Lindsay Wong’s memoir, The Woo Woo, takes a look at growing up in a family plagued with mental illness. Equal parts heartbreaking and darkly comedic, The Woo Woo explores the author’s complicated relationship with her parents, siblings and extended family as well as her own mental illness after being diagnosed with a neurological disorder in…
Homes is the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, as told to Winnie Yeung, about his family’s life in both Iraq and Syria before moving to Canada as refugees in 2015. For as long as I can remember, there has always been some sort of conflict ongoing in the Middle East. Despite seeing it on…
OK, book three of Canada Reads 2019 down. After reading Brother, I’m becoming skeptical of the tagline for this year’s competition – “one book to move you”. It should probably be, “Canada Reads: Embrace Depression.” David Chariandy’s novel Brother is an absolutely tremendous, albeit heartbreaking read. Alternating between the past and the present, Chariandy’s book…
Pieced together with the help of a private detective, Suzanne is a fictionalized telling of the life of Suzanne Meloche (Barbeau) by her granddaughter, Anais Barbeau-Lavalette. Suzanne is the second book I’ve read of the five shortlisted for the 2019 Canada Reads competition. With the first being By Chance Alone (a memoir written by a…
In his powerful memoir, Holocaust survivor Max Eisen details his early years, his internment in Auschwitz and his emigration to Canada. When the 2019 Canada Reads longlist was announced, I had hoped By Chance Alone would be selected for the shortlist. I suppose I would have read it eventually, but in a year where the…
In Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, the cautioned consequences of climate change have arrived. The Northern Ice has melted shifting coastlines inward, storms have become more powerful than ever causing numerous fossil fuel disasters and populations have begun to cluster in larger areas leaving small towns and communities behind. Many people have lost the ability…
In Forgiveness, Mark Sakamoto tells the story of his maternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, who had spent a number of years clinging to life as a POW in a Japanese prison camp during the second World War and his paternal grandmother, Mitsue Sakamoto, who had been forced from her home and province following the bombing of…
When a cargo ship carrying several hundred Sri Lankan refugees arrives off the coast of Vancouver, those aboard hope for a new beginning in Canada. The problem? You just can’t walk into the country (or sail in for that matter). There’s a long, drawn out process in claiming refugee status and it doesn’t always work…
