around ‘The Windsor File,’ and subsequent cover-up, seems folded carefully back into a narrative of control by the crown in keeping one of its members ‘in-check.’ European leaders viewed the Nazi State as modern, and Morton places Edward with his peers: “As for the so-called Jewish question, the prince was, like many of his class; instinctively anti-Semitic—Buckingham Palace did not employ Jews or Catholics in positions of any prominence in the Royal Household until well into Queen Elizabeth Il's reign.” Edward VIII was essentially ‘excommunicated’ to the Bahamas and stripped of his title. The duke’s polemic, as identified by Morton, was to reinstate himself and his scorned American wife, Mrs. Simpson, on the throne. In doing so, the negotiations with Hitler could be a power move.

The title of the text, 17 Carnations, is a reference to a rumour of the number of times Mrs. Simpson and a Nazi diplomat, Joachim von Ribbentrop, were thought to have been intimate. The story is merely gossip, which signifies to me the overall tone of the text as tabloid enmeshed with heavy chronology and historical detail. However, I would have liked to come away from the novel feeling confident about the contents of the cryptic Windsor File that was central in a top-down cover-up by Churchill and Eisenhower.

“The Windsor file exposed that man, his faults, his frailties, and his petty indulgences. He may have been blackballed from the club, but he was once a member of a very exclusive guild of kings and sovereigns without a throne.” Aligning stances like this with citations from the primary document would help transform the text from being a celebrity narrative. Despite the release of the Windsor File in 1957, the duke denied its contents. His story is neatly fitted into a narrative of control and the risk of an almost slip in history when a monarch collaborated with ‘the enemy.’ I do not think Edward VIII’s engagement with Hitler was the biggest cover-up in history. There are far more dangerous and orchestrated cover-ups left undetected, far higher-up organizations, political and economic bodies that likely worked with the Nazi State yet to be fully realized in current imagination. The Vatican, for one, would be a subject that would be ‘the biggest cover-up in history’ by working with Hitler and National Socialism.

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and Andrew Morton for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!  

Book Review: A Leaf Upon a Book by Anam Tariq

By Sara Hailstone

A Leaf Upon a Book is Anam Tariq’s debut poetry collection that gracefully shows a Bildungsroman contemplation of life crafted with a compelling command of language and skill. Influenced by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot, Tariq reveals the potential of contributing her voice to the Romantic literary style.

Tariq completed her M.A. in English at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh, India. She has also had poetry appear in various publications and anthologies.

The lasting impression for me with this book of poetry is the observation and appreciation of the growth of the writer in navigating the English language throughout the body of work. Tariq has ordered the set of poems chronologically, reflecting her evolution as an ESL speaker, which results in an eloquent and surprising encounter with English and literature in a creative way for me as a fellow writer. The diction, word choice, and ordering of words within the poems is refreshing and prompted me to see my mother tongue in new ways. This confrontation with life learning and the English language not typically used in colloquial or mainstream speaking captures the essence and potential of Tariq in her growth as a writer.

I am intrigued to come across future works by the author that pull through an overarching narrative and story throughout the body of poems, like Dionne Brand’s Thirsty.

Thank you to Tariq for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: The Shaytan Bride by Sumaiya Matin

By Sara Hailstone

Content warning: domestic violence, racism, kidnapping

         The Shaytan Bride: A Bangladeshi Canadian Memoir of Desire and Faith is memoir that lyrically follows the courageous self-actualization and fight for her life by Sumaiya Matin, who was essentially held hostage by her family during a trip to Bangladesh and pushed into the prospect of an arranged marriage. Matin resisted the marriage and was helped by the High Commission of Canada to return to Toronto alone. She pursued writing and social work. She is now a part-time psychotherapist and strategic advisor for the Ontario government.

           Matin moved from Dhaka to Ontario when she was six years old, and records with literary eloquence what life was like growing up in Toronto in a post 9/11 discriminatory society. She fell in love with a young man outside of her society and Muslim faith, and she traces the pains of the heart in her adolescence as she navigates the rigid ideological currents of how and who she was supposed to be as a woman within her culture. This young love later advocated for Matin and petitioned her case to the High Commission of Canada.

