Hardboiled detective fiction meets secret wizarding school fiction. A hard-drinking, mediocre, non-magical PI gets hired to solve a murder at the school for teens who can do magic where her estranged and very much magical twin sister is on staff. The mystery is pretty good, but I think the book is really more about the …
Memoir. By a well-known Antiguan-American novelist. Focused on her gardening. Perhaps an odd choice for me, given that I have never read any of Kincaid’s novels (though I do remember carrying stacks of them when I briefly worked at a campus bookstore many years ago) and that I am not a gardener (though I dabbled …
History of six major social reform movements in the United States from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries – abolitionism, populism, progressivism, the so-called “first wave” of the women’s movement, the labour movement, and the socialist and communist movements. The focus is how the white-dominated core of each related to racism, and how Black …
YA contemporary at heart, though it dabbles a bit in fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale. A tiny island off the east coast of a continent that is implied but not stated to be North America, an island known only for a rare bird that nests there in the summer and that draws a small but …
Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …
Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
A collection of short stories by one of the current giants of speculative fiction. A pretty wide range of lengths, tones, and kinds of stories. I think novel length work actually shows off her brilliance more effectively, but I definitely enjoyed this. One good measure of that is the fact that even with short story …
A revised and updated version (published in 2018) of Katsiaficas’ classic book (originally published in 1987) on the uprisings of 1968, notable as the first attempt to understand the peak years of the New Left in a truly global context. There are definitely some quirky elements to this book. I’m not convinced, for instance, that …
Sound studies. Indigenous sound studies, to be precise, by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. The centre of the work is consideration, through very close and careful attention to a range of works and performances, of the various ways in which settler art music and Indigenous music get put in relation and taken up. That might seem …