<\/p>\n
A Ladder of Bones<\/em> The title of Bunmi Oyinsan\u2019s latest novel, A Ladder of Bones<\/em>, immediately warns readers that what is to come isn\u2019t going to be pretty. Oyinsan, who lives in Nigeria and Canada, reveals the lives of characters who have been caught up in the on-going tragedies in various African locations, tragedies that have their roots deep in the past. Ultimately people\u2019s success is built on the bones of others, often Africans.<\/p>\n The novel opens on Victoria Day in Halifax in 1997, and a young naked girl is found in the street. As she is brown, the onlookers assume she is a foreigner, and no one knows where she has come from. The most curious thing about her is that she appears to have two navels, and it\u2019s thought that she may be reincarnated. Her name is Enilolobo, and according to Inin, a Yoruba attendant at the hospital, the name means \u201c\u2019The one who has gone has returned.\u2019\u201d Enilolobo is adopted by one of the doctors, and her background is discovered. She does have the ability to \u201cremember\u201d countless brutal experiences and speak in various languages, and when she is older, she decides she has to \u201cunravel where she came from and how she came to be found on a street of Halifax. To be strung out metaphysically, to be tethered to a mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n One of her first steps is to research \u201cthe relationship between the trans-Saharan trade and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.\u201d As Oyinsan develops her characters, she also provides education on a history whose effects are felt to this day. The novel expands from Enilolobo to several other children, whose lives have been shaped by power struggles, war, and poverty. Some are clearly different characters, and some may be other versions of Enilolobo. Accepting or rejecting the premise of reincarnation doesn\u2019t matter as it\u2019s the truth of the experiences that matter.<\/p>\n Another important character is Siaka, who experiences the destruction of his village in Sierra Leone. He and a small group of boys, including his little brother Bobo, escape the carnage as they were out in the cornfields. The boys struggle to survive. Their parents had also struggled to survive through job loss and subsequent marital discord, in part caused by decisions made by foreigners who own companies. But the boys\u2019 new circumstances are beyond devastating, and they decide to join \u201can army. Any army! All soldiers were hunters, and all civilians prey.\u201d As child-soldiers they are forced to do the unthinkable. Or die. Siaka\u2019s story is by far the most moving in a novel full of heartbreak. Eventually he is rescued and handed over to UNICEF to be rehabilitated. He\u2019s treated by a psychotherapist from Canada.<\/p>\n A Ladder of Bones<\/em> carefully connects the rungs in the worldwide economic pyramid scheme. For some people to become obscenely rich, others must be beggared. The novel focusses on the devastation of various African peoples and communities. It shows the connections between the early slave trades and the relentless greed of capitalism. Even when the wealthy attempt to help, as in the case of a Canadian billionaire who has an extravagant home in Ile Ifa, a place where his mining interests generate him a fortune but which do little for the people, the help is mere window dressing.<\/p>\n Another gripping facet of the novel is the travel back and forth between North America and Africa. Siaka\u2019s father, for example, believes his ancestors came from African settlements in Nova Scotia. In the end several characters find they don\u2019t fit in any place. They have no home.<\/p>\n Parts of this novel are difficult to read because of the physical violence. But it\u2019s the emotional or psychological violence that is really the foundational issue. When some people (largely because of their skin colour) are discounted as human beings, solely to fill another\u2019s pockets, suffering on an unimaginable scale is made possible. Apart from the obvious solution of treating people better, the novel offers little hope. But education is definitely a starting point. And this book is a great place to begin.<\/p>\n We, the Kindling<\/em> After three acclaimed books of poetry, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek has published her debut novel, and it\u2019s one of the most devastating books I\u2019ve read in a long while. We, the Kindling<\/em> is based on the kidnapping of children in Uganda by the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army. Children were stolen from their schools and homes and forced to become soldiers or to serve the army in other ways. Girls were married off to old men to bear children.