Reviews

★ A History of Reading

I’ve long been devoted to books like Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, books that gather around a single subject and with the help of history and literature and a sympathetic sensibility of their own, illuminate it ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley

By Lorna Crozier

A Saving Grace, the latest book from celebrated Prairie (and now B.C.) poet Lorna Crozier, is an ambitious collection of revisitation and recidivism. As the subtitle, The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley, suggests, Crozier adopts ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Poetry

White Crane Spreads Wings

By Gary Hyland

The deft formalism of this collection, combined with a lively eye for detail, makes White Crane Spreads Wings a pleasure. Though intimate or personal subjects may be treated, each of the poems here is allowed ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Poetry

Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax with

By Susan Swan

Reading Susan Swan is often exhilarating. Her first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, was a delight and, thankfully, the second half of Stupid Boys – “Cyber Tales” – has a similar sense ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Englishman’s Boy

By Guy Vanderhaeghe

In Guy Vanderhaeghe’s latest novel, The Englishman’s Boy, two seemingly disparate narratives intersect to form an impressive whole. Related in alternating chapters, the first tale centres on the Englishman’s boy, a young man who ends ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Word of Mouth

By M.A.C. Farrant

B.C. writer M.A.C. Farrant has worked as a social worker, a child-care worker, and an accountant. And at various points in Word of Mouth, her fourth book of short fiction, it all shows – for ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Angel Walk

By Katherine Govier

The wide-angled scope of Angel Walk, spanning a half-dozen decades and the world from Parry Sound to Nagasaki, doubtless explains why this is Katherine Govier’s first novel in five years. It reprises a chaotic century ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Chump Change

By David Eddie

This is a funny book, though it may fetch bigger laughs than mine from the generation whose idiom it speaks and whose purported ennui it celebrates. Chump Change is a coming-of-age novel with a hero ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Kerouac’s Ghost

By Ken McGoogan

Back in 1993, Ken McGoogan, literary editor of the Calgary Herald, published a novel called Visions of Kerouac. This was an ebullient, unapologetically Kerouac-obsessed coming-of-age story. Its hero and main narrator, Frankie McCracken, was a ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Alias Grace

By Margaret Atwood

A new novel by Margaret Atwood will sell, and be discussed, regardless of its critical reception and, one suspects, largely regardless of the book itself. Such are the wages of fame. And while I am ... Read More »

March 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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