         Matin expertly crafts the concepts of the jinn and the Shaytan Bride throughout the narrative. In Matin’s world, the woman is afflicted by jinn—demons—and is therefore used up, unable to be folded neatly into society. But Matin brilliantly identifies freedom for women in these wretched states:

Yes, I imagined the Shaytan Bride as forewarning, but not as terrorized by the bad jinns, the sorcerers, her human or non-human lovers, or even the Shaytan, like they said. She moved freely and in ways most others didn’t because they weren’t sure how, or they were afraid, or such freedom of movement existed entirely outside the spectrum of their imaginations.  

She knew, in her own life, the cautionary lesson of the Shaytan Bride was to avoid becoming one. There is no redemption for a woman in love with or touched by a jinn. Obey. Do not become the Shaytan Bride.

        This memoir is important for women. Matin works through the reality of the historical wars waged on women’s bodies. “By them I imagined the bodies of women raped, abandoned, and killed, corpses covered in rotten filth. Their bodies washed over with the echoes of voices of both strangers and kin. It was always the women who got the brunt of it, their bodies the battleground for all the sins.”

Considering the gravity of the adversity that Matin stood against and wrote through, and the mastery of her narrative, The Shaytan Bride should be eligible for awards. The memoir is that well written. It flows with a natural literary voice and has a powerful message for women: that story can shape the trajectory of a life, a life worth protecting and nurturing. Matin honours her inner truth again and again throughout the memoir.

Matin also shows layers of Canadian society that are important for Canadians to face now in turbulent times: our colonized bedrock exposes and isolates vulnerable members of society. Imagine returning from being kidnapped and almost forced into an arranged marriage and not being able to make that reality understood to an academic institution that requires one to pay the full tuition during the missed time. She gracefully and subtly shows the barriers within our country’s infrastructure, which permeate academia, government, and healthcare.

I see the full value of this text in the extension of the life Sumaiya Matin has carved out beyond the page. Her story is not over, she is just beginning. I recommend you follow her on social media to witness the flourishing of The Shaytan Bride as a novel that will most likely contribute to the canon of Canadian literature.

Follow Sumaiya here: @sumaiya.matin

Thank you to Dundurn Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

In Conversation with Jeanette Lynes author of The Apothecary's Garden

With Sara Hailstone

Photo by Matt Braden

The Apothecary’s Garden is set in Belleville, Ontario during the 1860s. With setting being an integral part of any story, why did you choose to set the story here and in this time?

Before I launch into the setting of The Apothecary’s Garden, I want to thank you, Sara, for this interview. From the 2008 – 2017 period, I spent considerable time in Kingston, Ontario, and became interested in the history of that whole area. I studied Canadian literature in university and knew that one of Canada’s prominent nineteenth-century authors, Susanna Moodie, had lived in Belleville. I also became in interested in Spiritualism, and places around Belleville were ‘hot spots’. The famous (or infamous) Fox Sisters, Kate and Maggie, seminal forces of spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, had family ties with Belleville. The town was prominent on the railway line. The train station is still a charming landmark and in general, the ‘old world’ vibe of Belleville appealed to me. In some almost inexplicable way, a place will ‘speak’ to you, almost as if it beckons you to explore it, and Belleville had this pull, for me.

The character Robert, the companion of the medium, has a disfigured face? Did you intend symbolism with Robert’s face? Is symbolism an important literary device in your work?

Good question about Robert’s face. I probably don’t think in terms of symbolism so much as literary tropes, or motifs. The Apothecary’s Garden gestures back to Victorian fiction and even earlier fiction, which had a fascination with deformity – and spectacle. People with physical differences were sometimes put on display as ‘freaks’ and monetized as a form of entertainment. This ‘othering’ is, of course, cruel. Various kinds of people were ridiculed or ‘othered’ in the Victorian world, including certain kinds of women – especially those without financial means - who lived on the margins of society. Those with physical differences. This anxiety around difference was part of that world. Robert’s disfigurement invites empathy and compassion. And on a more basic level, I wanted to avoid the typical, handsome romantic hero – if not ‘avoid’ entirely, because Robert has much about him that is attractive – at least trouble that a little.

