The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest by J. Duane Sept Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2019 $32.95 / 9781550178371 (first published in 1999 by Harbour as The Beachcomber’s Guide to Seashore Life in the Pacific Northwest; reprinted 2002; second edition 2009; third edition 2019) * Seaside Treasures: A Guidebook for Little Beachcombers by Sarah…
Read more #660 For the love of the North Pacific
A One-Handed Novel by Kim Clark Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin, 2018 $24.00 / 9781987915624 Reviewed by Margot Fedoruk * What is the difference between desirability and disability? Author Kim Clark explores these ideas and more in her fast-paced and farcical work of fiction, A One-Handed Novel. The book’s main character, Melanie Farrell, is a forty-something, face-planting,…
Read more #659 Move over Bridget Jones
A Mysterious Humming Noise: New Poems by Howard White Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2019 $18.00 / 9781772141412 Reviewed by Linda Rogers * Let’s start with the cover. None of your “art-whatever” declarations of sacred intent, pretty pictures promising verbal home decoration: this is a kitchen cover promising kitchen music, including a toe tapper, a fiddle, and…
Read more #658 Plain words in a plain wrapper
The Lieutenant Governors of British Columbia by Jenny Clayton, with a foreword by Janet Austin Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2019 $26.95 / 9781550178647 Reviewed by Patrick A. Dunae * The Office of the Lieutenant Governor is perhaps best known to the public for its pageantry. But it has an important constitutional function. It was created…
Read more #657 Government House calling
The Forbidden Purple City: Stories by Philip Huynh Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions 2019 $22.95 / 9781773100784 Reviewed by William New * Philip Huynh’s first book is an engaging, disturbing, wonderful collection of nine short stories. Each story’s intriguing characters are living lives worth thinking about and caring about, each character compromised by choice and circumstance, each…
Read more #656 Facing all the ghosts
Implicating the System: Judicial Discourses in the Sentencing of Indigenous Women by Elspeth Kaiser-Derrick Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019 $34.95 / 9780887558283 Reviewed by David Milward * The crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration in Canada remains an ongoing issue of national importance. Statistical estimates as of 2016 are that Indigenous inmates amount to 27% of…
Read more #655 The Gladue rights revolution
The House the Spirit Builds by Lorna Crozier, with Peter Coffman and Diane Landy (photography) and Rena Upitis (introduction) Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2019 $22.95 / 9781771622417 Reviewed by Paul Falardeau * The natural world has long been de rigueur to the life of poets and artists, the Chinese poet Han Shan (寒山, literally…
Read more #654 When images yield poems
Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers by Susan Scott (editor), with a foreword by Alison Pick Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2019 $24.95 / 9781987915938 Reviewed by Caileigh Broatch * Susan Scott skillfully curates and edits experiences across many cultures and faiths for Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. This collection of personal…
Read more #653 Sinners, seekers, and sceptics
Ranch Tales: Stories from the Frontier by Ken Mather Victoria: Heritage House, 2019 $19.95 / 9781772031881 Reviewed by Warren Elofson * Ken Mather’s Ranch Tales is a readable and interesting account of ranching in what is now British Columbia from the establishment of the Alkali Lake Ranch in 1861 to the twentieth century. Mather provides…
Read more #652 Mather’s ranch tales
Island Craft: Your Guide to the Breweries of Vancouver Island by Jon C. Stott Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2019 $25.00 / 9781771512923 Reviewed by Ian J.M. Kennedy * Jon Stott knows and likes his beer. This comes out loud and clear in his twentieth book, Island Craft: Your Guide to the Breweries of Vancouver Island. It…
Read more #651 Goodbye ladies and escorts
Love in Vile Places: Military Hospitals as the Site of Care and Nurture by Jo-Anne Fiske * For Remembrance Day 2019 we present a memoir by Jo-Anne Fiske of François Lake, in BC’s north-central interior, of her father Humphrey William Fiske (1886-1959). At the time of his enlistment in Kelowna in 1916, the Norfolk-born Fiske…
Read more #650 Love in vile places
Scallywag on the Salish Sea by Sara Cassidy, with illustrations by Mike Deas Victoria: Heritage House, 2019 $9.95 / 9781772032789 Reviewed by Valerie Green * This delightful little book, written by Sara Cassidy with illustrations by Mike Deas, is aimed specifically at a six to nine year-old demographic who love pirate stories and somewhat gruesome,…
Read more #649 Pirates of the Gulf
Paradise, Later Years by Marion Quednau Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2018 $18.00 / 9781987915839 Reviewed by Renée Sarojini Saklikar * Marion Quednau, from Gibsons, has won awards for both poetry and prose, including a Smithbooks-Books in Canada First Novel Award for The Butterfly Chair (1987). With Paradise, Later Years, she now debuts her first full-length…
Read more #648 A glance of a thousand years
Anna Wong: Traveller on Two Roads by Ellen van Eijnsbergen and Jennifer Cane (introduction) and Zoë Chan and Keith Wallace (essays), with a foreword by Maurice Wong Burnaby: Burnaby Art Gallery, 2018 $40.00 / 9781927364314 Reviewed by Michael Kluckner * A handsome hardcover book published in 2018, five years after her death, has released printmaker…
Read more #647 Finding Anna Wong
Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man by C.E. Gatchalian Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019 $18.95 / 9781551527536 Reviewed by Vincent Ternida * “I live for art.” This is how C.E. Gatchalian commences his brief but dense collection of interconnected personal essays in Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making…
Read more #646 An abiding hunger for art
The Return of the Shadow by Kunio Yamagishi London: Austin Macauley, 2018 £6.16 (U.K) $25.95 (Cdn) / 9781786937155 / Please order from your local bookstore or through Book Depository who offer free worldwide shipping. Reviewed by Patricia E. Roy * In July 2019, The Return of the Shadow, by Comox Valley writer Kunio Yamagishi, was shortlisted…
Read more #645 The journeys of Eizo Osada
The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019 $24.95 / 9781487522698 Reviewed by David Milward * When one hears the word “genocide,” it is easy to instantly think of the Holocaust and then not take it any further than that. As…
Read more #644 The Canadian genocide
My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir by Eufemia Fantetti Salt Spring Island: Mother Tongue Publishing, 2019 $21.95 / 9781896949758 Reviewed by Linda Rogers * “Children are resilient,” they say. “What doesn’t kill them makes them stronger” is another variation. It seems that religion, proverbs, and shibboleths were invented to justify the traumatic malformation of…
Read more #643 Father, daughter, and Tarot
Greenwood by Michael Christie Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (McClelland & Stewart), 2019 $22.00 / 9780771024450 Reviewed by Heather Graham * Michael Christie’s latest novel unfolds over a span of one hundred and thirty years, from 1908 until 2038. The precipitating event for what will follow is a head-on collision between two passenger trains near the…
Read more #642 Tales of timber & heartwood
The Codfish Dream: Chronicles of a West Coast Fishing Guide by David Giblin Victoria: Heritage House, 2018 $19.95 / 9781772032420 Reviewed by Kenneth Campbell * In The Codfish Dream: Chronicles of a West Coast Fishing Guide, David Giblin compresses fifteen years of experience as a sports fishing guide into one remarkable summer, resulting in an…
Read more #641 Big Bay fishing stories