Reviews

Summers in Supino: Becoming Italian

It is impossible to approach a book entitled Summers in Supino: Becoming Italian without wary anticipation of the cloying pastoral scenes found in the likes of a Frances Mayes novel. Thankfully, the follow-up to Maria ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Bilingual Being: My Life as a Hyphen

By Kathleen Saint-Onge

In her debut memoir, teacher and linguist Kathleen Saint-Onge details her fraught relationship with her native languages, English and French. Appropriately, Bilingual Being is itself written in two “languages”: prose and poetry. The latter tackles ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

By Lee Smolin

Explaining cutting-edge physics to non-physicists is a nearly impossible task. Compounding the problem is the fact that physics is grounded in mathematics, and because key concepts have to be put into layperson’s terms and illustrated ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent

By Denyse Beaulieu

In mostly breathless, giddy prose, Denyse Beaulieu, a Canadian who has made Paris her home for many years, attempts to combine the history of perfume with her own experience of it. Beaulieu writes about perfume ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Firebird

By Susanna Kearsley

Successfully blending a contemporary romance with an historical adventure is no easy task, but in The Firebird, author Susanna Kearsley goes one step further, bestowing supernatural abilities upon her protagonist. Since birth, Nicola Marter has ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Under Budapest

By Ailsa Kay

The legacy of Soviet aggression against Hungary is very much apparent in Ailsa Kay’s arresting debut novel. While the book’s early chapters resemble a treatise on how academia and “lived experience” are liable to interpret ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Flee, Fly, Flown

By Janet Hepburn

Janet Hepburn’s first novel could be dismissed as simply Thelma & Louise for the Canadian geriatric set: two elderly women escape from their nursing home in Ottawa, pick up a young male vagrant, and embark ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

In the Land of Birdfishes

By Rebecca Silver Slayter

In her debut novel, Rebecca Silver Slayter employs no fewer than five unreliable narrators in the service of a bleak story of twin sisters from Nova Scotia who are separated after bearing witness to their ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother

By Helen Humphreys

Loss is an open wound, a pain so enormous we reflexively turn away from it to keep from breaking. To examine grief would be to welcome the pain, to keep it alive. In her new ... Read More »

April 15, 2013 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography

The Hungry Ghosts

By Shyam Selvadurai

“In Sri Lankan myth, a person is reborn as a peréthaya because, during his human life, he desired too much.… The peréthayas that appear to us are always our ancestors, and it is our duty ... Read More »

April 8, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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