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Fiction Reviews

Manahil Bandukwala: Love as a Driving Force. Rewview of A Dream Wants Waking by Lydia Kwa

Posted on April 25, 2024

Love as a Driving Force by Manahil Bandukwala

A Dream Wants Waking, Lydia Kwa. Wolsak & Wynn, 2023

Lydia Kwa’s A Dream Wants Waking promises a dreamlike narrative through its title and cover, and the short novel certainly delivers. The book opens with a list of characters from the past timeline in Tang China from 644-904 CE and the present timeline of Luoyang in 2219 CE. Told through short chapters that switch back and forth at a rapid pace, Kwa immediately immerses the reader into both timelines of the story.

Chris Benjamin: A Richly Layered Study of Poverty and Trauma, Review of The Raw Light of Morning by Shelly Kawaja

Posted on December 19, 2023

The Raw Light of Morning, Shelly Kawaja’s debut novel and winner of the $12,500 BMO Winterset Award in 2022 for outstanding literary work by a Newfoundlander or Labradorian, is at the same time a compelling story of domestic violence, poverty, and trauma, and a 1990s western Newfoundland coming-of-age character study of a young woman of remarkable resilience. This is Laurel’s story, and she is 14 in the opening scene, and forced to intervene to protect her mother from life-threatening violence.

Carol Bruneau: Writing Bareback Review of World Naked Bike Ride by Lisa Fishman

Posted on December 19, 2023

Who can resist the title of this debut short fiction collection? Like cyclists in the eponymous event — a protest against fossil fuel consumption, among other things — Lisa Fishman’s 40 pieces, a collage of micro, flash fiction and narratives of greater length, flout convention. Vanity of vanities, the Pushcart Prize-nominated poet seems to say of the standard short story and its clothing/trappings.

Clarissa Hurley: Squinting Through the Smoke, Review of Cocktail by Lisa Alward

Posted on December 19, 2023

The epigraph to Lisa Alward’s new story collection, Cocktail, is an epiphanic moment from Virginia Woolf ‘s To the Lighthouse, in which the artist Lily Briscoe strives to resurrect and memorialize her dead friend through painting her portrait. Moved to uncharacteristic emotion by a sudden realization of the brevity of life, Lily laments, “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world?

Ian Colford: A Tragedy of Colossal Proportions, Review of The Broken Places by Frances Peck

Posted on October 26, 2023

The natural disaster has been a trope in fiction (and movies) for decades. Usually what happens is that a group of strangers becomes isolated by an unexpected and massively destructive event. The ensuing drama chronicles the efforts of the unlucky individuals to cope with the challenges, dangers and deprivations they suddenly find themselves facing.

Rebecca Geleyn: Lobster Men, Review of Some Hellish by Nicholas Herring

Posted on September 22, 2023

In Nicholas Herring’s first novel, his self-named protagonist, Herring, makes the following socioeconomic comment about lobsters: “You know, it wasn’t too long ago, you couldn’t get anybody to buy lobster. People used it as fertilizer in their gardens. Farmers would put it out on their rows. Eighty per cent of the market nowadays is cruise ships and casinos. The way I see it, lobster is just something people eat to distract them from the fact that they’re pissing their wages away” (260).

Sherry Coffey: Dauntless, Why I’m Here, Jill Frayne.

Posted on March 22, 2023
Who hasn’t wanted to be the fly on the wall of a therapist’s office? To hear the secrets people pay others to know? Jill Frayne’s Why I’m Here is a novel set in Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1995 and tells the story of Helen Cotillard, a counsellor who works at the only counselling agency in the Territory. Out of necessity, Helen “took all comers” in her practice. Her new client, Gale, is a scrappy and unhappy adolescent from Cobalt, Ontario, who is brought to therapy by her stepmother.

Chris Benjamin: MacLeod hits all his notes, Animal Person, Alexander MacLeod.

Posted on March 22, 2023
More than a decade ago, Alexander MacLeod showed unusual patience with his debut short story collection, Light Lifting. Patience in his delivery, care in his craft. Not a word out of place, some would say. The collection itself was the result of more than a decade of story writing and publishing one at a time in literary journals. Great short stories take time to master, and the bevy of jury recognitions his debut garnered was more indication MacLeod had put in the work. 
 

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