Longlisted for the Giller Prize this past Fall, I was delighted to see my fellow Calgarian Deborah Willis recognized for her latest book, Girlfriend on Mars. I’ve read and enjoyed her short story collections, in fact my review of her last collection highlights one of my favourite short stories which was the basis for this,…
Although I don’t consider myself a huge horror fan, I’ve been reading lots of it this past October, and I’ve now read the first and second in the Indian Lake Trilogy by Stephen Graham Jones. Don’t Fear the Reaper is the second in the series, returning to the site of the bloodbath from the first…
Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas is sure to be on many Canadian bookshelves these days. I was lucky to have received an ARC back when it was first released at the…
To finish up my Halloween reading streak, I finished the The Virago Book of Witches by Shahrukh Husain this past weekend. Not likely a book you are supposed to read straight through in a few days (although that’s what I did), it offers over 50 stories about witches from various cultures around the world. Many…
Not quite a Halloween book, but full of ghouls, jack-o-lanterns and skeletons is I Will Read To You, by Gideon Sterer, illustrated by Charles Santoso. It tells the late-night tale of a young boy getting ready for bed who decides to go out and tuck in the monsters outside for bed as well. Him and…
A witchy book for Halloween always gets me excited. I still recall one of my favourites from last year, The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, which tells the story of a very fun group of witches. It was this excitement that I brought to Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck, the second in a series about…
Not quite a spooky Halloween book, but Getting Huge by John Young is most definitely a story best read in October because it’s all about growing a massive pumpkin. It’s the opposite of a scary book, it centers on a reverend having a mid-life crisis. Not quite funny, but definitely not too serious, I enjoyed…
I saw a brief mention of the short story collection Homebodies by Amy LeBlanc somewhere online, and I decided I just HAD to read it for my spooky October reading series. It’s harder to find Halloween-themed books by small or independent presses, so I’m quite pleased and excited to introduce this Calgary-based author to a…
I originally chose to read Skid Dogs by Emelia Symington-Fedy now because it referenced the murder of a young woman on Halloween night, so I thought this would be perfect for my October reading…until I realized it was a) non-fiction and b) not really about Halloween at all. Yikes! The fun of being scared on…
It’s October, aka spooky reading season, and how could I let this month pass by without reading the new Stephen King novel? I’m not a die-hard fan; he’s far too prolific for me to have read most of his stuff, but I do enjoy a King novel here and there, and despite its 400 pages,…
I wanted to fit this book into my current reading queue as I was delighted to discover it was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and already sitting on my bookshelf. Wait Softly Brother by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is a (somewhat?) experimental novel, one that I wasn’t exactly sure I fully grasped, but found myself getting…
Time for another double review! I waited so long to review the first in the series, The Liquor Vicar by Vince R. Ditrich, that the sequel The Vicar’s Knickers came out before I was able to dig the first out of my bookshelf. So, I read the books back to back to get the full…
