Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of talk of tissue and blood in this story and simmering beneath. Bodies and carcasses (and not all in the expected places) are salved and slaughtered, vulnerabilities exposed and secrets maintained. The intimacy which I longed for in The Beet Queen (1986) pulses and surges
Although I am always interested in the short fiction which Biblioasis publishes (thanks to the likes of K.D. Miller and Kathy Page), it was Naomi’s review of this collection which urged me to fetch a copy of this from the Yorkville library downtown. This is not my usual branch,
I heard Madeleine Thien read from this collection in 2001 in a small library theatre in London, Ontario; I recall that she was very gracious and spoke of being honoured to appear with the other women who were reading that night. (I heard Joan Barfoot, Bonnie Burnard and Jane
Although following Finch’s Fortune directly, the fortune only recently received and dispensed, Master of Jalna was actually published more than twenty years before Finch’s Fortune. It’s easy to imagine why the author would have wanted to revisit the Whiteoaks before the events of Master of Jalna play out, to
Maybe it was because I read this one immediately following Tales of Burning Love, so I was more completely immersed in Erdrich-ness than I have been, yet, in this reading project. Or, maybe its more prominent air of mysticism charmed me from the first whiff. Either way, I loved
