BOOK REVIEWS

The Power of Style: How Fashion and Beauty Are Used to Reclaim Cultures

The mainstream fashion industry often excludes those who do not conform to its norms, which can leave people on the outside feeling less than beautiful. In The Power of Style, Christian Allaire, fashion and style ... Read More »

April 22, 2021 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Kids’ Books

Blood Washing Blood: Afghanistan’s Hundred-Year War

By Phil Halton

Afghanistan is often imagined by North Americans to be either an inferno of endless turmoil and repression of women or a rest stop for hippies seeking enlightenment, drugs, and groovy carpets. In our popular imagination, ... Read More »

April 22, 2021 | Filed under: History, Reviews

★ If I Tell You the Truth

By Jasmin Kaur

A companion to her 2019 debut, Jasmin Kaur’s sophomore YA novel, If I Tell You the Truth, blends poetry, prose, and illustration to tell the intergenerational story of Kiran, a Punjabi woman who flees her ... Read More »

April 19, 2021 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books

Second Place

By Rachel Cusk

Like much of Rachel Cusk’s writing, Second Place feels more like a conduit for philosophical and cultural thought than mere storytelling. Told in the first person, Cusk’s 11th work of fiction recounts a summer in ... Read More »

April 19, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

This Is the Voice

By John Colapinto

“Project your voice without fear or favor,” John Colapinto writes in his new book, This Is the Voice. “Be aware of its full, fantastic range of expression, and revel in it.” This exploration of our ... Read More »

April 15, 2021 | Filed under: Reviews, Science, Technology & Environment

Athabasca

By Harry Kleinhuis

Parry Sound, Ontario, author Harry Kleinhuis delivers a well-realized, if uneven, adventure novel set on Alberta’s Athabasca River in the late 1930s. Fifteen-year-old Jack can’t take his distant, moody, and sometimes violent father, Malcolm, any ... Read More »

April 15, 2021 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books

Like a Duck

By Deborah Kerbel

Waterfowl, day-camp antics, and family secrets collide during a summer of self-discovery in Like a Duck from prolific Ontario-based children’s author Deborah Kerbel. Sarah lives in a little seaside town with her mom and best ... Read More »

April 12, 2021 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books

Foregone

By Russell Banks

Midway through Foregone, the latest novel from Russell Banks, the main character recalls a woman who published a memoir titled My Autobiography as I Remember It. Banks’s protagonist, a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker named Leonard Fife, ... Read More »

April 12, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

★ Exhibitionist

By Molly Cross-Blanchard

In their debut collections, Tara Borin and Molly Cross-Blanchard both profess the longing and desire of relationships. While Borin connects their poems’ characters – whether dead or alive, human or animal – with location and ... Read More »

April 8, 2021 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews