“Nurses don’t get to make mistakes. This book is written as carefully as Crook navigated intransigent bureaucracy, patients, and children.” Linda Rogers reviews Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living by Marion McKinnon Crook (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024) $26.95 / 9781772034691
Ambitious poetry volume “illustrates the evils of human nature, the predatory elites, and social engineers,” but is marred by soapbox rhetoric and ‘poetsplaining.’ —Joe Enns reviews Pole Shift & Other Poems, by Sean Arthur Joyce (Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2024) 9781771715560 / $23.95
Set in the late ’70s, a hearty story for young readers portrays the triumphs and setbacks of a 12-year-old child named Truly. —Alison Acheson reviews Elvis, Me, and the Postcard Winter, by Leslie Gentile (Toronto: DCB Books, 2024) $14.95 / 9781770867666
“On July 4, 2021, Greg hiked to the summit of Frosty Mountain, the highest peak in the park. From this high perch he could look out on the panorama below, the terrain in which he had spent five months searching for Jordan.” Paul Geddes reviews Called by Mother Earth: A Father’s Search for His Son
by Greg F. Naterer (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2024) $24.95 / 9781778530142
“Rhenisch jam-packs his songs with ideas, zooming and spanning, yet with the grace of a skilled composer; a song might jar and rattle while at the same time carry a croon that compels. A reader cannot help but be swept and stilled simultaneously in the lyric experience.” —Steven Ross Smith reviews The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Cycle, by Harold Rhenisch (Regina: U Regina Press, 2024) $19.95 / 978177940154
“Trained in visual art … FitzGerald arrived in Victoria in March 2020 having made her decision to sketch and write about the city before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada and beyond. The focus of the book is ‘on the life pulse of the city of Victoria that kept on going in spite of it.'” Mary Ann Moore reviews Hand Drawn Victoria: An Illustrated Tour in and around BC’s Capital City, by Emma FitzGerald (Toronto: Appetite [Penguin Random House], 2024) $19.95 / 9780525611042
Debut novel, based on family memories, probes the “pitch-black reality of the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine that is estimated to have killed up to five million Ukrainians in the early 1930s.” —Ryan Frawley reviews Black Sunflowers, by Cynthia LeBrun (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2024) $21.95 / 9781554556434
“Going to Seed is prefaced with an introduction that effectively situates the reader around Neville’s central thesis— consider what ‘being constantly occupied’ does to both an individual’s quality of life and the collective health of a community, society, and natural environment.” Natalie Virginia Lang reviews Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature, & Sustainable Work, by Kate J. Neville (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2024) $30.95 / 9781779400000
An accomplished, sometimes surreal debut poetry collection fascinates with its immersive scenes and stark memories. —Marguerite Pigeon reviews The Sacred Heart Motel, by Grace Kwan (Montreal: Metonymy Press, 2024) $18.95 / 9781998898169
Essay collection relates the “great pleasure of strolling in great cities” and offers an appealing and illuminating “window into a wider world.” —Bill Paul reviews The Coincidence Problem: Selected Dispatches 1999-2022, by Stephen Osborne (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024) $24.95 / 9781551529653
“The Deerholme Foraging Cookbook proved to be truly inspiring. This book will appeal to well-established foragers, but also to those, like me, who want to think outside the supermarket norm.” Trish Bowering reviews The Deerholme Foraging Cookbook: Wild Ingredients and Recipes from the Pacific Northwest, revised and updated, by Bill Jones (Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2024) $40 / 9781771514378
“Remembering, as British writer George Orwell showed in his Homage to Catalonia, brings bloody thoughts to the surface and can unearth opposing memories. Spaner does not shy from including such moments and these add a tough realism to the novel.” —Ron Verzuh reviews Keefer Street, by David Spaner (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024) $24.95 / 9781553807209
“Genius loci, roughly translated as ‘spirit of the place,’ … This was the concept explored in the thought-provoking summer exhibition focusing on four modern Westcoast buildings and featured at Victoria’s Wentworth Villa Architectural Heritage Museum. The exhibit was the brainchild of museum curator Ben Clinton-Baker.” Martin Segger reviews the recent exhibition From the Ground, into the Light: Architecture and the Island, 1950-2000, at the Wentworth Villa Architectural Heritage Museum.
Featuring a tyrannical emperor, a kindhearted young hero, a daunting quest, and an “exceedingly chaste” romance, the novel succeeds on its own terms. —Jessica Poon reviews The Last Dragon of the East, by Katrina Kwan (Toronto: Saga Press, 2024) $24.99 / 9781668051238
Thoughtful volume, a long poem and “book of praise,” presents an argument about myth, spirituality, and evolutionary progress via luscious imagery and rolling metrical rhythms. —Harold Rhenisch reviews The Making: A Poem, by Brian Day (Eugene: Resource Publications, 2024) $30.00 / 9781666779479
“[Neering] begins the book with some powerful words: ‘More than 30 years ago, wandering the province for a book on small town life in B.C., I sat with one of the Ktunaxa band counsellors on the St. Mary’s reserve near Cranbrook. David talked about ‘that place over there’ —the hated residential school that dominated the centre of the reserve. He described the beatings, the deprivation—but he also described the traditions and rebirth of pride among the Ktunaxa.'” Valerie Green reviews A Traveller’s Guide to Historic British Columbia (revised), by Rosemary Neering (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2023) $34.95 / 9781770503700
A debut novella, in “some ways a mini-version of the classic Great Canadian Novel,” is “also a haunting subversion of that same overdone CanLit subgenre.”—Daniel Gawthrop reviews Yellow Barks Spider, by Harman Burns (Regina: Radiant Press, 2024) $22.00 / 9781998926190
“McGoogan’s histories have often focused on Arctic explorations. Favourites of mine are about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition and Mrs. Franklin’s earnest efforts to find her lost husband. This time, however, he highlights the rise of Spain’s Franco, Italy’s Mussolini, Russia’s Stalin and, of course, Nazi Germany’s Hitler.” Ron Verzuh reviews Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship by Ken McGoogan (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2024) $36.95 / 9781771624244
At a glance a standard police procedural, this debut novel “offers an extra layer of depth that examines deeper truths of the human condition.”
—Trish Bowering reviews Barcelona Red Metallic, by Christine Cosack (Toronto: Second Story Press, 2024) $22.95 / 9781772603910
“…British Columbia’s Songs of the Southern Interior, has Bartlett following in the footsteps of his mentor. The journey shows what time-consuming and labour-intensive efforts are required for such a venture. Bartlett describes his new book as “a companion” to the [Phil] Thomas memoir. He has followed the pattern established by Thomas by travelling widely and actively seeking material ‘made by ordinary people, in ordinary language, for pleasure and not for profit.'” Wayne Norton reviews British Columbia’s Songs of the Southern Interior & Phil Thomas and The Songs of British Columbia by Jon Bartlett (Vancouver: Vancouver Folk Song Society, 2024) $20.00 / 9780987725523