Is there anyone else out there who loves a big, thick, old-fashioned novel that is written with such sparkle and fluidity that you dive right in and only come up for air at three am when your vision shuts down and your bed has become a raft on the ocean of that new world? A.S. Byatt’s Possession is one such book for me.
I just finished Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. It's a stunning gift of a book—eloquent, elegiac, hopeful. A book about how our relationship with the land and its gifts has changed, and how it might be repaired. A book for everyone.
Best Canadian Stories 2019
Biblioasis, 2019
Edited by Caroline Adderson
Reviewed by Megan Kuklis:
"If a person had nothing but this collection of stories from which to judge the state of fiction in Canada, they would come away believing that Canadians are delightfully chaotic and completely insane...."
by Megan Kuklis
A review of Melissa Barbeau's The Luminous Sea (Breakwater Books, 2018)
By Megan Kuklis
A Review of Darusha Wehm's The Home for Wayward Parrots (NeWest Press, 2018)
The Home for Wayward Parrots by Darusha Wehm is a charming novel that centres on the complicated lives of its many sweet characters. Exceptionally readable, the novel flows through the past and present of Brian “Gumbo” Guillemot’s life with such care that readers will not be able to put it down. This novel should be devoured in a single sitting.
By Megan Kuklis
A Review of Andrew Battershill's Marry Bang Kill (Goose Lane Editions, 2018).
Andrew Battershill’s novel defies classification. Part west coast island thriller, part mystery/adventure, Marry Bang Kill tells the story of Tommy Marlo, a relatively inept thief with perfect pitch who robs people of their laptops. . . .
By Zachary Alapi
A Review of J.R. Helton’s Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions
J.R. Helton’s Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions (Liverlight 2018) accomplishes a unique feat: the weaving of social universality and cultural specificity. For Helton, that means a raw exploration of class, the most pressing and relevant issue we face, couched in the sounds and sights of 1980s Austin — the music, the drugs, the hustlers, and the grandiosity and pomp that only a state like Texas, in all its carnivalesque glory, can render both thrilling and morbid. As readers follow Jake Stewart, a burgeoning artist bent as much on self-destruction as producing great writing or visual art, as he navigates the bloated landscape of Ronald Reagan’s America. An undertone of paranoia and stasis infuses this wry and dark book with urgency and energy that even readers disconnected from the setting and era can feel.
