Family Potluckby Ashley Vercammen, Illustrated by Putut PutriPublished by Home Style TeachersReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$20.00 ISBN 9781778152931 Sixteen smiling, digitally-produced characters—including an infant in arms, a bespeckled elder, a girl in a wheelchair and a visually-impaired, non-Caucasian boy—surround a potluck-ready table on the cover of Ashley Vercammen’s children’s book, Family Potluck. Without reading a word of the story, I’m already applauding the author’s inclusive definition of “family”. I soon learn that the purple backpack-wearing main character is the daughter of a teacher, and the potluck will take place at school. The unnamed girl’s grandma and cousin will also attend in this the-more-the-merrier story for young readers. The book’s format will appeal to children who may be overwhelmed with large blocks of text and “too much happening” in the illustration department. This story unfolds across full-spread illustrations, each with a celery-green background for consistency, and large font text on just the left side of the page. The illustrations are simple and pleasant. The green chalkboard is wiped clean, there are no toys or other hazards on the floor, and there’s little else to draw the eye away from the characters themselves. First we meet a student named Bowen and his…

Quest for Black Beachby Neil ChildPublished by Wood Dragon BooksReview by Toby A. Welch  $17.99 ISBN 9781990863288 This quick read takes a riveting look into the future for those with an interest in fantastical worlds and times.  I call a book like this a pocket read. It’s small enough that you can slip it into a pocket and finish it within a day or two. Visiting a futuristic place for a brief time is a pleasure.  One thing I love about books that take place in the future is that they are as varied as an author’s mind allows. Thanks to writers with limitless imagination, readers can get pulled into whole new worlds that are intriguing places to visit. And this is what happens in Quest for Black Beach – we take a journey into an extraordinary time.  Quest for Black Beach takes place 89 years from now, just far enough that we can only guess what life will be like. (Do you think anyone in 1934 could even remotely have guessed the realities of the world we are living in today? I don’t think so either!) You’ll find four groups roaming the planet, many of them created when ‘blasts’ occurred. …

Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhoodby paulo da costaPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Michelle Shaw$27.95 ISBN 9780889779921 Trust the Bluer Skies is a sensory-rich journey through a brief and distinct moment in time. Our daily lives so often pass in a blur, and we can reach the end of the day wondering what we actually did. In this book, paulo da costa slows us down and shares with us a leisurely, poignant kaleidoscope of memories and experiences as he details the six months his family spent in Portugal, his childhood home. The author, his wife Heather, his four-year-old son Koah and his baby daughter Amari travelled from their home in Victoria, British Columbia to spend six months with his family in Vale de Cambra, Portugal where he grew up. While they were there, Paulo recorded his thoughts on “pastry receipts, train tickets and advertising flyers” to create a detailed account of their time. The book is written in the second person in the form of letters to Khoa. paulo details the everyday events they experienced and intersperses them with recollections of his own childhood, family memories and musings on life. Yet the book is grounded in concrete…

The Beech Forestby Marlis WesselerPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872546 The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler is a novel that combines day-to-day life in rural Saskatchewan with a gradual reckoning with the Holocaust on the part of its protagonist, Lisa Braun. Lisa is a middle-aged retiree, a wife and a mother – with all the attendant regrets and worries – who is mostly separate from her German husband, Gerhardt, throughout the course of the novel. This causes her to reflect upon her marriage and far-flung children, induces general restlessness, and transforms a semi-detached understanding of the Holocaust into a morbid, all-consuming fascination. The latter is incited by meeting Ben Meisner, an elderly Jewish man who was interned at Buchenwald. Meisner’s harrowing recollection of life under Nazi Germany, coming at the novel’s midpoint, is the hinge that pulls all the story’s disparate threads together. Wesseler’s writing is clear and understated. Much like the pristine German beech forest Lisa walks through in the opening scene, there is no “excess of any kind.” But while there are no rhetorical fireworks, secrets and ironies – familial, cultural, interpersonal – abound. The largest irony being that Buchenwald means “beech forest” in German….