Tag: CanLit
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Quoted: Etta and Otto and Russell and James
We’re all scared, most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren’t. Be scared, and then jump into that fear. Again and again. Just remember to hold on to yourself while you do it.
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The Witches of New York by Ami McKay
I have been enchanted by Ami McKay since her first novel, The Birth House, and it seems she still has me under her spell. (See what I did there? This book is about witches. You get it.) With both The Birth House and The Virgin Cure, McKay set a precedent as an author of great skill and imagination, and…
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Quoted: The Witches of New York
He shook his head. “A skeptic is only interested in being right. I’m interested in finding the truth.” “Even if there’s a chance your theories are wrong?” “Especially then, because it means I might be on my way to discovering something new.”
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Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
This book is an award magnet. It won the Scotiabank Giller Prize (praise be!), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction (holla), and was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (hella impressive). So you can bet I was expecting it…
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Patrin by Theresa Kishkan
Never before has a book—much less a literary novella—had such an impact on my sense of place. Patrin’s European travels as a young woman, her homecoming to Victoria, and then her journey to find traces of her family and heritage in Czechoslovakia simultaneously conjured within me an intense wanderlust, a fierce sense of belonging, and an acute…
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Quoted: A House in the Sky
It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don’t know what’s possible until you actually see it. Amanda Lindhout is truly incredible. Her memoir was hard to read and even harder to put down.
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13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
In just 214 pages and 13 stand-alone stories, debut author Mona Awad has won my undying respect. And because I can’t do this marvellous little book enough justice with a short and snappy “review”, I’m going to share one from the Globe and Mail instead: “It wouldn’t be far off to say that reading Mona Awad’s 13…
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Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt
I, like most everyone else, was a big fan of deWitt’s runaway hit (heh, that rhymed) The Sisters Brothers, so my expectations for the follow-up were of average height—which, for a shorty like me, is pretty high. Now, it’s not that this meandering little tale didn’t meet my average/high expectations, but it didn’t exceed them, either. So while I…
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Quoted: Undermajordomo Minor
The position (Mr Olderglough assigned it the name of undermajordomo, which Lucy and Father Raymond decided was not a word at all) was lowly and the pay mirrored this but Lucy, having nothing better to do, and nowhere in the world to be … embraced his fate and wrote back to Mr Olderglough, formally accepting the offer,…
Being Tori 