Fish Change Direction in Cold Water
Pierre Szalowski
An icestorm is a natural disaster with a quintessentially Canadian personality. It arrives slowly, without fanfare, and is accompanied by seasonally mild weather. As we have seen this year in Guelph, it has the power to drop old trees, endanger travelers, and disrupt power service. In Montreal in 1998 it did all this and more. It shut down the city for three days and left many without power for days.
In Fish Change Direction in Cold Water a ten-year-old boy asks the sky to fix his family’s problems and is rewarded with a life-changing storm. Pierre Szalowski’s
novel weaves together the isolated lives in a Montreal neighbourhood thrust together by shared weather. The book is a comical and uplifting look at the possibilities that arise in life when a drastic change in weather causes everyone to change directions.
As someone who lived through the 1998 icestorm nearby in Ottawa, I got to relive the community spirit that brought out the best in everyone. With the electricity out sporadically throughout the city, there were many who took in those without power. This book captures how life slowed down momentarily and brought people together.
A great book full of laughs and social commentary, especially recommended for young readers going through family trouble.
- Dave MacKay
Red Planet Blues
Robert J. Sawyer
Robert J. Sawyer’s twenty-second novel is somewhat of a departure from his more recent works. While his most popular sci-fi thrillers such as FlashForward (the basis for the 2009 ABC series) and the WWW trilogy tell near-future or present-day stories, his latest, Red Planet Blues, follows some of the genre’s more traditional conventions—the book is set on Mars, after all. But Sawyer doesn’t limit himself to one genre; Red Planet Blues also pays homage to classic noir crime novels, most notably Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
Set against the backdrop of the Great Martian Fossil Rush—a tip of the hat to the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1800s—the story follows the exploits of Alex Lomax, a private detective living in a domed city on future Mars. Very quickly, Lomax becomes involved in a series of investigations revolving around stolen identities, stolen fossils, murder…and naked ladies. And then there are the transfers: wealthy individuals who’ve had their minds uploaded to immortal android bodies. In other words, this is a compelling fusion of classic sci-fi and detective mystery fiction.
Although Red Planet Blues doesn’t explore the “Big Ideas” as fully as Sawyer’s previous works, there’s still no denying that this latest novel is a heck of a lot of fun.
- Z. S. Roe
The Shore Girl
Fran Kimmel
Dark and enchanting: that’s what Rebee Shore is. The sweet innocence of childhood has escaped Miss Shore. Forced to travel from town to town, she has never stayed in a place longer than three months because her demanding, flighty, hard-as-nails mother is always on the run. Rebee loves her mother but has learned some people are not to be counted on. Rebee does not know her father or anyone from her mother’s past life, except for her Aunt, who has her own issues to deal with. Rebee has an endless stream of questions, the first being who is her mother running from and why?
Rebee evokes a sweetness that people cannot help but gravitate toward, but her independence and fierce eyes that show she has seen too much prevent anyone from getting too close to her. The Shore Girl, which depicts Rebee’s life as she finds the answers to her questions, is told from her perspective and from the perspective of those who have had the fortunate experience of meeting her. Reading about Rebee is addictive; you fall in love with the young girl and travel with her through her life. Rebee has many lessons to teach us, the first being that you control your own destiny.
- Katie Lowe
Snow Hunters
Paul Yoon
Sitting in a noisy cafe with my notebook open, I think about silence in Paul Yoon's book Snow Hunters and am amazed at how he does it. Here I am in a dizzying mix of hissing, droning, gurgling sound that defiantly opposes silence, yet somehow within this space, I am able to sustain a feeling of silence after finishing Snow Hunters yesterday. Wow! That's something. Yoon not only explores how silence develops intimacy and meaning in our lives, he offers it to us; silence, with its spiritual understanding intact, lifts from these pages to create an aura around you, which to my mind marks this book as a valuable reading experience.
Yoon's protagonist is Yohan, a North Korean POW who refuses repatriation after the Korean War. He stays in the American war camp for almost a year, helping the medics, mending clothes, until he is given the opportunity to emigrate to Brazil, where a job awaits him. Yohan accepts the offer and makes the journey to a new land to become an apprentice to a Japanese tailor named Kiyoshi. Equipped with a few Portuguese words he learns from the South Korean sailors on board ship, Yohan lands in Brazil as a foreigner.
In spite of Yohan’s memories of war—especially his friendship with Peng, who was blinded in a landmine explosion that led to their capture and years-long detention in the POW Camp—and his emotional ties to another homeland, another life, that claims much of his mind and heart, Yohan tries to open up to his new life. The simplicity of his life with Kiyoshi, his brief conversations with one of the sailors who bring cargo to Brazil, and Yohan's sporadic encounters with Santi, a small boy, and Bia, a mysterious young girl, combine to weaken the hold of his past and to strengthen his desire for a new life in his new land. A gentle kind of magic permeates this story, and its subtle light shows us the beauty of a simple life.
