It took me 18 months and three weeks. Nearly 19 months is a long time, a tough pill to swallow for a girl nominally understood to be “one of the smart kids” (though, if we’re being honest with ourselves, that label is far too liberally applied to any decently organized non-athlete unafraid of raising their […]
I should have known what to expect, when I looked at the author information at the back of the book and noticed that Frank McKinney looks an awful lot like the figure depicted on the cover of The Other Thief, A Collision of Love, Flesh, and Faith. Next clue: the main character, and narrator, is called […]
Jack Woodville London has written an engaging book about family and how our personal and familial histories impact who we ultimately become. It is an interesting exploration of how secrets and different interpretations of events based on incomplete knowledge can influence lives, creating domino effects that can ripple through generations. The story centres on two […]
Crude Blessings: The Amazing Life Story of Glenn Patterson, American Oilman is written by Patterson’s Roe. Glenn isn’t famous, though he was successful. He didn’t accomplish great feats of endurance, work towards world peace or discover a groundbreaking scientific phenomenon. What he did do was achieve success as a businessman in the oil sector, moving beyond a […]
The Spirit of the Trail by Carrie Morgridge with Ross Sellers is an account of the 46 day bicycle journey undertaken by Morgridge and her husband John in the summer of 2016. The couple rode their bicycles the length of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR) from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, […]
This book is a love letter to Mitzi Libsohn, the author’s mother. It is ostensibly about the love story of her parents and the poetry that sprang from that relationship, but make no mistake, this is about the adoration of Mitzi. Pauli Rose Libsohn writes about her mother’s early life, chronicling challenging family relationships and […]
Jennifer Egan must be a wise soul. I would love to sit down with her and ask for her advice about my own life. She just seems to know so much about the powerlessness of… living. “Emerald City” is a collection of short stories that she published in 1989 (two decades before “A Visit from […]
I loved Jane Austen. And I loved this modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. It perfectly updates the story to capture all of the same themes and it made me squirm, laugh, and seize up in anticipation the same way I did when I first read P&P as a teenager. In Eligible, Jane is nearly […]