Highlights of the season’s books for young people
By Vanessa Bonneau
Reviews
Librarian Jessie Loyer on the publication of the report by McGill-Queen’s University Press and the role of Canadian libraries in reconciliation.
By Jessie Loyer
Our featured Montreal illustrator is Ohara Hale, a multi-disciplinary artist whose books for children include the five titles in her Who Did It? series.
By
Mend the Living, here translated into English by Jessica Moore, explores the processes, both physical and emotional, that surround a heart transplant.
By Aimee Wall
My earliest exposure to Montreal’s literary scene came in the late 1990s, when, as a new arrival to the city, I started going to YAWP!, the spoken word/performance poetry/live music series hosted at various venues around town. Several of these events happened at Bistro4, an unassuming bar on Saint-Laurent around the corner from the apartment where I experimented with Stoicism and made my own soy milk.
By Anna Leventhal
Irish historians – and Irish people in general – are currently revisiting important moments in their national past as part of the hundred-year anniversaries of the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence and Civil War. Donald Akenson’s new book also seeks to revisit and revise a formative moment in the Irish past, albeit one that has been mostly forgotten: the emergence in the 1830s of a distinctly Irish variant of apocalyptic Evangelical Protestantism.
By Aidan Beatty
This season's selection of poetry collection.
By Abby Paige
In the 1970s, Marguerite Andersen compiled one of the first feminist anthologies in Quebec, Mother Was Not a Person. Many books later, on the cusp of her ninth decade, she picked up her pen again to reconsider one mother in particular: herself.
By Elise Moser
From the very first page, Police Wife sensitizes readers to the horrors of domestic violence, highlighting the extra challenges faced by victims of officer-batterers, such as when 911 calls are answered by the aggressor’s colleagues.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
The fascinating story of how contemporary activists learn from each other and disseminate their knowledge is still being unravelled by acad- emia, as well as by social movements themselves. In Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements, Aziz Choudry,an activist-turned-academic and professor in McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, pays homage to the intellectual work that is inherently produced and circulated when people get together to challenge oppressive systems.
By Patricia Boushel
What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen’s debut collection of short stories won the 2012 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and marked her as a young writer to watch. Her second collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers.
By Katia Grubisic
An elaborately coiffed woman, an intricate tapestry, and a woodblock sinking ship on the cover promise a story of love, history, and war. And Louis Carmain’s Guano delivers assuredly on all counts. But there’s also an off-white splotch that closer inspection reveals to be bird shit, a commodity once valuable enough to spark the minor war that provides the backdrop for this unsanitized yet sparkling historical novel with a sly contemporary feel.
By Pablo Strauss