Courtney discussed the implications of violence in our culture in her blog based on Herman Koch’s The Dinner
Author: wmelnick
Media Arts and English high school teacher who loves using technology to enhance learning and engage students. Experiments with online learning and teaches in Brightspace.
The World Before Us
When Jane Standen is 15, she loses the 5 year old girl she is looking after during a walk through the woods. This event traumatizes her for life. In her adult life, she works in a museum, piecing together the stories that haunt each artifact there. Her daily world is populated by the ghosts of these museum pieces and she becomes focused on solving the mystery of a disappeared young woman, lost near the same woods, but many years ago. It becomes interesting when various characters from the local insane asylum become important characters in the mystery. It is an engaging story, but don’t expect all details to wrap up tidily in the end.
The author Aislinn Hunter teaches creative writing at the Kwantlen Polytechnic University In BC.
All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews has written this novel based on her own personal experiences with a sister and father who had battled depression and in the end, committed suicide. When Toews began writing All My Puny Sorrows in 2012 (the title is borrowed from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) she was unsure what form it would take. It was simply something she had to write, she says, a way to deal with the anger, and confusion, and sadness that threatened to become all-consuming. Many will read the novel as a memoir, and, while Toews says this is “definitely, absolutely” the most personal book she’s ever written, and much of the dialogue is based on conversations Toews had with her sister while Marj was in the hospital, it is still a work for fiction. (source)
The story is a passionate look at the connections that Elf and Yoli, sisters, form early in life and should sustain them through adulthood. But depression is an over powering monster and without timely help from the medical system, Elf sister is lost. The book brings up many questions about life, death, depression and suicide. It is a deep read.
Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab
For Moving Forward, the Toronto-based novelist Shani Mootoo returns to her native Trinidad to explore the fraught tangle of identities that marginalize people – women and queer-identified, in particular – in certain communities. Relocating to seemingly more tolerant cities, like Toronto, doesn’t change much: these places practice their own forms of social exclusion. This time around, Mootoo commits a white Canadian male protagonist to the messy task of unpacking these ideas – a canny technique in an age when the Donald Sterlings of the world are finally being called out. (Globe & Mail)
The story revolves around Jonathan, a young man raised by two mothers, but one leaves when he is 9 years old. After years of feeling abandoned, he sets off to Trinidad to find Sid, and discovers she has undergone gender reassignment surgery. The setting is wonderful and descriptive and we learn many things about both Jonathan and Sid along the way. It is a satisfying read.
Digitizeme 