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
1648 Henfryn Street and 363 Carlisle Street: "Wenlock Edge" feels so vivid that one can hardly resist keying in the significant addresses to see what appears on the digital map. These addresses do not actually exist in London, Ontario. But there is a Henfryn Line which runs north-south, just east of Clinton, Ontario. And
It's not impossible to find them, but if you read a lot of literary fiction, the novels which contain humour are outnumbered. Each of these books actually addresses a serious issue (or touches upon it, for Susan Juby's novel doesn't delve very deeply): global warming and habitat erosion, family farm
There are "ways of making people into ghosts". So Atticus say, to Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird, about Boo (Arthur) Radley. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 Neil Smith turned Oliver Dalrymple into a ghost in Boo. And, then, he named him Boo and gave him a Casper the Friendly Ghost
