Food for the Journey: A Life in Travelby Elizabeth J. HaynesPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 9781771872690 Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Elizabeth J. Haynes has just published a new book, and this time it’s an essay collection. Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel is the kind of book I can really sink my teeth into. As I read these engaging essays about the author’s far-flung travels, family dynamics, heartbreak, a health crisis, history, politics and her former profession (Haynes is a retired speech-language pathologist), I quickly ascertained that the “food” here is much more than literal. Mining experiences from a lifetime of global travels, the introverted and interesting author comes by her love of travel honestly: her father worked on a fisheries project for the British Colonial Office in Nigeria in the 1950s. “He arrived on a freighter, squinting into a bloody sunrise on the Gulf of Guinea,” Haynes writes. She concludes her first essay with an observation of her father’s “big, gnarled hands holding the knife that sliced cleanly through ham and bread and cheese and the fire-red peaches.” In my experience, one of the most exciting things about travelling is the…

The Dark King Swallows the Worldby Robert G. PennerPublished by Radiant PressReview by Toby A. Welch  $25.00 ISBN 9781998926152 This book drew me in immediately with the title – The Dark King Swallows the World. How could a royal leader swallow the entire world? What a claim! I couldn’t wait to crack the book open and dive in. The Dark King Swallows the World is the story of Nora, a preteen girl whose brother dies in a car crash. Consumed with grief, Nora’s mother jumps into a relationship with a man into sorcery and the occult; he is a cohort of the Dark King. To save her family, Nora sets off on a journey into the Dark King’s world. Along the way she battles various creatures and otherworldly challenges. I greatly value a book that features a main character that I will remember long after the book is collecting dust on my bookshelf. (Sadly that doesn’t happen often enough, in my experience.) Nora is that type of character. She is a brassy twelve-year-old who comes across as much more mature than her years. Her adventure is a pleasure to read. I would go as far as to say that The Dark King Swallows the…

From the Ground Up: An Anthology of New FictionEdited by Annabel TownsendPublished by Pete’s PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$21.99 ISBN 9781069000965 Annabel Townsend loved the “From the Ground Up” theme of Regina’s Cathedral Village Arts Festival (2024) so much, she used it as the theme for an anthology featuring ten Regina area fiction writers. Townsend—a writer, editor, publisher and former bookstore owner—held a “Battle of the Pitches” event at the festival: short story writers were given three minutes to “pitch” a story before a live audience and judges, with the prize being publication in the first-ever anthology by Pete’s Press, From the Ground Up: An Anthology of New Fiction. A few other writers also contributed stories. The stories include a futuristic story by well-known, multi-genre author Alison Lohans. The piece, “Crystal Sister,” is set on the planet Terruggia, which contains a “massive crystal lode” that’s being mined. The main character is young Lytha, whose “job was to form and impress images into waiting crystal, which had the capacity to amplify and transmit halfway across a galaxy.” Legend has it that the Terruggian waters are unsafe, so what’s any self-respecting teenager going to do? You can guess. The anthology opens with…

Theories of Everythingby Dwayne BrennaPublished by Shadowpaw PressReview by Brandon Fick$22.99 ISBN 9781998273294 In less than 180 pages, Dwayne Brenna’s short story collection, Theories of Everything, takes readers around the globe into disparate eras and unique voices, inviting them to sample a little bit of everything. More than most short story collections, which often contain similar settings, characters, and themes, Theories of Everything is diverse and irreverently ordered, as if saying: “A story is a story, no matter what it contains. Deal with it.” At least a couple of its fifteen stories will jive with any reader. Whether you want to read about an aged rock star, a couple on the brink of separation, or a murderous parrot, whether you are in the mood for academic satire or the truth about Hollywood, and whether you want to go to Costa Rica, Libya, London, Hawaii, or rural Saskatchewan, it’s all here. Brenna takes a no-nonsense approach to storytelling. Within the first paragraph or even the first few sentences of his stories, you are in the predicament. A fine example being the opening lines of “Isla Mujeres”: “Still in his pyjamas, my husband Jim is stretched out on one of a pair…