- Morvern McNie
Apocalyptic Planet
Craig Childs
In recent years there has been an absolute onslaught of fear around issues of climate change. The media loves to accentuate the imminent apocalyptic doom destined to destroy the Earth. Supposedly civilization as we know it, and possibly even life itself, are about to vanish in an almost instantaneous way. As outrageous as those predictions of immediate and final extinction are, there are many, even if they don’t want to admit it, who are fearful of the future. Even for those who support action on climate change, it is tiresome, annoying, and depressing to be constantly bombarded with announcements of doom.
Craig Childs, author of Apocalyptic Planet, is on a mission to discover what the end of the world will really look like. He travels the world to experience the most uninhabitable regions on earth. His discoveries are both humbling and thought-provoking. His book is neither positive nor negative, but rather neutral. Childs doesn’t lambaste modernity or suggest the need for a massive paradigm shift. Instead, he cites facts and highlights the reality that the Earth is over four billion years old and is in a constant state of flux. While anthropogenic impacts are indeed accelerating certain processes, one fact remains certain: there are bigger, stronger, and slower forces at work that we are not yet able to fully understand. It’s not that Childs advocates passivity, but that he puts our role and efforts into perspective:
The Earth is a seed planting itself over and over. And we are not the gardeners. We are no benevolent being leaving the house every morning with a watering can and a towel to dig up weeds wiping our brows midday to marvel at our handiwork. Instead, we are within the seed itself. We are part of its cells and the hardness of its coat, our place not to marvel at the futility and smallness of ourselves, but to keep life moving. What we do now, from the inside, determines the vigor of that seed, how long it might live and plant itself again.
This is a fantastic book, one that provides a refreshing clarity.
The Resurrectionist
E. B. Hudspeth
Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” I think that's true for most people; we love anything to do with the supernatural, the paranormal, anything that falls outside the rigid lines of science. It makes us feel comforted, knowing that everything isn't all rules and guidelines, that there's still room for exploration and adventure. The desire for the mysterious is escapism in its purest form.
But science too can be beautiful in its intricate, wonderful way; it builds connections between things thought unrelated and provides a powerful way to understand our universe. These two forces, the known and unknown, are balanced masterfully in The Resurrectionist. The book starts with an idea: what if all mythical creatures (or at least the anthropoid ones) were ancestors of modern humans?
Hudspeth takes this conjecture and runs with it. The fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black is masterfully done, touching on real-world events but leaving just enough open for the reader to enter the story fully, rather than just read an account of it. Dr. Black feels real, acts real, and we are with him until his tragic end.
However, while the writing in this book is entertaining enough, it is the artwork that really stands out. Accompanying the pseudoscience are fully realized anatomical drawings of several beasts of lore, including satyrs, sphinxes, and merfolk. The art is nothing short of astounding—skeletal and muscle diagrams mesmerize the eye and bring the creatures closer to life than they have likely ever been. I cannot praise the book highly enough; even casual browsers in the bookstore will find themselves entranced by the oneirataxic imagery. The Resurrectionist is quite likely to be one of the most highly-regarded gems of 2013.
- Robert Green
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
The historian Tony Judt was dying slowly from ALS when his friend and colleague Timothy Snyder proposed working together on a book. Snyder had recently published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a challenging examination of wartime genocides that extended beyond the Holocaust. Thinking the Twentieth Century takes the form of a conversation between these two historians and good friends, friends who expand on and circle around some of the most important and sometimes most obscure periods in the last century. It was, perhaps, a century with more history than any other. It was certainly a century with more deaths by atrocity than any other.
The conversation ranges widely across “history, biography, and ethical treatise,” and in doing so, presents forgotten or unfamiliar history. The history and biography here are alive—recalling his early life, Judt states, “The world of my youth was thus the world that was bequeathed us by Hitler.” As for the ethical treatise, in his Foreword Snyder has this to say:
There is one truth that seeks us rather than the other way around, one truth that has no complement: that each of us comes to an end. The other truths orbit around this one like stars around a black hole, brighter, newer, less weighty. This final truth helped me to give this book its final shape. This book could not have arisen without a certain effort at a certain time, little more than a companionable gesture on my side, but an enormous physical campaign on Tony’s. But it is not a book about struggle. It is a book about the life of the mind, and about the mindful life.
Judt’s previous book, The Memory Chalet, exhibited such deep care for the world he was leaving, and leaving behind. Thinking the Twentieth Century is also a book about the capacity for caring. In this case, caring deeply about a friend.
- James Reid
