This is the kind of book I would love to be excited about. Casselman’s prose is full of righteous anger, directed at the numberless tentacles of patriarchy that have limited women’s social, economic, sexual, and personal freedom.
By Anna Leventhal
Reviews
Exploring the dark side of the maternal and matrimonial experience is both relevant and valuable, and Akerman is to be commended for her choice of subject matter. But by populating her tales with bitter, resentful, powerless, and almost uniformly unhappy female characters, the author catalogues the weaknesses of women while largely failing to celebrate their courage and strength.
By B. A. Markus
Ravvin’s precise tonal control keeps the book fascinating; the unexpected stringing-together of odd incidents develops a curious sense of meaning. Nevertheless, the quiet elegance of the structure occasionally seems forced and tends to make the book’s more obvious moments seem even more obvious.
By Matthew Surridge
Door weaves the journeys of several human characters – Aydee, Lucas, and Sandra – against a fantastical background of altered states of consciousness (and even states of identity), which seem to involve visits to a world of large, menacing creatures – part myth, part machine, part human.
By Louise Fabiani
This gives the book an authentic feel, and provides the reader with the inside scoop (on insecurities, on sex – the usual topics that make a diary a juicy read).
By Vanessa Bonneau
The stories are tight, economical, and each sentence has been nursed and carefully crafted. Spry has an ear for slang and tone; whether it’s a demented orderly or a young woman at rehab, he gets it right.
By Vanessa Bonneau
Alice Zorn’s debut novel Arrhythmia is an ambitious, deftly handled exploration of human beings in love. Far from stuttering along as its title might seem to suggest, it seldom misses a beat.
By Claire Holden Rothman
What constitutes a person other than a collection of memories, both those acquired in one’s own lifetime and those passed down through generations? If you strip someone of his memories, do you strip him of his soul? And if memories are the very building blocks of humanity, who decides what to construct?
By Kimberly Bourgeois
There are ways in which biographies, interesting ones at any rate, act as reference points; for better or worse, they turn a life (whether typical or atypical) into a marker for a particular historical moment, or use it to summarize events too complex for readers to grasp in other ways. Though this is not their only effect, it is a compelling one.
By Peter Dubé
André Pratte is the editor-in-chief of La Presse. His newest book, Wilfrid Laurier, is part of the Extraordinary Canadians series, published by Penguin Canada and edited by John Ralston Saul, that aims to provide historical insight into our own times.
By Anne Legacé-Dowson
So, girl dates cad. Girl leaves cad. Girl trips serendipitously over business card. Girl buys into expensive arranged-marriage service. Marriage is arranged. Newly-met husband turns out to be knave. Girl leaves knave. Arranged husband professes love, knaveship is overturned. Ta-dah!
By Katia Grubisic
Sylvia Weisler, age thirty-three, published writer of a book of poetry, is tackling a new subject in earnest. Her next book will be about newspaper-based personal ads, she has decided.
By Sarah Lolley