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
Have you ever missed your stop on public transit because of a book? House of Anansi, 2016 Into the Sun is so gripping, from the start, that I travelled four stops past my own stop, before I even realized that I had missed it. (Then, I was so surprised,
"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
Reading Becoming Lin reminded me of discovering Marilyn French's The Women's Room and Marge Piercy's Small Changes. Two unapologetically feminist novels which I felt had poured out of my own heart into some other writer's story. I inhaled these books, and I felt the same sense of intense recognition and
If a story's beginning looks at its reflection in a room made of mirrors, does it see its own beginning-self reflected back? Or is the reflection actually the story's ending? Hamish Hamilton, 2016 This is the kind of question that I can imagine keeps Jay Hosking up late
