By Mary Roach While there are plenty of books that cover the political and human impacts of war, we rarely see and examination of more unusual aspects of maintaining a military force.  Grunt by Mary Roach isn’t about new guns and tanks, drones and missiles. This is the kind of stuff that most people don’t […]

Boundless By Kathleen Winter When Kathleen Winter is offered a chance to journey through the relatively unknown waters of the Northwest Passage, she responds truthfully, “My bags are already packed.”  As a writer, Winter is always ready to embark on a journey and she’s fascinated by the mysteries of the Arctic.  In her memoir, Boundless, […]

The Paris Wife Paula McLain The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, is a lilting story of the life of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Written from Hadley’s perspective, we get an inside look to what it was like to be a woman in the 1920’s married to a chauvinistic, self-obsessed man who […]

The Kill by Jane Casey I read a lot of mysteries, but surprisingly I have not read anything by Jane Casey before. I’m not sure how I missed her over the years, but I am really glad I stumbled upon her books. The Kill is the fifth book in Jane Casey’s fantastic Maeve Kerrigan’s series. […]

A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria SchwabJust when I thought that there was nothing new under the sun, I stumbled upon “A Darker Shade of Magic” by Victoria Schwab. At first glance, this fantasy has many elements that might be familiar to readers of the genre: invented languages, magic, a large cast of characters, […]

BirdieBy Tracey Lindberg Everything I read about Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie told me to expect humour.  So naturally, I thought I’d be reading a fairly lighthearted novel.  Not so.  In fact, Birdie was not what I expected at all.  Birdie, or Bernice Meetoos, is a young Cree woman from Loon Lake, Alberta.  Raised by her mother […]

by Steve Olson I was just a baby when Mount St. Helens blew up.  I remember my parents telling me about the ash fall, but I always wondered how that could be: the mountain is 500 km away.  After reading Eruption: the Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson, now I get it.  […]

by Ali SmithAli Smith’s How to Be Both is not an easy read, but it is a clever and engaging one. Split into two separate sections, one set in the Renaissance and one set in the modern era, the stream-of-consciousness style of writing can make it a challenge to grasp the two separate stories and […]

Secret Daughter   Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda interweaves the stories of Kavita and Somer, two mothers connected by one daughter.  When Somer, in America, realizes she cannot have a child of her own, she and her husband, Krishnan, decide to adopt. Kavita, having already lost one daughter in a country that favours boys, decides […]

by Joshua Ferris Healthy teeth are much more important to one’s overall constitution than I ever gave them credit for. It all ties in, as I learned from reading Joshua Ferris’ To Rise Again at a Decent Hour- not a dentistry textbook but an offbeat novel about a dentist who becomes the victim of an […]