Archive for the ‘Canada’ Category

WHITE SPACE BETWEEN by Ami Sands Brodoff

ami Sands Brodoff opens with an epigraph from Rabbi Avi Weiss: “The Torah is written ‘black fire on white fire’ . . . black fire refers to the letters of the Torah . . . the white refers to the spaces between the letters . . . they are the story, the song, the silence.” Exploring the story, singing the song, reflecting on the silence, these are the promises of this intimate yet ambitious novel, and they are both moving and beautiful. To say that Brodoff does not quite realize them is not to diminish the value of her search. The book is a sincere and obviously personal attempt to illuminate mysteries that may ultimately remain unknowable.

December 3, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Canada, Contemporary, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

SANCTUARY LINE by Jane Urquhart

Consider memory. At any time, a person’s mind potentially holds the sum total of all her experience, though she may not be able to access all of it. She may have forgotten details, until reminded by revisiting a place or picking up a keepsake. There may be memories too hurtful to recall, until the recounting of simpler things clears a pathway to them. There may be things that she cannot understand until the light of maturity suddenly reveals their meaning. Unlike a tale told chronologically, a novel based on memory contains its entire story in outline from the first pages on — although it remains unclear in detail, emotion, and significance until we have lived long enough in the narrator’s mind to explore her past from within. And Jane Urquhart, in the gradual unspooling of memory that is the essence of her latest novel, allows us to inhabit the mind of Liz Crane, her protagonist and narrator, as though it were our own. This is a novel about memory, nostalgic, partial, sometimes painful, but always intriguing.

October 4, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  · Posted in: Canada, Contemporary, Family Matters, Literary, Theme driven, y Award Winning Author

BLUE DUETS by Kathleen Wall

Lila Jameson is a professional pianist living in Montreal. She specializes in chamber music — that is, playing with one or two other musicians rather than solo — so intense intimate interactions with others are an integral part of her life. But right now, her musical exchanges are in danger of being eclipsed by her personal ones. Her mother is dying of cancer and has rejected further treatments. Her husband, Rob, a professor of history, has become distant and Lila suspects an affair. Her daughter, Lindsay, is breaking up with her boyfriend. And Lila herself, at fifty-three, feels herself at a crossroads of her life, both blind and naked at the same time.

September 23, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Canada, Contemporary

THE MATTER OF SYLVIE by Lee Kvern

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s THE CORRECTIONS, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ STRANGERS AT THE FEAST, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–”four, if you count Sylvie.”

September 5, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Canada, Contemporary, Family Matters, y Award Winning Author

BORDER SONGS by Jim Lynch

In Jim Lynch’s critically-acclaimed first novel, THE HIGHEST TIDE, Miles, a thirteen-year old boy with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, discovers a giant squid on the shores of Puget Sound as it gasps its last breath. What follows is a miracle of nature as oceanic oddities and coincidences seem drawn to the teenage boy. Now, with his second novel, BORDER SONGS, also set in the Pacific Northwest but inland, Lynch has created another story concerned as much with unexplained coincidences and natural beauty as it is with its quirky characters.

November 13, 2009 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: ,  · Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Canada, Contemporary, Literary, US Northwest

LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER by John Irving

I had dinner recently with a friend who asked me what I was reading. “The new John Irving book,” I told her. She became instantly animated. “I love John Irving,” she declared. “I’ve read everything he’s written, and watched the movies too.” I was almost finished with the newest Irving book, LAST NIGHT AT TWISTED RIVER, and was exhausted at what I found to be its inherent ups and downs. I needed her enthusiasm. “Tell me why you like him so much,” I asked. “Well,” she began, “his characters are always so interesting. And the stories, they’re usually tragic but still somehow funny. I love how he can do that.” I understood both these comments–and agreed. “He’s just different than all other writers.” I understood that too–I think.

October 26, 2009 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: Canada, Contemporary, Literary, NE & New York, y Award Winning Author