At the "Modern Families" roundtable at this year's IFOA, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explained that it only felt natural to build her characters with the seemingly endless details that comprise their lives, their selves. Identity is clearly at the heart of her much-lauded debut, Harmless Like You, and a good part of
Lisa Moore builds folks from the ink up: she is standout at characterization. Groundwood Books, 2016 One of the elements that makes her characters so convincing is the echo effect, the reverberations off seemingly extraneous details (in images, in descriptions, in settings) to construct multi-faceted individuals. Readers who have
The majority of my reading time this year has been devoted to the books which have been living for years, though neglected, on my own bookshelves. In May and June, I had a planned rebellion, and I enjoyed a great number of new books. But now I have returned to
For weeks after reading Frances Whiting's Walking on Trampolines, my vocabulary was peppered with LuluBelle-isms. That's how I thought of the habit that young Lulu and Annabelle had, of mashing-up synonyms to intensify the meaning of each individual word. Gallery BooksSimon & Schuster, 2015 (2013) "I'm starmished," I would
Reading about Sabrina Ramnanan's love of Anne of Green Gables made me really want to read the debut novelist's Nothing Like Love. And it's a good thing that I understood this about her reading past, because it prepared me perfectly for her prose style. Random House CanadaDoubleday Canada, 2015