<\/p>\n Three girls are the main characters; Maggie, Helen, and Miriam are taken from their school. While a nun is able to argue for the return of 109 girls, thirty are marched off to spend years with the rebels. Okot Bitek weaves in the history of Uganda and how war has occurred since the ousting of Idi Amin in 1979. She shows the utter disruption of the country, its internal fights for power, and how children are the kindling\u2014the small bits used to start fires and ultimately destroy. <\/p>\n Even though Maggie, Helen, and Miriam survive and finally escape the clutches of the rebels, their lives have been irrevocably changed. They\u2019ve lost years. They have children. They see that their school companions who weren\u2019t stolen have finished school, attended university, and gained good jobs. They suffer from the shame of their experiences even though they are victims.<\/p>\n Along with the historical events, Okot Bitek includes traditional stories, which are another form of education along with formal school. The first story is from the Baganda people who have a tale about a mother doing what she needs to do to protect her children. She tells her daughter not to open the door to anyone until she hears a particular song. An ogre tricks the girl into opening the door and eats her. The mother finds the ogre and makes him vomit up her daughter, thus showing the lengths to which a mother will go to save her child. The stolen girls try to protect their children, but sadly these mothers have not been protected.<\/p>\n When they attempt to return to what\u2019s left of their former lives, too much has happened. They have missed so much, and they are different from the people around them. Miriam says, \u201cI tell Helen not to live as if everybody knows what happened to us. And even if they think they do, they don\u2019t. They only know what they think they imagine. They have no way of knowing what happened. We are the ones who know the ogre\u2019s belly.\u201d And the ogre\u2014the men who stole these children\u2014are brutal beyond belief, often wielding violence simply because they can. And they make the children participate. It\u2019s a terrifying world, one that the children try to survive. But physical survival is only one kind.<\/p>\n Stylistically, it\u2019s easy to see that Okot Bitek is a gifted poet. Her use of various languages and voices helps to tell the various stories. She often employs lists and anaphora to make her point. For example, she uses Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s \u201cThe Things They Carry\u201d as inspiration for what the children carry. The list goes on for pages and includes both the concrete objects carried (e.g., luggage, babies, food, AK-47s, sugar, salt) and the abstract (e.g., \u201cthoughts of our families and the good times we\u2019d known at home,\u201d luck, guilt, hope. Lists of names (and sometimes how the names are changed) and ages show that children were abducted from many places.<\/p>\n It\u2019s shocking how children are used as pawns in war, and yet it happens all the time. What We, the Kindling<\/em> does so eloquently is explore the humanity of these children while their humanity is being denied and they are being treated as tools in senseless power struggles. Incidents of brutality are deeply disturbing, but the novel is much more than a series of awful events. It\u2019s also a testament to human perseverance. <\/em><\/p>\n Celestina\u2019s House<\/em> Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez dives into her Filipino culture in her debut novel, Celestina\u2019s House<\/em>, which tells the story of Celestina Errantes\u2019 search for happiness. Although the grand-daughter of a wealthy man, Celestina and her parents do not enjoy the luxurious lifestyles of her relatives. Her mother Stella is disinherited because she marries her art instructor, Antonio, instead of the wealthy man her father has selected. <\/p>\n But the Errantes family is not poor, at least not in material terms. Stella and Antonio\u2019s marriage soon falters as the lust that formed the basis of their union wears off, in part because of Antonio\u2019s drinking and infidelity. It\u2019s evident almost immediately in the novel that Antonio is a creep of the lowest order: \u201cHe loved women, and he enjoyed the games they played, but they were most beguiling when they were on the cusp of maturity, not yet aware of the power they wielded over men. He understood why men risked jail sentences and madness to taste this delectable fruit.\u201d Celestina is a beauty. She\u2019s also smart and ambitious, but she is nearly destroyed by her father\u2019s closeness and her mother\u2019s distance.<\/p>\n How children are harmed by ineffectual or even evil parents is an underlying theme of the novel. Celestina confuses lust for love; consequently, she indulges in sex randomly simply to avoid being alone, or she fools herself by thinking that attraction and great sex will provide her with the sense of belonging she desperately desires. Given her upbringing, it\u2019s a miracle she can function at all though, so readers are likely to feel sorry for her and wish her well.