Tag: Fiction

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee – Review

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The world can be a scary place when the mob takes over. When people band together, put their hands over their ears and refuse to listen, it can be dangerous to step out of line or go against the grain in any way. It is in times like this, when injustice is being perpetrated, that the people who aren’t being victimized need to stand up against those forces. Atticus Finch, one of the most beloved characters in literature, goes against his neighbours and the people in his small town to make sure that justice is served.

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Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald – Review

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I don’t know what it is between me and books about strange families. Whenever I hear that a novel that I’m going to be reading has an unusual family structure, I’m chomping at the bit to read it. It may be simply that the world is a messy place and a family that has an unusual shape seems more real to me than the nuclear family that I had shoved down my throat when I was a kid. Or it might just be that there’s a mystery to unusual families that isn’t there with conventional ones. There’s a need to figure out how the different pieces of the family fit together to form a family unit which adds a depth to the proceedings that comes naturally.

Enter stage right: Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

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The Spawning Grounds by Gail Anderson-Dargatz – Review

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I’m a big fan of weird families living in a world filled with magical realism. Looking at my favourite novels, many of them have unusual families as their feature. While Canadian novels have often been dismissed as novels about farms and prairies, I’ve never found that to be the case. Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novel, The Spawning Grounds, is a beautifully written narrative set in the Shuswap region of British Columbia. Strange and delightful, the book was enough to have me looking up at the moon as I walked the streets of Toronto and trying to find some new source of magic within it.

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