A selection of this spring's new books for children and young adults.
By B. A. Markus
Reviews
n 1932 – as Hitler was paving his rise to power in Germany – the great Canadian Jewish poet A. M. Klein declared ...
By Elaine Kalman Naves
Panther, by cartoonist Brecht Evens, is a colourful and sombre psychological thriller about the troubling relationship between a small girl and a fantastical creature.
By Eloisa Aquino
The Company of Crows begins with thirteen-year-old Veronica Reid and her father driving to the Laughing Willows Trailer Park where their family will spend the summer, her father commuting from the city on weekends. It’s a spot where the family can get away, and escape is a prominent thread throughout the book.
By Deanna Radford
In his introduction to A View from the Porch, Avi Friedman espouses his “firm belief that homes and neighborhoods are first and foremost about people.” This view unites the collection of twenty-two essays, and makes his subject – the often-rarefied spheres of architecture and design – highly accessible.
By Patricia Maunder
Teaching Plato in Palestine opens with a bold thesis: “Can philosophy save the Middle East? It can.” It’s an ambitious statement, but McGill philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel’s real objective is slightly humbler: he makes the case that philosophy can offer a language to help communities in conflict find common ground to overcome their differences.
By Emily Raine
A look at this fall's selection of poetry.
By Jaime Forsythe
Twenty-eight. That’s the number I can’t get out of my head. There are a lot of figures and statistics in Wade Rowland’s cir de cœur for the decline to near-terminal status of the once proud and nation-defining CBC, but for this reader the one that jumped off the page and put it all in perspective appears in a breakdown of the comparative per capita subsidy for public broadcasting among countries who have such things.
By Ian McGillis
The written histories of cities usually tell the big stories, hashing out biographies of visionary men building things and founding things and fighting one another for the spoils. In Beyond Brutal Passions, Mary Anne Poutanen delves into the details to create a portrait of Montreal’s early nineteenth-century prostitutes, scouring city archives for moments when the lives of these mostly forgotten women intersected with official public record.
By Emily Raine
Few figures are as stirring – and heroic – as a servant, walking a dangerous but noble path, abandoned by the very people who called him to it. We may not be capable of such idealism, but it reminds us of what faithfulness looks like. And the tragedies that usually accompany such missions show us true sacrifice and heroism.
By Matthew R. Anderson
Named for its author’s hometown, Samuel Archibald’s debut short-story collection Arvida is a grab bag of family lore, tall tales, idle boasts, and dark secrets – the kind of stories usually told around a kitchen table or campfire before vanishing into the night air like smoke.
By Pablo Strauss
Employing a variety of experimental techniques in style and structure, Daniel Allen Cox’s fourth novel, Mouthquake, details the queer coming-of-age of a stuttering young man in Montreal.
By Jeff Miller