Frédérick Lavoie’s For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone, translated by Donald Winkler, provides a portrait of Ukraine in the pivotal months surrounding the unseating of President Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent division of Ukraine into a pro-Europe west and a pro-Russia east. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 led to outright war between Russian separatist forces (a combination of Ukrainian rebels and imported Russian troops) in the Donbas region and the Ukrainian government.
It’s amazing to learn, from this compelling and comprehensive book, that there are as many Americans claiming French-Canadian ancestry today as there are Canadians, about ten million on each side of the border. Those in Canada are descendants of French colonists who settled in the St. Lawrence Valley (and elsewhere) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those in the United States are the heirs of nearly a million French-Canadians, mostly from Quebec, who relocated in the period from 1865 to 1930 to work in the shoe factories and paper plants and especially the cotton mills in dozens of New England towns and cities.
In analyzing the writing, art, film, fiction, and facts surrounding the so-called Oka Crisis of the 1990s in Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature, Isabelle St-Amand shows that history is explored via many winding, complex, and at times contradictory paths and not the broad boulevards historic winners stroll in their victory parades.
In this collection of both previously published and new Woman World comics, Dhaliwal serves up slice-of-life anecdotes of a village of women many years after the male species has died out and the planet has been ravaged by a series of natural disasters. Although this post-apocalyptic theme may come across as dark, most of the strips are light and hilarious, addressing issues such as identity, solitude, love, and anxiety, with some occasional angst about the survival of the species.
As a child, Gravel thought she would be either a teacher or a rock ’n’ roll star. Now all grown up, she’s become one of the most successful author-illustrators of kids’ books in Quebec, part of a vibrant scene that includes such stars as Marie-Louise Gay and Mélanie Watt.
Since its publication in 2014, Eric Dupont’s La Fiancée américaine has sold more than sixty thousand copies in Quebec. Using sales figures as any kind of metric for artistic worth is a slippery slope, of course. But the number above is worth pondering for several reasons. Check the shelves in just about every household in Quebec with any inclination toward literary fiction and you will find a copy of Dupont’s novel. It’s the Thriller or ABBA’s Greatest Hits of its world, with a popular reach most serious writers stopped dreaming of decades ago.
