I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan. Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the
The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways. In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption. (My laugh came out more
Elissa Washuta’s White Magic (2021) is a personal narrative of searching and locating boundaries about her own self amid the context of colonization. (She is a member of the Cowlitz tribe.) Her writing is considered experimental but it passes for conventional prose at first glance; much of her
In Dog Flowers: A Memoir (2020), Danielle Geller is immediately relatable; as soon as she shares her Arby’s sandwich from the airport with her cat Little Foot, I’m hooked. When she binge watches an entire season of DragRace, with a guy she meets through an online video game,
Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life among the Qallunaat (1978; 2015) is the third book published in the University of Manitoba’s First Voices, First Texts series. It chronicles her experiences as an Inuit woman adjusting to life south of the Arctic in the 1950s, working as a translator for many
