Canada Reads starts today but I haven’t finished all five books yet! I am, however, halfway through the last one, so at least I’m in a pretty good position to know which ones I like and which ones I don’t.
I will write a proper review of Good to a Fault once I finish it. For now I’m enjoying it, and really identify with the main character, Clara, especially in the way she second guesses herself so much. Endicott is very good at making very human characters and letting us know what they’re thinking as they do what they do. I’m very interested to see how it goes.
Based only on half the book, I’d rank it above both The Jade Peony and Generation X, which I’d put at 4th and 5th respectively, but below Fall On Your Knees and Nikolski which are in...
The fourth book in my series for CBC Canada Reads is The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy.
Let’s cut right to the chase: This was an okay book, but not a favourite by any means. Of the four books I’ve head, it’s sitting solidly in third place. Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees both had some resonance with me through their stories and memorable characters, while Generation X inspired an intense repulsion. The Jade Peony was just… meh.
The novel is told through the eyes of three children in the same family in the roughly 5 to 15 age range, living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. On the face of it this could have had very similar results to Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees, which featured multiple points of view and stories that connected in different...
The first thing I have to ask is what’s the deal with the paragraphs? Not having chapters is one thing, I don’t think anybody cares whether the breaks in text are numbered or not, but the lack of standard text formatting did bug me from time to time.
Anyway, if you can get past that, there’s still the problem of sorting through the numerous characters. I just finished the book a couple days ago and, though I can remember a fair bit of what happened, and I can remember a fair number of names, I still don’t have straight in my head who did what. I did enjoy it when occasionally the narration of one character’s point of view would mention people in the background which I recognized to be some of the other characters I had read about in a previous scene (even...
This is the third novel in my Canada Reads 2009 series of posts. I’ve heard a lot of good things about David Adams Richards. I don’t remember any of them off hand but I at least have this idea in my head that he’s supposed to be a decent author. He spoke at my high school graduation, but I don’t remember anything that he actually said, so I have very little to go on here going into this book.
Unfortunately I don’t have my copy handy, so I can’t go back and look for all my little bookdarts, reminding me of what I liked and didn’t. What I do remember is that most of it falls under the latter.
There were many simple reasons I didn’t like this book. I found the narration dull, and I tended to notice how the writing style was annoying me more...
The Outlander by Gil Adamson is the second of the selections for this year’s Canada Reads that I tackled. The blurb on the back of the book certainly made it sound exciting, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype.
From the beginning I was definitely interest. The anonymity of the main character meant I always wanted to know more about her. We begin the story only knowing her as “The Widow”. On top of the questions we have right from the start—why is this woman being chased, what is she running from—we now have this odd clue, and must wonder, “what does being a widow have to do with it?”
Unfortunately these and other tantalizing clues, references to her past and the excitement we get from the pursuit, come very infrequently. At times I...
In
Daily Life,
calm,
chase,
Gil Adamson,
momentum,
nicknames,
pursuit,
The Outlander,
The Widow,
thriller,
book,
review,
novel,
Canada Reads
Fruit, by Brian Francis, was the first of this years Canada Reads selections I read. Partially this was so I could lend it to my mom sooner rather than later, since it’s not available in the New Brunswick library system, but it’s also the book that I was most curious about. A novel about a puberty aged boy, called “Fruit”… might this be a novel about coming out? An angsty homosexual teen drama? Nothing in the promotional material I read said anything along those lines, instead making the connection from the title to the cherry-like nipples of the main character. The tagline, afterall, claims the nipples will be as much a part of the story as the boy himself. But then again the cover of my copy is bright purple, so there was still a chance.
Peter Paddington is...
In
books,
Radio,
fruit,
Rowing,
homosexuality,
Brain Francis,
coming out,
insecurity,
last names,
loud voices,
puberty,
touchdowns,
review,
Media,
CBC,
Canada Reads