<\/p>\n Where the novel comes alive is in its display of Filipino culture. Gonzalez, who now lives in Toronto, makes Manila and its environs vibrant on the page. The country is complicated and has problems, but it is also physically gorgeous and has layers upon layers of traditions from the Filipino to the Catholic spirits that inform actions to the unbelievable variety of food to the multitudes of languages to popular culture. Celestina\u2019s mother\u2019s family, for example, is ethnically Chinese. Her father\u2019s family appears to be of Spanish descent. Celestina speaks English, Hokkien, and Tagalog. The food is a blend of all the peoples that have inhabited the country. When Antonio takes Celestina to a restaurant, the narrator reports, \u201cLike their country, the menu was a long-simmering cultural cocido\u2014with continental European dishes like bouillabaisse, six kinds of paella with local produce, Chinese dishes bearing Spanish names, and regional dishes featuring ingredients such as cow\u2019s blood and minced beef lungs saut\u00e9ed in the holy trinity of garlic, onions, and tomatoes.\u201d The novel made me want to learn more about the Philippines, its troubled, yet fascinating history and its amazing blend of traditions.<\/p>\n Apart from the Errantes family, one of the most important characters is Rio Orosa or Manang (term of respect for an older sister) Rio, a servant who becomes like part of the family and who takes care of Celestina. Even after death, Manang Rio keeps an eye on Celestina in the house she eventually is given by her grandfather Sebastian. Characters are haunted by their pasts and by the dead. Celestina\u2019s house used to be her Great-Aunt Selena\u2019s house, and the house is as much a character as the people who inhabit or visit it.<\/p>\n Overall the novel is engaging because of the glimpses into Filipino life but the characters are often a little out of focus as they are used to make points. Children are scarred emotionally and physically by parents driven by desire or adherence to beliefs. Characters try to follow or flout (as in the case of Celestina) accepted practices, but the novel feels overwritten or overwrought at times. However, given what happens, the high emotions may be appropriate. The conclusion, unfortunately, seems forced to me as Celestina retreats into a belief system that is the opposite of what she was pursuing as a free-thinking young woman.<\/p>\n The Road to Heaven<\/em> Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson\u2019s debut novel, The Road to Heaven<\/em>, takes readers to 1965 Toronto, when phones were in public booths and cost a dime, not carried around in people\u2019s pockets. The narrator, Patrick Bird, is a would-be private detective, but his tendency to be his own worst enemy often gets in his way and keeps him from being the best version of himself possible.<\/p>\n Bird is tasked by his boss, Sid, to investigate the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Abbie Linklater. The job is a welcome change from his usual task of setting up philandering husbands to get evidence for a divorce. But right off the bat, it\u2019s clear that the Linklater family is wildly dysfunctional and secretive. Trent Linklater, Abbie\u2019s father, is an obnoxious bully who refuses to answer Bird\u2019s questions. As Bird says to Trent, \u201cI think if you have a real interest in getting your daughter back, you\u2019d take the time to answer my questions. For all you know right now, you little girl could be greasing some guy up at a body-rub parlour on Yonge Street.\u201d Readers are also wondering why Trent is so obstructive, the past of the Linklater family is the true mystery of the novel and has led to the present problems.<\/p>\n Abbie is not hard to find, but why she is on her own search to find about her family becomes Bird\u2019s mission. Abbie and her twin brother, Nelson, live with their father and step-mother, Jane, and no one gets along. Trent\u2019s first wife, Belinda, died when the children were two years old. Any information about the past has to be pried out of the Trent and Jane, so it\u2019s no wonder that Abbie is trying to find out about her mother. As Trent refuses to involve the police in the search for Abbie, it\u2019s evident that something is amiss.<\/p>\n The novel is peppered with references to real places in Toronto, and a reader unfamiliar with the city would benefit from looking at a map as it\u2019s helpful to see where the action happens. Stefanovich-Thomson manages to show the so-called \u201cToronto the Good\u201d by having characters regularly attend church, and one of Abbie\u2019s friends is the son of a local Anglican minister. But no place is as good as its veneer, as demonstrated by the opening chapter in which Bird uses a woman to entice a married man into bed so he can take pictures of them.