Review by Kyle Schoenfeld The Mercy Journals Claudia Casper Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016 As with any book imagining a future world, Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals threads its way between optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia. It’s impossible to...
Review by Lesley Finn Pax by Sara Pennypacker Harper Collins, 2016 In the opening pages of Sara Pennypacker’s new novel, twelve-year-old Peter plays fetch with his pet in the woods. The idyll is all artifice: this is a scene...
Review by Will Preston The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff Little, Brown and Company, 2016 Some years ago, on the southwestern tip of England, I stumbled across a little stone chapel overlooking the sea. It was a gorgeous,...
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera The Heaviness of Things that Float by Jennifer Manuel Douglas & McIntyre, 2016 The cover of Jennifer Manuel’s debut novel, The Heaviness of Things that Float, depicts two seashells attempting a yin yang configuration. The...
Review by Francine Cunningham Faerie by Eisha Marjara Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016 Faerie, by Montreal filmmaker Eisha Marjara is a Young Adult (YA) novel that tackles tough issues head on and does not back down from the reality of...
Review by Will Preston The Gods of Tango by Carolina de Robertis Penguin Random House Available May 17, 2016 It’s 1913, and Buenos Aires is a picture of bedlam. Exploding with an influx of immigrants, the city is a...
Review by Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt Breakneck Nelly Arcan Jacob Homel, translation Anvil Press, 2015 First published in French as À ciel ouvert in 2007, Breakneck is the last of Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan’s body of work to be translated into...
Chinkstar Jon Chan Simpson Coach House Books, 2015 Review by Clara Kumagai Run is a Chinese-Scottish seventeen-year-old in Red Deer, Alberta, and he’s not particularly fond of his older brother. They clash, fight, and wrestle, and Run wonders how...
Review by Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt The Mystics of Mile End Sigal Samuel Freehand Books 2015 As someone who lives on the proverbial other side of the tracks from Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, I had high expectations for Sigal Samuel’s...