If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
This bundle of books, with the Canadian Reading Challenge in mind (this, the eleventh year, hosted by The Indextrious Reader, with sign-ups for the twelfth year now posted), was particularly delectable. I love the idea of telling the story of a life in a way that feels true, whether
Although I loved books about animals when I was a younger reader, in my teens I backed off. I realised that books in which sad things happen to the four-legged and furred or feathered characters were even sadder than the books in which sad things happened to human characters.
It's not quite as bad as Edith's dreams. Not quite. But almost. And that's because Suzette Mayr has a way of writing that pricks beneath the skin. "That night Edith dreams of hares. Hares hanging by their necks, throttled by catgut in a thicket of trees. Someone has executed
If you've glanced at the union regulations for Native writers, you'd have seen this one coming: Eden Robinson explains that it's a requirement. "It’s also a union regulation as a Native writer that you have to write a Trickster story at least once." (This is from an interview by
