Search
Hollywood North paints a dark portrait of Trenton, Ontario. This institutional port town is a gateway to the Trent-Severn Waterway and Prince Edward County, and it has a storied history as an epicentre for tragedy. Author Michael Libling pushes his hometown’s reputation to the extreme, and he would have us believe it to be the township of Quinte’s own Bermuda Triangle, with a forever-burning creosote plant, tragic fires, unexplained plane crashes, wartime losses, train derailments, drownings (so many drownings!), and various traffic accidents.
Review by []
By Natalia Yanchak
The cover of Aphelia features an out-of-focus photograph of a young woman. In the gauzy light, few of her features are visible beyond an outline of shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a smudge where her mouth should be. This haunting image neatly symbolizes the novel’s central character, whose name we never learn.
Review by []
By Jeff Miller
Georges Sioui’s Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy promises to retell the history of Canadian democracy by tracing its origins back to Indigenous confederations that pre-existed the arrival of Europeans. It’s an exciting promise. Closely related to this effort is a second goal, which is to challenge the Canadian textbook histories that he finds grant an outsized role to the Hodenosaunee Confederacy and ignore the Wendat Confederacy almost completely.
Review by ["Jocelyn Parr"]
By Jocelyn Parr
Throughout modern history, the concept of hygiene has shifted, going from mere outward appearance (distinguishing the rich who had time and money to get their clothes washed from the poor who didn’t) to the idea of cleanliness for health (with the discovery of germs) before becoming an easily purchased sign of beauty and a daily routine.
Review by []
By Mélanie Grondin
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, the award-winning author of Grass, is known for both her work about the marginalized and for her manhwa, a South Korean comic style. Grass is a graphic work of non-fiction about a former comfort woman, Lee Ok-sun, during World War II.
Review by []
By Heather Leighton
This season's selection of poetry collections.
Review by ["Katia Grubisic"]
By Katia Grubisic
This season's selection of books for young readers
Review by []
By Bronwyn Averett
Éric Mathieu’s The Little Fox of Mayerville is a coming-of-age tale that follows the life of Émile Claudel, a young outcast born into a small village in France in 1945. Although he exhibits many of the traits of a burgeoning genius, Émile is brought up in a traditional home where children are meant to be seen and not heard. Told through a series of vignettes of varying lengths comprised of both prose and poetic verse, the novel offers an intimate glimpse into the mind of a young boy who yearns to belong.
Review by ["Anya Leibovitch"]
By Anya Leibovitch
In Martin Lukacs’s The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent, the political and rhetorical interchangeability between the country’s two largest parties is shown to have never been as apparent as with the rise of the Trudeau brand over the past fifty years.
Review by ["Patricia Gu00e9linas Boushel"]
By Patricia Gélinas Boushel
First, we’re expelled from the garden, then
slavery, the ten plagues ...
By Ken Victor
Living through dread is usually an extremely uncomfortable experience, whether in life or art. Sometimes in art, discomfort is the point, horror movies being an easy example. In The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, translated by Pablo Strauss, Matthieu Simard tacks the ship of dread in a different direction. For the most part, it is a pleasurable book, the dread passing by like a quiet late summer day in the countryside, with neat sentences paced nicely with more indulgently pretty or philosophical ones.
Review by ["P.T. Smith"]
By P.T. Smith
The stories in Vita, Susan E. Lloy’s second collection, are imperfect; in this book, that might be the point.
Review by ["Quinn Mason"]
By Quinn Mason