<\/p>\n The style of the mystery is mostly hard-boiled although Bird, while smart, is not a verbally proficient as one would hope, and all the characters, with the exception of Abbie, run from the annoying to the awful. It\u2019s easy to understand why Abbie is trying to find out about her mother, who died in a botched bank robbery, as no one ever talks about her. And in an era without the internet, Abbie finds herself pouring through old newspapers in the public library, to alleviate or confirm her suspicion that her mother was murdered.<\/p>\n The tangle of nasty people gets sorted, but not before another body is found. Bird makes a dubious choice regarding Jane, and the seduction scene with the two of them is dubious at best and entirely ridiculous. The pull of sex is one of the drivers of the novel, and that\u2019s certainly realistic, but as drawn in the novel is over-the-top.<\/p>\n The other driver of the novel, the formation and development of family, is also realistic, and while the events of the novel are possible, the lack of realistic characters makes the novel appear somewhat cartoony. But there are funny moments, and if Stefanovich-Thomson writes a sequel, maybe Bird will have matured a bit into a more thoughtful and controlled character. He has the instincts and drive to be a great detective. And the historical aspect of the novel is engaging. It\u2019s been a wait for fans of Alex Pugsley\u2019s Aubrey McKee<\/em>, the first of five autobiographical novels. In The Education of Aubrey McKee<\/em>, the setting shifts from Halifax, where Aubrey grows up, to Toronto, where he attends university and has his first serious relationship. As he did in Halifax, Aubrey is attracted to clever and creative people, while being more of an intense observer of life.<\/p>\n Like the initial novel, this second one is comprised of connected parts, in this case, three of widely varying lengths. Aubrey begins his story by introducing the three characters he will focus on: \u201cWe arrived in the city from places far flung\u2014Halifax, Selkirk, Napanee\u2014and settled somewhere between Kipling and Kennedy. . . . Calvin Dover, Gudrun Peel, Quincy Tynes, and I were such worshipful believers. Everyone invented themselves. . . . With various destinies available, just who would we become?\u201d And then he goes on to develop these characters and his relationship with them.<\/p>\n The first part, \u201cThe Calvin Dover Show,\u201d is the shortest at 24 pages. Calvin has made it in television in California, and Aubrey says, \u201cI loved Calvin Dover. He was absurd and gruff and brilliant and responsible for a large part of my adult brain. I was one of the writers on this sketch comedy series The Calvin Dover Show<\/em>, which ran for one under-the-radar season on a Canadian cable network.\u201d Calvin visits Toronto for the Fringe Festival and spends time with Aubrey in a crazed alcohol-fueled few hours. They had met at the U. of T. and remained friends. Clearly the three characters around whom Pugsley arranges the book are profoundly influential in Aubrey\u2019s life.<\/p>\n As expected, the novel deploys the same blend of comedy and tragedy as does Aubrey McKee<\/em>, but both extremes are more muted than they were in the first novel, perhaps to show that adult emotions are strong but do not completely overwhelm as they can for young people, at least in Aubrey\u2019s group of friends and acquaintances. And no character can possibly be as remarkable as Cyrus Mair in the first novel.<\/p>\n The second part, \u201cThe Poet,\u201d is about Gudrun, Aubrey\u2019s longtime girlfriend, another remarkable person. Gudrun is working unsuccessfully on a Ph.D. in English and trying to write poetry. She struggles with some mental health issues. Aubrey is besotted with her, and he tries to do whatever he can to help her as she changes directions (and herself). This part has 29 chapters, each beginning with one of Gudrun\u2019s poems or a note by her or some other bit of information like a recipe, and clocks in at over 200 pages. Aubrey is a graduate student in chemistry, and he will also change over the years they are together. The world the characters inhabit is full of popular culture, intellectual banter, and a drive to find themselves in a challenging world.<\/p>\n Pugsley stays away from a year-by-year exploration of Aubrey\u2019s life. Instead, it\u2019s people and events that shape the narrative, so the novel has much more the feel of autobiography as memory is capricious. Given the space devoted to Gudrun, it\u2019s obvious how important she is to Aubrey. An she\u2019s important as a character apart from Aubrey. Her background makes her success even more remarkable as she came from bad family circumstances and makes her way on her own because of her intelligence and work ethic. Unlike Aubrey she does not come from privilege.