Off the Page

Every year on January 27, Canadians celebrate Family Literacy Day, an initiative to affirm the importance of reading and engaging in other literacy-related activities as a family. And while the benefits to children of exposure to books and literacy are well-documented, less sung is just how much wisdom an adult reader can garner from children's literature. These books are not just for the kids, and they've affirm to me some of the most important lessons I've learned in my life. We all get a lot out of returning to these stories again and again. 

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On diversity:  

We all count. 

From We All Count, by Julie Flett: We All Count: A Book of Cree Numbers is the 2014 board book from Native Northwest featuring the artwork of Cree/Métis artist Julie Flett. In this basic counting book from 1 to 10, this bilingual board book introduces Plains Cree (y-dialect) and Swampy Cree (n-dialect) written in Roman orthography. Artist and author has a simple graphic style using bold and clear text to introduce counting with appropriate cultural images from contemporary Cree society. An excellent introduction to counting to ten in Cree and English using authentic Cree imagery.

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What happens when an adult daughter finds the corpses of two teenaged girls at the bottom of her dead mother’s freezer? That’s at the heart of Jen Sookfong Lee’s latest novel, The Conjoined. It’s a pleasure to be in conversation with Jen on this week’s Chat.

Writing in The Globe and Mail about the book’s many twists and turns, Stacey May Fowles says, “In the universe Lee has created, coming to the truth is more about nuance, empathy and openhearted understanding than it is about any strict, simplistic set of rules about good and evil, right or wrong.”

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, where she now lives with her son. Her books include The Conjoined, The Better Mother (a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award), The End of East, and Shelter, a novel for young adults. Her poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Elle Canada, Hazlitt, Room, and Event. A popular radio personality, Jen was the voice behind CBC Radio One’s weekly writing column, Westc …

History, memoir, cookbooks, essays on food culture, politics, plus books on birds, baseball, royal babies and bike rides. And that's just some of what's on offer by CanLit for non-fiction during the first half of 2017. Read on! 

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Celebrated restauranteur Jenn Agg tells her story of life in the restaurant industry in I Hear She’s a Real Bitch (April). In Michelle Alfano’s intimate memoir, The Unfinished Dollhouse (May), Alfano recounts her experience as the mother of a transgender child. Marianne Apostolides' memoir about abortion, Deep Salt Water (March), includes a series of collages by visual artist Catherine Mellinger. In My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell (out now), Arthur Bear Chief depicts the punishment, cruelty, and injustice that he endured as a residential school student and then later relived in the traumatic process of retelling his story in connection with a complicated claims procedure. And You Can Have a Dog When I’m Dead (February), by Hamilton Spectator columnist Paul Benedetti, puts on a humorous spin in the realities of modern family life. 

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"On Our Radar" is a monthly 49th Shelf series featuring books with buzz worth sharing. We bring you links to features and reviews about great new books in a multitude of genres from all around the Internet and elsewhere. 

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How to Pick Up a Maid in Statue Square, by Rea Tarvydas

Reviewed by Anne Logan at I've Read This:

I’ve never been, but I picture Hong Kong at night, with lots of flashing lights, billboards, and traffic, similar to the cover of How to Pick Up a Maid in Statue Square. Tarvydas does a wonderful job of evoking these dark images, as many stories take place in bars under strange neon signs. Her characters are mostly expats struggling to find their place in Hong Kong, although she does stray into the life of a Filipino nanny in “Merrilou”, albeit briefly, only a few pages. It’s obvious Tarvydas is mostly comfortable depicting the lives of the transplanted, (especially because she was an expat herself for awhile), so her stories seem believable, even if the characters are extremely wealthy in some cases. But this wealth and glamour is what makes these stories so interesting, I found some of them read like screenplays, in fact “Blank” could be shopped around for movie rights it was so engrossing.

(Read the entire review here.)

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Today's chat is with Kevin Patterson, author of the critically acclaimed novel News From the Red Desert. It’s a book that brings readers into the heart of the Afghanistan conflict and introduces us to men and women whose lives are forever changed by the war.

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Robert J. Wiersema says “Kevin Patterson has crafted one of the finest war novels this country has ever seen, exploring a conflict many Canadians have already conveniently forgotten, or chosen to ignore.”

Kevin Patterson grew up in Manitoba, and put himself through medical school by joining the Canadian army. Now a specialist in internal medicine, he practices in the Arctic and on the coast of British Columbia. His first book, The Water In Between, was a New York Times Notable Book. Country of Cold, his debut short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2003, as well as the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. He lives on Saltspring Island, Canada.

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THE CHAT WITH KEVIN PATTERSON

Trevor Corkum: Your novel News From the Red Desert …