You’re a Professor of English and Director, MFA in Writing with the University of Saskatchewan. Given all of your experience, what do you find to be the most challenging aspect in writing a novel and this novel in particular? What do you do to overcome this challenge?

The most challenging aspect of writing a novel is time – finding the time to maintain the discipline to see the project through. Long-form fiction, for me at least, requires regimented, structured writing time, ideally, a daily practice that is very regularized. If you step away from the novel for too long, you grow distant from it. The aim is to keep your head in the world of the story. I wrote the first draft of The Apothecary’s Garden in 2013 and there were periods where I had to set it aside – long periods. It took quite a while to return to the world of that story. I wish I had a secret tip on how to overcome this challenge, other than strategizing which windows of time you have for writing and guarding those windows fiercely because the world always finds a way to claw back your attention and time.  A particular challenge with The Apothecary’s Garden was pandemic lockdowns. I very much wanted to return to Belleville for some immersive research, but lockdowns prevented that. Luckily, my copyeditor is from Belleville – such serendipity! – and helped me with some setting details. All this being said, I’m fortunate that my job as a writing teacher is so closely tied to my passion – writing.

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20 and as writers we can endlessly tweak and adjust our creative projects. Looking back, would you change anything about the novel in terms of plot, setting, and characterization? Or, did The Apothecary’s Garden form exactly as you hoped and intended?

Hindsight, yes. I always had a sense of what mood I wanted to evoke in this novel – melancholy, lush, spooky, and I thought a lot about my late mother and my longing to somehow connect with her. And fairy tales were also part of this affective landscape: Hans Christian Andersen, for example.  So the ‘feeling’ of the novel was always there, but the plot evolved. In hindsight, I’d tie a few of the story’s elements together a bit more.

How much research did you need to do for your book? Did you research some of the more magical attributes to the story? What was your most interesting find?

I undertook a lot of research for this novel, especially the Spiritualism aspect – the magic. But equally, I combed through the newspapers of the period to find, for example, what businesses existed in Belleville. I read accounts of drug remedies in the nineteenth century. Two of the most interesting aspects of my research were: 1) how women physic mediums leveraged their work as a means of agency and empowerment. And 2) the world of pharmaceuticals was wild, unregulated, with all sorts of ‘quack cures’ and dubious substances that were sold. For instance, cocaine tooth drops, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup which contained morphine and alcohol. But I loved all the research, including ladies’ clothing in the mid-nineteenth century.

If there is one thing you hope your readers will take away from The Apothecary’s Garden, what is it? Alternatively, what is your favourite aspect of the novel?

Honestly, I’d like readers to derive pleasure from the story, and immerse in its world. A love story written to entertain might be an antidote to the past two difficult years. Our times are dystopian, but I hope there’s still room for romance and pleasure. My favourite aspect of the novel is escaping to another time and place. And I confess I enjoy romance. This novel allowed me to indulge my inner romantic (laughs).

What is your must-read book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?

It’s so difficult to choose one book that has had the most impact and influence on my writing. But some important authors are Bronwen Wallace, Lucy Maude Montgomery, Alice Munro, and Elizabeth Bishop. My copy of Madness, Rack, and Honey by American poet Mary Ruefle is never far away. Same with Stephen King’s On Writing. And Thomas Hodd’s recent edition of Mary Melville the Psychic proved timely with respect to The Apothecary’s Garden. See, I told you I couldn’t choose one.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors who are trying to navigate the publishing world?

My advice for aspiring authors would be to not fixate on agents – many newer authors tend to do this – but write the best piece you possibly can. Get your work out there. Read at open mics, that sort of thing. Also, talk to other writers. Ask them about their experiences. Joining a writing group can help. Deadlines help (laughs). Above all, try to maintain a regularized writing practice, even if it’s only every Sunday morning. The routinization is so important in making writing an integral part of your life.

Do you have another novel in the works or a new project that you’re working on? When can readers anticipate this?

