Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Emma Donoghue's "Frog Music"

     Omnibus historical fiction that features...a (real-life) murder and amoral suspects galore, burlesque performers, prostitutes and their fancy men, a cross-dressing street urchin, the origin of the contemporary slang "blow job" (who knew?!?), much actual filth and many malodorous streets, baby farms, an impervious Madame, many costume changes, incidental racism and sexism, panic over a looming epidemic...all in a late-Victorian San Francisco you'll barely recognize. 

   Okay, it's too early to think about a beach book, so perhaps on one of these lazy weekends where outside looks like sheets of rain or drifts or snow you can sink into Ms. Donoghue's clever and fun and serious entertainment.

The review appears in The Vancouver Sun. 

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Audrey Thomas' "Local Customs," Richard Powers' "Orfeo," Lorrie Moore's "Bark," and Nancy Lee's "The Age"

   Time and tide wait for... etc, etc.
   By happy coincidence, most of my assigned review writing was completed before my sister's death-by-automobile.
 

    The titles (all fiction: three novels, one short story collection) include Audrey Thomas' Local Customs, Richard Powers' Orfeo, Lorrie Moore's Bark, and Nancy Lee's The Age. Click on the link to check out the review. They're all worthwhile reads, strangely tied together by meditations of mortality and the unavoidable fact of death.

A Farewell to Meesha-Chan Grubisic, My Sister

Pre-Halloween Eve, Bond St., Victoria BC

Meesha-Chan Grubisic (10 September 1966 — 13 February 2014)
For as long as I draw breath, you will be missed.

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is the solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,--

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

                    —Emily Dickinson

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Audrey Thomas' "Local Customs"

   A ghost story! 
   There's fiction that you read and all the while understand that thematically or stylistically it belongs to a current fashion or literary norm. Narrated by a series of talkative and quarrelsome spectres, Local Customs appears to stand well outside convention as it presents a series of biased and partial accounts of the life of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a real-life English poet who died in western Africa in 1838. Economical, funny, and decidedly odd, Thomas' novel crackles with personality even as it's suffused with Gothic atmospherics. 

 

My actual review appears in The Vancouver Sun

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Kim Fu's "For Today I Am a Boy"

  If the characteristic tension of a coming-of-age narrative results from questions—"Who truly am I?" What should I become?" and "What does my social environment expect from me?"—Kim Fu's intriguing variant on the genre focusses on masculinity as a naturalized social construction. That description makes the novel sound like academic jargon, which it is not. In particular, then, Fu examines the immense, unenviable pressures faced by Peter Huang, a boy (and later adult) certain that he's meant to be female, and his unique responses to those pressures.
 

The review appears in The Winnipeg Review.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Jamie Iredell's "I Was A Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac"

   Meet Jamie Iredell, a PhD essayist with a wildly checkered past... 
   He had me at "I was in this fucked relationship with a woman who had the beginnings of a serious drinking problem. To be fair, I too swilled ten to twelve too many beers a day and was a heavy drug user." (A title like “How to Not Get Arrested for Driving While High on Crack and After Having Drunk a Bunch of Vodka at a James Taylor Concert” didn't hurt either.)

The review appears at The Rumpus.

Digression: Promotional Material—What Are You Up To On February 14?