Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

I am probably the last person to have read Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Even my mom read it before me. But read it I have, and you may be shocked to find out that I was disappointed by it. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but it failed to live up to the hype.

Born To Walk by Dan Rubinstein

Two things to confess before we get into the review of Born To Walk by Dan Rubinstein:

1. I love to walk. We don’t have a car and I walk everywhere. So, Rubinstein is kind of preaching to the choir with this book.
2. I know Dan. He’s a great guy.  But what i never knew, and I don’t know how this is possible, is that he is even more into walking than I am.

Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

If you are Canadian, you have undoubtedly already read Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. I think everyone got it for Christmas. And even if you haven’t read it, you have heard amazing things about it and probably gave it to somebody for Christmas. It won the Giller after all, and for Canadians that is a big endorsement.

Skim and This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

It seems that graphic novels and comics are all the rage right now. I’ll be up front with you. I don’t think I get them as an art form. My mind is so responsive to words and I think I lack the necessary visual vocabulary to properly appreciate them.

Smoke River by Krista Foss

Smoke River is Krista Foss‘ first novel. It is set in the vaguely named interlake region of Ontario, in a fictitious settlement that bears a striking resemblance to the Caledonia and Hagersville area bordering the Six Nations Reserve. In recent years, Caledonia has been synonymous with First Nations land disputes, and that sets the scene for Smoke River.

Landing Gear by Kate Pullinger

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kate Pullinger‘s latest novel, Landing Gear. I really enjoyed her Governor General’s Award winning The Mistress of Nothing (2009), but in many ways it could not be more different than Landing Gear. The Mistress of Nothing was a historical novel set in colonial Egypt, Landing Gear is a novel that grew out of a multimedia digital project called Flight Paths: A Networked Novel and is very much set in the here and now.

Ostensibly the story is about Yacub, a Pakistani man who stows away in the landing gear of a plane bound for London. As the landing gear descends on it’s approach to Heathrow, he falls and lands on Harriet’s car. Miraculously, he is alive and unscathed and she takes Yacub home and adopts him into her family. And to a large extent family is really what the novel is about. What constitutes a family in modern society? How do you remain true to that family and how does it impact your identity as an individual?

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Yes, it has taken me a long time to get to Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Sometimes too much hype about a book can keep me away. Edugyan emerged out of nowhere in 2011 and became the It girl of Canadian fiction in 2012. There is scarcely a prize for which she wasn’t nominated. This was topped of in 2014 with Canada Reads.

Cover Wars – Listen to the Squawking Chicken

In Canada Elaine Lui, aka Lainey Gossip, is big news. So when she recently came out with a memoir of her mother, Listen to the Squawking Chicken (my review), it was big news too. Lui is not a complete unknown south of the border either and her book was released in the United States this week.

The two covers are very different. Canada went with a more spring time look in white. And the chick is rather cute too. The American version has gone for basic black. And to me it is at least a little surprising that neither went with an overtly chick-lit feel (yes, that is a pun).

So, what do you think? Who wore it better?

Cover Wars – Worst. Person. Ever.

 

I reviewed Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland a couple of months ago when it came out in Canada and the UK. I have no idea whether or not Coupland is as popular in the United States as he is in Canada, but his book is being released there this week.

I’m interested in this cover for two reasons:

1. Coupland is a graphic designer himself. I’m pretty sure that he was not the designer of either cover, but the Canadian one feels much more in keeping with his general aesthetic.
2. The covers are so different. The American cover makes more sense after having read the book, but the Canadian cover is more in keeping with the Canadian editions of many of his other books.

The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan

Wow. This is one hard book to review. Let me start off by saying Padma Viswanathan has written one of the bravest books I’ve seen in a long time with The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Brave because it takes on one of the darker incidents in Canada’s recent past, the 1985 Air India bombing. Brave because it takes on the very perpetrators of this incident and condemns them as guilty in spite of the court findings. Brave because it (rightly) accuses Canada of seeing this as another nation’s problem. Brave because it tackles the inter-religious fighting in India and it’s connections to immigrants in Canada and around the world.