Reviews

Sea of Tranquility

Ragged Island, Lesley Choyce’s fictional community off the Nova Scotia mainland, has survived centuries of various economic catastrophes through the entrepreneurial inventiveness of its inhabitants. Recent ventures include Phonse Doucette’s shoot-’em-up junkyard and Moses Slaunwhite’s ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Grasslands

By Michael Hetherton

A woman named Sunny in one of Michael Hetherton’s stories calls a man “iceberg head,” but it’s not an insult. She means – or hopes – there’s more beneath the surface than meets the eye. ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Short

The Cure of Folly: A Psychiatrist’s Cautionary Tale

By Gordon Warme

With his book The Cure of Folly, University of Toronto psychiatry professor Gordon Warme attempts to recast the practice of psychiatry as “soul care,” an idea close to its roots, rather than a dubious science ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Hard Boiled Love: An Anthology of Noir Love

By Kerry Schooley and Peter Sellers, eds.

Hard Boiled Love, the follow-up to last year’s Iced anthology of noir fiction, gets off to a shaky start, but ends up succeeding on the strength of four or five solid tales and one unexpected ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Anthologies

★ Choosing His Coffin

By Austin Clarke

“We are all lost,” a preacher shouts from a car radio at a son and mother in the title story of Choosing His Coffin, a collection of 20 of Austin Clarke’s best short stories. The ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values

By Michael Adams

An innocuous, unarmed United States with health care – this is what Canada is to many. However, according to Michael Adams’ second book, Fire and Ice (much less intriguingly titled than his first, Sex in ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Working Class Zero

By Rob Payne

One of the challenges facing the contemporary novelist is to capture the complexities and absurdities of modern life without boring the reader. Rob Payne manages to do this and make us laugh too. In Working ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Hey Nostradamus!

By Douglas Coupland

Hey Nostradamus! is one of Douglas Coupland’s minor-key efforts. It doesn’t have the operatic heft of All Families Are Psychotic or the poppin’ fresh teen spirit of such earlier works as Microserfs. If anything, Coupland ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

When She Was Electric

By Andrea MacPherson

When She Was Electric, a first novel from Vancouver author Andrea MacPherson, suffers from a sense of familiarity, a reliance on structural clichés that damages, almost irrevocably, this otherwise interesting debut. MacPherson’s narrative treads perilously ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

By Ray Robertson

Ray Robertson is a novelist (best known for his long goodbye to the 1960s, Moody Food), teacher at the University of Toronto, book reviewer, TV pundit, and, most importantly, a perceptive, light-on-his-feet heavyweight critic and ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

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