<\/p>\n The third section, \u201cA Night with Quincy Tynes,\u201d jumps into the future from the second, and also links to Aubrey\u2019s youth in Halifax. Pugsley writes this section as a three-act play. Readers of the first novel will remember Tynes: \u201cSome will remember him as Sneaky Tynes, friend of my drug-dealing youth, and when we last saw him, Sneaky Tynes was walking off with sixty-three joints, stolen from me, on the Wanderers Grounds in Halifax in 1979. Vagaries have been manifold since that day and I will fill them in as we move along, but now let\u2019s get to the present dramatics. . . . Quincy Tynes is Black Nova Scotian, 48 years old, with an open face and broad shoulders, and if there is a hero in this period of my education, that hero is Quincy Tynes.<\/em>\u201d Quincy is a true friend to Aubrey.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s not necessary to read Aubrey McKee<\/em> before reading this book, I highly recommend it, and it\u2019s wonderful. And it\u2019s also about Aubrey\u2019s education\u2014how and why he reacts to the people and world around him. Pugsley is a genius at focusing on what matters in life\u2014friends, love, self-development, creativity, and a large whack of kindness. He explores these topics in an erudite manner that moves between the basic grittiness of life and the heights of emotion. <\/p>\n Open Season: Stories<\/em> Shaukat Ajmeri was born and educated in India and now makes Canada his home. He uses his experience to develop stories about cultural issues and the problems people face, focusing on class, gender, and caste. The details indicate a writer who has lived experience of some of the situations and an ability to imagine the others and present them in clear, direct prose.<\/p>\n Ajmeri opens the collection with a story about the power of reading, \u201cThe Reading Ritual,\u201d which is set in both India and Canada. The story is narrated by Priya, who is invited to visit the new next-door neighbour, Sharda Devi. When Priya and her older sister take up the invitation, they are exposed to a new world of books. They have grown up in a family that discourages reading apart from schoolwork. Their aunt says, \u201cLife is the best teacher . . . . Books only confuse the mind\u2014fill you up with ideas and knowledge for which you have no use.\u201d But Sharda Devi says, \u201cWords want to be read, they long to be rescued by us. I buy books because I love words and the stories they tell, and by reading them I set them free.\u201d The girls manage to convince their mother of the value of reading, to the extent that she too wants to do her \u201cpart in freeing the words.\u201d But freedom becomes elusive for Priya who tries to avoid a predatory servant and avoids going to her neighbour\u2019s house. And she stops reading because of the association. Ajmeri takes Priya to Canada and then back to India as an adult who finally visits Sharda Devi again, and books play a role. It\u2019s a beautiful story about possibility and loss and recovery.<\/p>\n Cultural practices follow a family to Canada in \u201cAll Cut Up,\u201d the title of which alludes to a devastating procedure done of girls\u2014genital mutilation. In this story the family is in conflict over what should happen regarding Zari\u2019s seven-year-old daughter. Zari and Abizer marry in Mumbai and move to Canada, where Zari experiences an unknown freedom. When her mother-in-law comes to live with them, she tries to make Zari stop working and adopt a more traditional role as wife. Zari refuses. Fortunately, Zari had made Abizer promise she could work. When the topic of khatna<\/em> is raised, the lines are drawn, even though the cost of non-compliance with the traditional practice is the excommunication of the family. Zari stands her ground to protect her daughter. The story beautifully illustrates the collision of different ways of seeing the world.<\/p>\n The range of topics in this collection is wide. In \u201cSaving Grace,\u201d class and caste play a role. Salim, a ten-year-old boy, lives with his extended family in India. He boosts his allowance by helping himself to change in his father\u2019s pocket. When Sugra Bi, a servant, asks for a loan because her husband is sick and in the hospital, Salim\u2019s father refuses, saying the husband is \u201ca liability. He drinks all day.\u201d Salim wants to help, but has nowhere near enough money. The most memorable example of the difference between the family and the servant is that when she cannot come one day, Salim\u2019s aunts have to wash the dishes themselves, and one comments, \u201cHow did that poor woman use freezing water without a complaint?\u201d <\/p>\n All twelve of these stories offer insight into the human condition in varying conditions. Ajmeri is an astute observer of inequity and injustice, and his stories are sensitive and educational about many aspects of cultural struggles.<\/p>\n Window of Tolerance<\/em> Susanna Cupido\u2019s debut novel, Window of Tolerance<\/em>, illustrates what happens when people cannot stay in the optimal zone of emotional response. If stress becomes too great, people may respond by being overwhelmed or by shutting down. Being able to stay within the window is critical.