How to: Run a Review-a-Thon
Buying books looked a lot different thirty years ago. If you wanted to know how good a book was, you read a newspaper, or asked your friends for recommendations. Then you had to find the physical copy on a...
Fragile Equilibriums & Sudden Fictions: A Review of Paulo Da Costa’s The Midwife of Torment
The Midwife of Torment Paulo Da Costa Guernica Editions Review by Jessica Barratt Weaving many flash-fiction works into a single, bound narrative, Paulo Da Costa’s The Midwife of Torment paints humanity in its honest bright colours and oscillating emotions of...
Candor, Grit, and the Unexpected: A Review of Cason Sharpe’s Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories
Review by Rachel Jansen It would be a mistake to assume Cason Sharpe’s slim debut, Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories, is a quick read. These stories are dense and complex, deserving of a slow eye and...
Moments of Perfect Balance in Fun Home: A Coming of Age Musical
Fun Home: The Coming of Age Musical
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Review by Mikaela Asfour
“At times my father appeared to enjoy having children,” Alison narrates, “but the real object of his affection was his house.”
As a fan of Alison Bechdel’s comics, I was pleased to see Fun Home: The Coming of Age Musical onstage in its Canadian premiere at Arts Club Theater’s Granville Island Stage in Vancouver. Fun Home, based on Bechdel’s 2006 autobiographical family tragicomic of the same title, was adapted for the stage by Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music). In its 2015 Broadway run, the show won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. A heart-rending drama balanced with wonderful moments of levity, Arts Club Theater’s production of Fun Home met my high expectations for the show.
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White Light into a Rainbow: David Ly’s Stubble Burn
Stubble Burn David Ly Anstruther Press Review by Kai Cheng Thom The gay male body is razor wit and iridescent verse in David Ly’s Stubble Burn, the debut chapbook of an exciting and necessary voice in Canadian literature. Rooted...
Mirrored Bodies: Reflecting on Eliza Robertson’s Demi-Gods
Demi-Gods
Eliza Robertson
Penguin Random House, 2017
Review by Kyle Schoenfeld
Eliza Robertson’s debut novel Demi-Gods is the story of Willa, a girl growing up in British Columbia in the 1950s and ‘60s. In luminous prose, Robertson shows her protagonist’s formation in a world set on teaching her about others’ power to shape her. Willa finds this restrictive power crystallized in Patrick, the son of her mother’s boyfriend and a monstrous presence who slinks into rooms and haunts the summers of the narrator’s childhood. As a parable of the oppressive weight of other people’s desire, Demi-Gods is lush and compelling, however unsettling it may be to read.
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Despite the Odds: a Review of Project Compass
Project Compass
Lizzie Derksen, Matthew Stepanic, Kristina Vyskocil, Robert Strong
Monto Books, 2017
Review by Peter Takach
What do you get when you take four emerging Edmonton writers and give them each a quadrant of their city to explore? In Project Compass, publisher and editor Jason Lee Norman has assembled a crack crew to take readers on an odyssey through a city that, despite producing its fair share of writers, is rarely the explicit setting of their stories. The result is an engaging and emotionally-arresting collection of four concurrent novellas that all unwind on June 21, 2016. Starting from the north, south, east, and west, we follow four Edmontonians as they wander their way through the longest day of the year and reflect on the paths they have taken.
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Of Mermaids and Men: Jessie Jones’ Nix
Nix Jessie Jones Desert Pets Press Review by Andy Verboom In poetry, myth is usually deployed either as allusion or as conceit. The distinction between allusion and conceit is analogous to how one might treat a very old hammer:...
The Novel That Lies Before Us: Thomas Trofimuk’s This is All a Lie
Review by Peter Takach
You are about to read a review of Thomas Trofimuk’s new novel. Perhaps you’ve seen This is All a Lie reclining against the shelf at your local bookstore, its stark white cover a breath of sanity amidst more lurid neighbours. Hesitantly, you ease it off the shelf, for you’ve been hurt before. Still, you remain optimistic that, somewhere past the bland bestsellers and the remainder bin, the perfect paperback awaits you.
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