I’m working on another novel, yes. It’s different, set in 2018, so can’t really be considered ‘historical’. It deals with characters in the latter phase of their lives. It’s never too late for a do-over. Thanks for these great questions, Sara.

Book Review: The Apothecary's Garden by Jeanette Lynes

By Sara Hailstone

Set in 1860 in Belleville, Ontario, The Apothecary’s Garden by Jeanette Lynes stood out to me due to my own connection to this region, having grown up in Madoc, Ontario. The storyline of a young woman, Lavender, her encounter with a celebrity medium, Allegra Trout, and the balancing between the physical and ethereal realms were all things that drew me to this book.

The Apothecary’s Garden is the author’s third novel amongst a set of seven collections of poetry. She has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is also currently the director of the MFA program in writing at the University of Saskatchewan. I predict from the quality of its prose, its rich characterization, and the authenticity of the historical setting that The Apothecary’s Garden will win awards.

Lavender Fitch has grown up in the midst of culture and herbology but she is left poverty-stricken after the deaths of her apothecary father and her mother, a talented harp player. Lavender scrapes by with her resourcefulness, selling homemade wares from her cultivated garden at the market. One day, Belleville is visited by a renowned medium named Allegra Trout and her assistant, Robert Trout, an alluring man with an injured face. Although intimidated by and critical of Allegra’s talents, Lavender nevertheless hopes to use her psychic talents to secure information about a possible secret nest egg that her mother left her from the proceeds of her harp concerts. Through economic adversity, Lavender holds on to forbidden love and the hope for financial security from the actions of her lost mother.

The text flowed nicely and was woven with well-crafted descriptive language of the world of the apothecary, plants, flowers, and the representation of Belleville in the mid-1800s. I was interested in the mention of the Moodie family and their presence in the spiritual medium culture in Belleville, but it would have been exceptional to witness deeper contextualization of the Moodies in the novel. There was also a reference to the infamous Fox sisters, who were known for using “rappings” to convince others that they were communicating with spirits. Lastly, I was inspired by the subtle feminist plot line surfacing and holding fast throughout the duration of the novel. Lavender’s mother is the true ethereal connection between the living and those who have crossed over, with validated instances of hearing her harp playing during certain timings of the plot. The novel, essentially, is about the love of a mother from beyond the grave in ensuring her child is okay in the world without her. The novel is also about the grit and perseverance of a woman labelled a “spinster” who makes her way in the world.

Thank you to HarperCollins Publishers Ltd for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: Maud and Me by Marianne Jones

By Sara Hailstone

With her second published novel, Marianne Jones has presented a story challenging the conventions of what it means to be a woman in northwestern Ontario in the 1980s, especially a minister’s wife, demonstrating just how far women go to connect and reconnect. Published in May 2021 by Crossfield Publishing, a Canadian independent small press, Maud and Me allows readers to navigate the spiritual and emotional depths of the iconic Lucy Maud Montgomery in ways that have not been delved into before. The protagonist, Nicole Leclair, is a middle-aged minister’s wife. Her private struggle with the constraints placed on her by a conservative religious society, as well as what it feels like to be constantly forced into gender constructs and boxes, securely fix the main plotline. The author grew up in Thunder Bay and her personal connection with nature is expressed in the way the protagonist rides out her emotional hardship by grounding herself in nature. The landscape and cliffs of Lake Superior feature stoically in the background of a controlled, unravelling plot.

In following Nicole’s daily repression and the conformity demanded of her as a minister’s wife, the reader is shown in parallel another layer to the humanity of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The public knew about her struggles with her husband’s mental health and the plight of her son, Chester. “I took refuge in doing my duty. It’s remarkable how stable that will keep one through life’s crises. And when my duties became too much, I turned to my imagination."

We, in turn, get to imagine an element of Maud’s emotional fabric that was not present in her own journal writings or her fiction. The depth that Jones delves to sympathizes with both women as wives of ministers and women with artistic passion. "No, what troubled me more was Ewen’s attitude toward my writing. He never read any of my books, never exhibited any interest in my writing, even though it paid for his automobiles and our sons’ education, and many expenses that his salary did not cover. He resented any attention or praise I received for my writing. It hurt deeply, especially since I supported him fully in his work.”

