On occasion, I have to wonder if perhaps my grandmother and great-aunts didn't have a point. How many times did they instruct me that I should not, so often, have my nose in a book. Because sometimes I really wonder how I missed something huge. Like, for instance, Robert Lepage's
When life and story intersect: that's where this story takes place. (And isn't that the best place ever to set a story?) Groundwood - House of Anansi, 2012 But, okay, in the beginning, when readers step aboard That Night's Train, they are actually in a railway carriage. "The train
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
On one hand, I could have counted the books about same-sex romances and suicide that were available to me as a young reader twenty-five years ago. Not that the two themes necessarily coexist in the same work (as they do, for instance, in Skim and Monoceros), but each of the
Perhaps Hélène is not a likely hero. She is "only eight years old, a bit florid in colour, with bluish veins on a body that weighed twenty-three kilos, holding back a mind that was always trying to run off to faraway, pitiless realms". Oscar sounds like a more heroic name,
