Dubliners — Sometimes, a book falls into your lap for no particular reason. That was the case with Karl Geary’s yet-to-be-released book Juno Loves Legs. It was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review, and it arrived in my possession with little in the way…

That’s (Not) Entertainment — Trying to figure out how to introduce Canadian Kevin Chong’s ferociously courageous new novel, The Double Life of Benson Yu, feels problematic. When you’re reading the book, it will feel as though you are wading through an oil slick, and the other feelings this book may conjure up may include…

The Aftermath of Anxiety — This may come as a surprise to many of my readers, but I’ve been known to suffer from anxiety from time to time. This is something that hasn’t been diagnosed professionally and I’m generally doing better these days by trying to have a more optimistic outlook, but there was a…

A Heavy Novel — Usually, I spend the first paragraph of my reviews coming up with something clever. I think about what I’m going to write as I read the book I’m about to review. However, when it came to Helen Elain Lee’s breathtaking novel Pomegranate, I felt that I was at a bit…

The Only One? — Jeff Boyd’s dazzling debut novel The Weight is the story of a Black man who is surrounded by a sea of white. Julian is the Black drummer in an otherwise all-white indie rock band who lives in Portland, Oregon, which is in and of itself a bastion of whiteness. At…

A Satisfying Satire — Sometimes, authors or publicists reach out to me to review a book based on something I’ve written in the past. The logic goes that, “If you’ve positively reviewed Book X, then you’re bound to love my new work, Book Y.” And so, from time to time, I come across books…

The Fork in the Road — It’s hard to write a review of an Owen King novel without mentioning his famous lineage: his mother Tabitha, in particular, is a very famous author of novels and needs no further introduction. King’s brother, Joe Hill, is an author of comic books and genre novels and is almost as…

Nature as Poetry — When one reads Adam Nicolson’s Life Between the Tides, one may be besieged by several stimuli. This is a book about nature and marine biology as it recounts how the author goes about building a series of tidal pools on the coast of western Scotland. He examines the life he…

The Long Road to Recovery — If you’re Canadian and follow Canadian writing, you will need no introduction to Vincent Lam. He’s a very respected writer who astounded me by winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his first book, the 2006 short story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. It is rare for a first-time author to…