Both Maud and Nicole are artists, whether writing or painting, and they are both quietly struggling with the constructs that religious roles place on them artistically.

The seamless integration of Maud into the events and characterization hints at magic realism. I wonder, even after reading (and perhaps this questioning is also what accentuates the reading experience), at how smoothly Maud’s character fits into the narrative even though I’m not convinced it is believable. Maud fully arrives later in the novel when Nicole is pushed to the edge of her emotional capacity from putting on constant fronts of being okay within an emotionally and socially constricting lifestyle. The relationship evolves and is strained by the humanity and personal essence of both women in confrontation and in connection with each other.

The protagonist challenges Maud in ways we wouldn’t expect a Canadian icon to be made vulnerable; I argue this is a strength of the text and of Jones’s literary skill. Maud stops appearing when Nicole faces the crux of her problems and begins reckoning, organizing, and confronting what is upsetting her. No other characters ever know of Maud’s appearances to Nicole. The narrative point of view does not spend extensive time on justifying or realizing the plausibility of Maud appearing at all. Nicole chalks it up to a hallucination and the encounter resonates with biblical and religious moments she knows others have had with saints and miraculous apparitions. These women are “kindred spirits.” Both “pressed upon by people and their demands, and yet…have no one to really talk to—that was heavy to bear.” They are women in parallel: minister’s wives, artists, women in pain, and women concealing that pain.

There is a saying, The best stories are the ones that never get told. Jones contributes to the creative and literary persona of Maud as a Canadian icon—one in pain and locked in a prison of opiate abuse and mental illness. And another layer is laid down; another element of her story that was not told is imagined. She becomes more real to us than simply a national persona who carefully censored and privately hid the extent of pain she faced every single day. 

Thank you to Marianne Jones for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

Book Review: In the Writers' Words (Volume II) by Laurence Hutchman

By Sara Hailstone

Freshly published in 2022 by Guernica Editions, In the Writer’s Words: Conversations with Ten Canadian Poets, Volume II editor and creator Laurence Hutchman has presented a quietly relevant text that could potentially contribute to and shift the tone of the current conversations revolving around CanLit at this time. Writers in this second volume include Brian Bartlett, Roo Borson, George Elliott Clarke, M. Travis Lane, John B. Lee, Daniel Lockhart, Bruce Meyer, Al Moritz, Sue Sinclair, and Colleen Thibaudeau. Hutchman asks each writer to speak to their lives, issues within Canadian society that potentially inform their writing, historical events, influences, style, and lastly, the inspiration that fuels their poetry writing. As a writer, I was inspired by this volume, in delving into other writers’ styles, and I found that I took away many discussions on writing, convention, and issues within CanLit that I would teach and borrow from as a resource in an English classroom. 

First, I loved the use of transforming haiku into a verb, “haikuing,” with Brian Bartlett in his interview on his essay about the style of poetry. I hadn’t encountered this verbiage before and would refer to these segments of the interview when teaching poetry. Bartlett states that “Haiku need a delicate balance between solidity and ellipsis, substance and suggestion, speech and silence. A haiku needs to give enough, but not too much; overwritten haiku stumble, but underwritten haiku are static.” I found, too, I was inspired throughout the interviews by how the writing process was shown differently according to each author’s personality. John B. Lee remarked that, “Writing is a discovery and a rediscovery of things that I already knew, but forgot, or that I never knew or that I didn’t really know that I knew. Poetry is more profound than conversation.” The compilation further contributes to current and necessary conversations in the field of CanLit. 

D.A. Lockhart writes about the history of his nation and the deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools, adding a sense of urgency and humanity to the text. The recent discovery of the graves of Indigenous children at former Canadian residential schools and the need for reconciliation are two significant topics mentioned by the writer. With the need for our Canadian society to work to connect more fully with nature, Lockhart writes that “the hope with these lyric essays was to capture something truthful about the world we’ve come to inhabit and are gifted by creation. The poet is naturally the speaker across so many cultures. So, it was natural to assume the role, one must find their way into situations that one wants to discuss.”