<\/p>\n At the age of twenty-six, Marta struggles with debilitating depression, which she unfortunately attends to with substance abuse, of both alcohol and illicit drugs. The third person narrator\u2019s perspective is limited to Marta\u2019s, so the novel is developed from the perspective of a clinically depressed person who is floundering: \u201cThat was the thing about depression. It had taken the past first, and then it had taken the future, and then she had been left out at sea, stranded in the vanishing present.\u201d After the loss of her job during covid when entertainment spaces were largely closed, Marta has to move back home to the apartment where her father, sister, and little nephew live, and the only room available is the laundry room. She is also grieving the death of her mother.<\/p>\n When the novel opens, Marta is nearing the end of her twenty-session allotment of group therapy. It does not go well. One of the other participants, Thomas, arrives with bare muddy feet, and appears to be having hallucinations. Marta tries to help Thomas by washing his feet and suggesting he talk to her. But Thomas is quite far gone into his own world. That doesn\u2019t stop Marta from doggedly trying to find Thomas when he is kicked out of his apartment and disappears into street life. Most of the novel revolves around Marta\u2019s efforts to track down Thomas, and as it\u2019s winter in Halifax, anyone attempting to survive on the streets is suffering. The lack of care for the mentally ill, addicted, or poor is a blight on contemporary society, and Susanna Cupido shows the damage wrought. The situation of another regular at the therapy sessions is replayed across the country every day:<\/p>\n [Shaw\u2019s] name was on the waitlist for a therapist, a psychiatrist, a pastoral counsellor\u2014nobody ever called him back. . . . Sertraline thinned his thoughts, fluoxetine clotted them; he took lithium for suicidal ideation, propranolol for the tremors that lithium gave him, and valium for his anxiety about the propranolol. And every time the carousel of the counselling centre tried to wheel Shaw back out into the world, he hit another crisis and got sent right back. Shaw is Marta\u2019s friend, and he\u2019s one of the therapy group who manages to hold down a job.<\/p>\n Marta also has a job as a night janitor at the university, at least for a while, but her commitment to locating Thomas disrupts her job performance, and she gets fired. She is taken in by Shaw after she leaves her family home. Along with her mission to find Thomas, she spends time trying to figure out what she is going to do with her life. Cupido doesn\u2019t flinch from showing the harm Marta is doing to herself. The amount of vomiting that happens in this novel is remarkable\u2014and of course disturbing.<\/p>\n Clearly there are no easy cures for depression. Marta grapples with what she sees as criticism from her sister, who is herself trying to be a responsible parent to a child she had at fifteen. Marta\u2019s father is loving and caring to his daughters and his grandson. But even with a supportive family, Marta struggles. The experience of a depressed person feels realistic. Perhaps the most compelling part of the novel is that Cupido makes it clear that a person with depression is not just the disease but has many other attributes, kindness and generosity being paramount in Marta and in Shaw, at least to people other than themselves. It\u2019s evident that the self-destructive behaviour has to stop, but it\u2019s also evident why people succumb to the lure of blotting out their negative feelings.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprising that the novel often seems disjointed. The characters are living extremely incoherent lives, and there\u2019s no simple fix. But the message of the novel is that while it\u2019s impossible to save everyone, some people may be able to get back into that window of tolerance.<\/p>\n I Left You Behind: Stories<\/em> Born in Pakistan, educated in Pakistan and Texas, and now residing in Toronto, Nazneen Sheikh has numerous publications, and her latest collection of short stories demonstrates the range of her experiences. The first ten stories in I Left You Behind<\/em> are linked, and they could have been the basis for a novel. The next seven have different characters all experiencing the challenges of immigration in various ways.<\/p>\n The opening story, \u201cThe Girl on the Rock,\u201d introduces a five-year-old girl who has a favourite rock she loves to sit on. She is a fascinating character: \u201cAt five she displays a resolute air. She goes to school and is a precocious reader.\u201d Her father has been involved in the Free Kashmir movement, and he has bad news for his daughter. They have to move to a big city. Its benefit is its location by the sea, and when the tide is out, her rock appears. Her plan is to write stories about the rock and perhaps about \u201cResistance,\u201d a word her father taught her.