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformityby LJ SlovinPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$32.95 ISBN 9781779400505 To write the academic text Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity LJ Slovin (the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto) undertook a year-long ethnographical study in a Vancouver high school to explore the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth, who, Slovin found, were “often overlooked in discussions about trans issues, in part due to policies created by well-meaning educators that inadvertently perpetuated a narrow definition of trans identity.” Ethnography is the study of people in their own environment through methods including participant observation and face-to-face interviewing. Slovin, a non-binary researcher and Vanier Scholar, writes that in witnessing how six “gender-nonconforming youth navigated their genders … through different spaces and relationships at school,” they attended their grades 9-12 classes, “joined in during their extracurricular activities and clubs, ate lunch with them, attended their performances, and hung out” inside school and out, ie: in cafés. Slovin’s work focused on “youth who were not regularly recognized by others as trans,” and these…

Charged!: The Dangerous and Misguided Promise of the Electric Vehicleby M.G. BucholtzPublished by Wood Dragon BooksReview by Toby A. Welch  $21.99 ISBN 9781990863677 I’ve always been wary about how so-called experts have pushed consumers to purchase electric vehicles over gas powered modes of transportation. Logically I can’t wrap my head around it. After all, running an electric vehicle takes electricity, a resource that requires energy to make. Just like gasoline and diesel take energy to get to the pump. Does electricity make more sense to power a vehicle? I never felt knowledgeable enough to make an informed decision about that. So when Charged hit my radar, I was thrilled for the opportunity to become more educated about electric vehicles. Should my next car be an electric one? I dove into Charged with gusto, eager to learn everything I could on the topic. And Bucholtz is the perfect teacher. The Mossbank, Saskatchewan, resident is an engineer by trade and is clearly an expert on geopolitics, numerous areas of science, and future trends. But he didn’t just rely on his expertise to author Charged. There’s over twenty pages listing where Bucholtz sourced the information included in the book.  One of the many fantastic things that stood out to me about Charged was that…

Walking Upstreamby Lloyd RatzlaffPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9781771872706 Saskatoon’s Lloyd Ratzlaff—essayist, former minister, walker in wild places—has released his first poetry collection, and wow. I know this man and have long believed that poetry lives in him; I’m grateful his mostly contemplative poems—alive with water, birds and creatures—have found a deserving home in Walking Upstream. The first two sections map “The Old Path” and “The Irresistible Forces,” while the latter two, “To Grouse like a Mountain,” and “Afloat,” ferry readers from “Coffee at Starbucks” to a “Prairie Cemetery” and “Nirvana Big Rest Motel.” At the latter, the narrator waits out “a steady rain” and concludes “I can do nothing/for my mother in her care home bed/but think,/look Mother,/I am because of you.” Whew. For a piece with just eleven lines, this unsentimental poem packs serious emotional punch, aided by an image of the “white petunias [that] sag/under the water’s grey weight.” Ratzlaff possesses a gift for evoking emotion in just a few poignant lines—some might consider this poetry’s raison d’être—and his poems reflect that over a lifetime, the former counsellor’s mastered the oft-ignored art of listening. “The Realm” contains just nine lines, but in the…

Helloby David CarpenterPublished by Shadowpaw PressReview by Brandon Fick$34.99 ISBN 9781998273270 Hello is the first book of fiction I have read by Saskatchewan writer, David Carpenter, after having read two of his nonfiction books, Courting Saskatchewan and The Education of Augie Merasty. His versatility and credentials are well established, but in spite of that, I imagine his work still does not get the level of praise and attention it deserves. Hello is a collection of short fiction, seven short stories and two novellas, and based on what I know about Carpenter, it strikes me as a record of the obsessions, sympathies, locales, and people that have been part of his life. Like the virtuoso banjo player that one of his characters aspires to be, Carpenter knows which strings to pluck in order to evoke empathy, humour, and nostalgia. Many characters in Hello are outcasts and loners, those navigating young adulthood, experiencing trauma or the loss of a loved one. In some cases, characters are searching for a metaphorical “hello,” an affirmation or a calling, as in “Frailing,” where a university student working at Lake Louise feels that the banjos in the “gloomy basement” of a music store have “the power…