Indeed, this tone works through the manifesting powers of prayer and language, but also functions to kick “at the edges of decolonization. There is a great deal to learn from the space between languages.” Lockhart ends on a powerful note that should push the industry of CanLit into a space of more fully including Indigenous literature—if that space is where Indigenous Lit wants to be— that, “if anything could be said of actual Indigenous folks it is that we are survivors. Surviving is something to be both happy and hopeful about.” Survival is a powerful term. The reality was that Indigenous authors were excluded from this national work which further reinforced caricature and stereotype in literature. This compilation gives space to a reclamation and reconciliation in CanLit for Indigenous readers and writers. 

Book Review: Refuse edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker

By Sara Hailstone

Content warning: sexual assault

Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, co-edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker, is a compilation of nonfiction and fiction texts writing through the pain and uncomfortable state of CanLit as deemed by contributor Alicia Elliott as a ”raging dumpster fire.” Assertively and unapologetically writing through layers of what it means to ”refuse” the current state of CanLit, this text will be, I assume, included on syllabi and course outlines across Canadian university English departments. With contributions by Zoe Todd, Keith Maillard, Jane Eaton Hamilton, kim goldberg, Tanis MacDonald, Gwen Benaway, Lucia Lorenzi, Alicia Elliott, Sonnet l’Abbé, Marie Carrière, Kai Cheng Thom, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Natalee Caple & Nikki Reimer, Lorraine York, Chelsea Vowel, Laura Moss, Phoebe Wang, A.H. Reaume, Jennifer Andrews, Kristen Darch & Fazeela Jiwa, Erika Thorkelson, and Joshua Whitehead, Refuse gives space for diverse stances on contemporary CanLit controversies that have arisen since 2016. The text offers anticipation of what will be built and what will grow from the “ruins of” this country’s state of literature.

Refuse, as in, to say “no.” No to the #UBCAccountable letter that essentially created a class war further accentuating the divisions within CanLit as an industry, as an area of academic study, as a history of writing of a settler country that has been exclusive in nature, and as a continued discourse forward into a future of plurality and the end of literary celebrity. No to sexual harassment. No to the Appropriation Prize and no to the debates about Joseph Boyden’s identity claims. These current controversies fix the core of the conversations within the text. 

Refuse also, as in waste, “what wastes our time, and our lives as writers and teachers, is the kind of endorsement of the status quo that we want to see taken out of CanLit.” 

Refuse, lastly, to reconnect and fix “what has been torn apart, evoking the idea that, after something is destroyed, something better can take its place.” There is a desire to dismantle and rebuild from ruin; I wonder if that is fully possible. 

The play on words with Refuse as a title works well creatively and from a space of literary analysis, however, and this feeling extends beyond the perimeters of the text itself, I don’t know if I see CanLit as a raging dumpster fire. I see the fire raging in the crowds of Canada’s publishing industry, but I separate industry from art. The analogy is not creeping into me fully. 

The compilation includes a break within the analysis by Laura Moss: “I pause here to disentangle "CanLit" as a noun synecdoche of all that is broken in the writing industry and the academy from "CanLit" as a short-form term that refers to the history of writing in Canada.” Moss has been teaching CanLit for over twenty years and is an editor of the journal Canadian Literature. Her tone is one I encountered throughout my studies at the University of Guelph in English (2005-2009) and at Trent University in the Public Texts Graduate program (2018-2020), one of a social historical lens of Canadian literature. In studying ”minoritized literatures” I felt my studies were critical in calling me to action to question the bedrock and pillars of discourses in Canada that have been historically and socially racist and exclusive, while appreciating a contemporary and resilient literary thread of experiment, exploration, and reclamation. Like Laura Moss, I refuse to give up on CanLit. I’m grateful my university studies in CanLit do not feel homogenous. 

