In Tomboy Survival Guide, author Ivan Coyote shares their life journey from growing up in the Yukon to their life today as an author, performer, and advocate. The stories as told by Coyote are at times funny, at time sad, but always seem to retain that common thread of a strong family bond. Taking the book at face value as a memoir, it was a good read. The stories were well-written and engaging – I could see myself roller skating with Coyote and their cousins […]
It’s the end of the world as we know it….
In Toronto, Ontario paramedic-in-training Jeevan Chaudhary is sitting in the audience watching a production of King Lear when the lead suddenly drops dead onstage. Unable to save him, Chaudhary comforts a young actress as the body is taken away. This is Year Zero. In Year Twenty, Kirsten Raymonde is a member of the Travelling Symphony – a group of actors and musicians who travel around the Great Lakes performing classical music and Shakespeare. The colonies they visit sprung up after the Georgia Flu wiped out […]
If you figure out the secret before the reveal, is it still a secret?
Tessa Markham arrives home on a rainy Sunday night to find a young boy sitting in the kitchen of her locked, and otherwise empty, London flat. Instead of calling the police, she calls Scott – her estranged husband and father of her dead twins. The Secret Mother by Shalini Boland tells Tessa’s story as the boy Harry is picked up by the police and returned to his father. As the story unfolds we learn of the tragic loss of Tessa’s children, her mental breakdown, and […]
Won’t Someone Please Think of the Cat???
Stories set in the context of a family split are generally told from the perspective of one of the adults in the relationship, or from that of the child(ren) caught in the middle. Sandi Ward’s debut novel “The Astonishing Thing” employs a different voice: that of the family cat. Admittedly, when I first read the concept of the novel my thought was that it would go something like this: “Hoomin, feed me.” “Medium hoomin, stop yelling at large hoomin – I am trying to nap.” […]