Category: Reviews
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Review: Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
Afia Atakora’s debut novel, set in the rural South, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, is a complex exploration of the deeply held tensions and continual trials that infuse a small, isolated community of former slaves. The story centres around Rue, who has inherited the position of midwife and healer from her mother,…
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Review: Lakewood by Megan Giddings
When Lena Johnson is invited to participate in a research study that will pay all her bills and provide for a future that is beyond comfortable, it is an impossible offer to pass up. A college student whose grandmother passed away leaving a pile of medical bills, and whose mother, Deziree, suffers from a mysterious…
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Review: Away! Away! by Jana Beňová
I had the great pleasure of reviewing Jana Beňová’s award-winning novella Seeing People Off a couple of years ago, over at Necessary Fiction. It is an excellent, genre-defying, language-experimenting work with a compelling woman at its centre. So I was very excited to pick up Away! Away! Which is similarly genre-defying, language-experimenting, and also driven…
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Review: Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus
There’s no need to introduce Jane Yolen, writer of children’s and young adult books whose name was pretty much all over my childhood book shelves. She is most famous for writing folklore and fantasy, reinventing classic tales and often paired with illustrators whose work will look immediately familiar to any child of the 90’s. This…
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Review: Life in the Court of Matane by Éric Dupont (translated by Peter McCambridge)
Any book prefacing itself with the claim that “to understand this novel, readers must listen to ‘Little Earthquakes’ [by Tori Amos] and ‘Pointant le nord’ [by Pierre LaPointe]” is a book that already has the deck stacked significantly in its favour for me. There is probably a lot to love about a book for whom…
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Review: Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun
A wholly engrossing, impressive debut by a writer who has taken the force of multiple influences and wielded them with an uncommon grace and lightness.
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Review: Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday
Set in the world of violent conflict arising from divisive attempts by sectarian splinter groups to define and put into practice a fundamentalist form of Islam, Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (Grove Press) can feel all too familiar at times. It echoes the news of kidnapped schoolgirls and the profiles of young men who leave their homes…
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Review : The Book of Speculation and The Mermaid Girl
Erika Swyler’s first novel The Book of Speculation has a lot of things to recommend it: a reclusive archivist, mysterious tomes, a jolly antiquarian bookkeeper, mermaids, tarot cards, beach scenes, sibling rivalry, extramarital affairs, and the strange and delicious insanity that comes from loss of employment. There’s a bit of romance too. Also some love.…
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Review: The Surrender
It is nearly too perfect that the French word genre denotes both literary genre and gender. For if Scott Esposito’s quietly powerful essays found in The Surrender do not defy genre, they certainly do reveal the plasticity of memoir and then stretch the form to its limits. Somewhat the same could be said for the author’s own exploration of gender. In this book, the acclaimed critic…
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How to Feel Like a Visitor in Your Everyday World
Guys, we need to talk about Leena Krohn. As a longtime fan of Tove Jansson (creator of the Moomins) and Aki Kaurasmaki (go check out the Proletariat Trilogy and Le Havre right now), I was curious to see what other weird-and-wonderfuls Finland had to offer. Turns out, Finland has so much to offer and we’re just waiting…
Indirect Libre 