I had hoped to have this review in for Canada Day, but if I’m lucky, I’ll have it ready before Robbie Robertson’s birthday (July 5) is over. Robertson is a musician perhaps best known for his songwriting and guitar playing for the Band, and in this memoir, he describes his journey from a 16-year-old school drop out on the road with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks through his successful but tumultuous years with the Band. I picked up the book because I was already familiar […]
Growing up (in the north of Sweden) is hard to do
Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in […]