"My Stella, girls get attacked everywhere." Stella's Kookom -- her grandmother -- states her truth blnntly. She has lived it, is living it, has survived it and is surviving it. Although, as Lou says: "We have all been broken in one way or another." House of Anansi, 2016 The Break is
"I was never sure exactly what I wanted. I guess I wanted to be popular, and beautiful, and smart, and in love," Charlotte observes. Groundwood Books, 2016 She comes from Kibi, Eastern Region, Ghana, where some believe the women to be beautiful but cantankerous. Now Charlotte is eighteen years old,
What Jane Ozkowski captures beautifully in Watching Traffic is the very sensation embodied in the debut novel's title: Emily is overwhelmed by motion even while in a state of stillness. Groundwood Books, 2016 It's the summer after high-school gradulation, and Emily is working at a catering company, making egg-salad sandwiches and
Excerpt from my reading journal: Having read all of Jane Hamilton's novels, and having waited since 2009 for another, I was pretty psyched for The Excellent Lombards. Grand Central Publishing, 2016 My favourites were The Short History of a Prince and The Book of Ruth, which I read
Massacre, killer, murder: when these words appear on a novel's first page, readers are fore-warned. And, yet, the first third of Sara Taylor's Boring Girls (2015) is a coming-of-age story. "It was becoming more and more apparent that I had been right all along. No one could truly understand me, unless they got
