My February reads. It was another fantastic reading month. Now, on to March!
pickA Minor Chorus, by Billy-Ray Belcourt (2022 🇨🇦)
Premise: An Indigenous graduate student, jaded by the institutional game and the broader lack of effective action on Indigenous Reconciliation in Canada, returns to his home community to find the voice for the novel he knows he has within him.
Review: This is incredibly well-done and is thought-provoking in all the best, most challenging ways. Cont.
pickA very Booker Prize-ish book - it was a bit tricky. This is a series of stories spanning 1908 to 2025 covering love, both romantic and between parent and child, loss, war and science. What I struggled with was the telling, individual stories moving back and forth in time, the narrative in each story also moving around from paragraph to paragraph. Lovely in parts, but it was harder work than I‘m willing to invest.
pickSomething about me: romance novels leave me utterly disappointed and full of contempt. But I keep giving them a shot because hey, I‘m a hopeless romantic.
This charming, refreshing modern romantic comedy features a young Canadian Muslim woman juggling independence and familial obligation while being confronted with racism, Islamophobia and of course, love. Finally, a romance novel with wit, heart, and substance!
#romance #romcom #canada #canlit
pickGood read. The author uses her great-great-great aunts writings from her trek to the Yukon to stake their claim in gold. Dual timeline, the 1898 timeline and the history of striking gold was the majority of this book. Money creates problems. The Han tribe that lived on the Yukon River and the gold rushers that took their chances all either triumphed or suffered from the gold found in that region. Alice‘s story is both brave and cunning.
pickPopulated with newcomers from all over the world, 1970s suburban Toronto is the setting of these linked stories that subvert the idyllic image of suburban life.
A tender and truthful collection of stories where themes are carefully explored with emotional pull and sharp prose.
#ohcanada #iamcanadian #fiction #canlit
pickI haven't read many WW1 books, let alone from a teen Canadian girls perspective. In this book Rilla is left at home as her brothers and friends leave to join the fight. The book is half journal and is an insight into her day to day life during the war.
so-soThe third audio narrator of the series is introduced with this installment. I liked the previous two, this one not so much because the voices aren‘t as distinct. The pronounced French accent meant distinguishing among the several French names was difficult to track, but that‘s no fault of the narrator.
This story sprawls across many locations and characters, and as a result there was too much explanation of connections rather than showing.
so-soFinished this yesterday—not my favorite, that‘s for sure ⭐️⭐️⭐️