<\/p>\n The stories move forward in time from 1949 to 2022, dipping in and out of the girl\u2019s life as she grows up. The second story solidifies the girl\u2019s interest in stories when her aunt visits the family in Karachi and tells her a tale about an evil king. The girl\u2019s response captures the magic of story-telling: \u201cThe story did two remarkable things. It transformed the story-teller and the listener. Suddenly the stuffy aunt became magical. This magic was the ability to captivate an audience that did not want the story to end. The girl experiences fear and wonder.\u201d It\u2019s clearly Sheikh\u2019s goal to provide the same magic for her readers.<\/p>\n In \u201cThe Eyes of Texas,\u201d the girl wins a scholarship for an exchange and spends her final year of high school in Texas, where she is introduced to the racism of 1961. The American family lives in a segregated neighbourhood, and they have a Black woman to do housework. \u201cHer position was that of maid and household pet. . . . Jhonny Lee had stepped out of the pages of an unwritten American history book and had sparked her curiosity to learn more about this invisible race in the country she was waltzing through.\u201d The waltz stops when she tries to have lunch with a Black student she meets at a another school during a debating competition. One of the teachers from her white school prevents her. The linked stories take the character through marriage, motherhood, and other experiences in Canada where she lives because of her husband\u2019s job. Each slice of life is realistically depicted, with the possible exception of \u201cSeeing Through Green,\u201d in which the main character and her husband are at their summer house on land which was once indigenous. The indigenous people are like the Black people in the Texas story\u2014invisible: \u201cShe felt that an entire race of people were [sic] hidden from sight. There was never a sighting even of a canoe on the water and she felt as though her husband spoke of another era or time.\u201d He responds to her concern: \u201cDon\u2019t worry, the pow-wow is next weekend and you will see them all.\u201d The woman realizes she lacks knowledge of the indigenous people, but this story seems forced, more a way to include indigenous issues than to develop character or theme.<\/p>\n Among the mostly unconnected stories, \u201cThe Last Martini\u201d is gripping. Xavier is a bartender in an upscale Toronto hotel. He has worked there for decades after immigrating from Jamaica. He started at the bottom, and devotes himself to his job and his small house to the extent that he erases his past. Sheikh does a marvelous job of showing the limitations of Xavier\u2019s life and how an unscrupulous man takes advantage of him. Race is part of the picture, just as it is \u201cThe Actress,\u201d in which a woman and her husband adopt a mixed-race girl. Emotional coldness rules the actress\u2019s life as she and her own mother have a dysfunctional relationship in which the daughter feels she is competing with her mother. Hence the adoption. The child is manly raised by her unemployed father, who loves her, but the narrator\u2019s comment about her place in the family is telling: \u201cThe vivacious little girl was lively and intelligent, and her racial difference from her parents gave her the cachet of becoming an exotic accessory.\u201d Sheikh excels at broken and unhealthy relationships and how they damage those in them.<\/p>\n I Left You Behind<\/em> is likely to keep you up reading if you start at bedtime. Nazneen Sheikh is a polished and assured writer with much to offer readers about different experiences in the world for people who move and leave something or someone behind. <\/p>\n Hello, Horse: Stories<\/em> Richard Kelly Kemick\u2019s first collection includes stories that have won prizes, and it\u2019s easy to see why. The eleven stories in Hello, Horse<\/em> are wide-ranging in subject and setting, showing the breadth of Kemick\u2019s interests, while being written in deliriously incisive prose. Often using first person point of view, the stories delve into the utter perplexity of human beings.<\/p>\n The first story, \u201cPerfection,\u201d hurls readers into that perplexity. One technique that Kemick makes great use of is matching scenarios. The grandfather of the narrator\u2019s girlfriend was a hangman for the Nuremberg executions; his mantra is \u201cThis world . . . is not fit for man or beast.\u201d The beasts in question are racing dogs. The grandfather is obsessed with them. So is the granddaughter who starts to sabotage one of the dogs because \u201cThe perfect season, the perfect career. The perfect dog. It cannot happen.\u201d She has adopted religious beliefs that teach is perfection is achieved, \u201cheaven will cease to exist.