The compilation strives to leave the reader hopeful for what will grow from the ruins, or ash, of that raging dumpster fire. The necessary conversations have been laid down with an inclusion of voices from social media. I would be inspired for the extension of these conversations in Refuse to move us deeper into the literary and creative. A play of words on the analogy of CanLit as “surviving” could also serve to move us deeper as we have been doing more in this country than getting by and holding on. I am hopeful for more conversation, more analogy, more motif, and more creating. 

Book Review: Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

By Sara Hailstone

Content warning: Death, murder, addiction and drug use, racism, sexual violence, intergenerational trauma

The focus of reviewing Eden Robinson’s 2000 debut novel, Monkey Beach, is to acknowledge and highlight the power of activating textual layers of magic realism in providing a pathway of shamanism and spiritual components of the Haisla Nation throughout the book. Robinson guides her readers on this journey while simultaneously withholding the sacred power of knowing. What cumulates in this traditionally perceived coming-of-age narrative is an understanding of a young female protagonist’s reclamation of a way of being lost to immense colonial folds. 

Robinson set Monkey Beach in 1989 in her own hometown of Kitamaat Village, BC. The reader follows the fraught actions of 19-year-old Lisamarie, who learns of her brother’s disappearance and suspected drowning while working away on a fishing boat. Without her parents knowing, Lisamarie sets out on her own to find Jimmy. 

While trekking the Douglas Channel alone on an outboard, Lisamarie works through memories of lost loved ones. The reader is pulled through this narrative point-of-view of a close-knit family legacy of death, trauma, suicide, accident, and the immense bonds of love. Triggered, Lisamarie pushes through emotions of drug abuse, rape, and her mental health. Through this narrative weaving and intermingling of Lisamarie’s worldview, Robinson successfully evokes a multi-dimensioned existence of the supernatural, spiritual, and physical. Monkey Beach is a shaman story. 

“Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness…To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.” 

Thus, Robinson threads throughout shifting timeframes of the present and past with spiritual teachings and conceptualizations of life that in reality transform the structure of the text itself into an awakening process. In combination with the polished execution of elements of magic realism is Robinson’s way of artistically and brilliantly pulling Lisamarie and the reader through a process of essential reclamation and, in my opinion, empowerment. 

In connection with the vibrancy of the land itself, Lisamarie’s world is ethereal and vividly layered. Supernatural beings like the B’gwus, or sasquatch make appearances, and she communicates with other Haisla spiritual beings through dreams, visions, and sightings. Lisamarie walks with the dead and the overlaying of an ethereal matrix with the young woman’s confrontation of colonial psychological and Western clinical views of mental illness and personality disorder. 

“Contacting the dead, lesson three. Seeing ghosts is a trick of concentration. You must be able to concentrate on nothing and everything at the same time.”

Her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo’s guidance and passing on of Haisla knowledge is also an initiation of shamanism. Lisamarie is instructed in the history of the Haisla people, herbology, walking in the way of the existence of the dead, translating the synchronicity of the appearance of supernatural phenomena and the realization and actualization of her power. “I felt deeply comforted knowing that magical things were still living in the world.” Two strong female characters, the learning and teachings carried out between Ma-ma-oo and Lisamarie prepare her best to journey after her missing brother.

The enthralling and magical components of Robinson’s writing is that the plotline embodies a West Coast mythology of the Spirit Canoe travelling to the Land of the Dead. Lisamarie journeys and navigates spiritual realms fully and risks being lost there. “Never mind about [Jimmy] now. Go back. You’ve come too far into this world. Go back,” she is warned upon reaching the dead’s shores and witnesses her ancestors dancing around a bonfire. Lisamarie is left on these shores at the end of the novel, existing multi-dimensionally, both rooted in the visceral and hooked to the ethereal. Regardless, my interpretation is that she is existing and more fully actualized than before her journey to find Jimmy. “I lie on the sand. The clamshells are hard against my back. I am no longer cold. I am so light I could just drift away. Close, very close, a B'gwus howls—not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between. The howl echoes off the mountains. In the distance, I hear the sound of a speedboat.” Lisamarie is the plotline incarnate, a keeper of memory, a mediator of worlds, a practitioner of magic, ‘something in between.’