\u201d The story compares the faultiness of the Nuremberg gallows and the will to win of a dog named \u201cGod Speed.\u201d<\/p>\n When a collection starts with such an amazing story, expectations are built. And Kemick continues to deliver. The problems plaguing young people and their search for meaning in life are common in several stories. In \u201cGravity,\u201d a teenage couple are expecting a baby. They are utterly clueless about what that means for their lives. The future father, Danny, is more invested in hanging out with his friends and doing drugs although he does acknowledge things will change. His current activity is defacing election billboards and posters for the incumbent, Woodside. Kemick\u2019s sly humour comes through clearly, \u201cForty-eight hours before the polls opened, our town newsletter broke that Gibbs was cheating on his wife with Olivia who runs Olivia and Paul\u2019s Outdoor Paintball. It was the biggest story the newsletter ran since Sandra Schmirler came in \u201995 to cut the ribbon for the rink.\u201d Bad decisions are not confined to the young.<\/p>\n A laugh out loud story is \u201cSea Change,\u201d in which the \u201cBritish Columbia Teachers\u2019 Union Pedagogical Conference\u201d is taking place at a resort in Cuba. Anyone with even a faint passing acquaintance with so-called educational conferences will guffaw at the topics offered. The previous conference had simultaneous sessions that resulted in a PR nightmare when \u201cGamifying Your Classroom (sponsored by Ubisoft) was scheduled at the same time as Decolonizing the Report Card,\u201d and to the surprise of no one paying attention, everyone went for the games. This year there are no simultaneous submissions which means that most people go to one and then head for the bar. Against the scheduling, two teachers contemplate having an affair.<\/p>\n Kemick deploys his meta-fictional chops in \u201cThe Unitarian Church\u2019s Annual Young Writer\u2019s Short Story Competition.\u201d Dogs feature in this story as well, and they are obviously important to the author, whose photo online includes a beautiful dog. The narrator\/writer is seven months pregnant, and her mother died two weeks ago. She decides to write about a dog breeder named Michelle, who \u201cbreeds Great Danes crossed with some sort of Himalayan hound. They stand as tall as young horses and have sagging jowls; their paws are large and round as human skulls. But Michelle also breeds rumours.\u201d The story within the story shows the skill of the girl, likely Janny from \u201cGravity\u201d as she refers to a fellow student who appears in the title story, \u201cHello, Horse.\u201d<\/p>\n And just when I thought Kemick had reached the ends of his fictional world, he dazzled again with \u201cSatellite,\u201d a post-apocalyptic story that features children and hockey-playing nuns. Like many of the stories, violence, loss, and heartbreak play a huge role. Friendship is also critical, but it has limits and can be destroyed.<\/p>\n Hello, Horse<\/em> is remarkable in its diversity and sheer word deployment. Lovers of the short story should get their hand on this collection as soon as possible. Don\u2019t look for a pretty picture of the world. Look for a troubled and real view of human foibles and a mastery of language.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction, Poetry and Essay Reviews A Ladder of Bones by Bunmi Oyinsan Guernica Editions 248 pages, $22.95 ISBN: 978-1-77849-008-8 The title of Bunmi Oyinsan\u2019s latest novel, A Ladder of Bones, immediately warns readers that what is to come isn\u2019t going to be pretty. Oyinsan, who lives in Nigeria and Canada, reveals the lives of characters who have been caught…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217"}],"version-history":[{"count":55,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5384,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions\/5384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby Bunmi Oyinsan
\nGuernica Editions
\n248 pages, $22.95
\nISBN: 978-1-77849-008-8<\/p>\n
\nby Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
\n(Alchemy) Knopf Canada, 214 pages, $32.95
\nISBN: 978-1-03-900928-8<\/p>\n
\nby Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez
\nDundurn Press, 314 pages, $26.99
\nISBN: 9781459754003<\/p>\n
\nby Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson
\nDundurn Press, 296 pages, $24.99
\nISBN: 9781459753723<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\nThe Education of Aubrey McKee<\/em>
\nby Alex Pugsley
\nBiblioasis, 318 pages, $24.95
\nISBN: 978-1-77196-583-5<\/p>\n
\nby Shaukat Ajmeri
\nMawenzi House, 164 pages, $22.95
\nISBN: 978-1-77415-155-6<\/p>\n
\nby Susanna Cupido
\nTidewater Press, 260 pages, $24.95
\nISBN: 978-1-990160-36-3<\/p>\n
\nby Nazneen Sheikh
\nMawenzi House, 256 pages, $22.95
\nISBN: 978-1-77415-180-8<\/p>\n
\nby Richard Kelly Kemick
\nBiblioasis, 236 pages, $22.95
\nISBN: 978-1-77196-607-8<\/p>\n