Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspirationby Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky DancerPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$27.95 ISBN 9781779400840 Award-winning Saskatchewan writer Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is renowned for her candid, Cree-infused poetry and presentations. Her latest book, Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, braids memoir, poetry and essays to reveal where the author’s found inspiration and, I would say, contentment, after a tumultuous early start. In the eloquent introduction by the author’s daughter, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, the latter writes: “My mom dances with both her bones and the bones of our people, and when they poke and punch her with their insistent rattling, she does us all a favour, as painful as it is, and leaves them naked in the wind.” Until age seven, Halfe lived with her family in a log cabin on the Saddle Lake Reserve and practiced traditional Cree ways of life. She doesn’t pretend that it was perfect. Her father drank and was emotionally volatile (“His heart was a cave of stalactites.”). Her parents “stooked hay, picked rocks/in white farmers’ fields”. Halfe “learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. [She] also watched [her] grandparents work…

Twice Cursed: An Ever After Tales Collectionby Robyn TockerPublished by Pete’s PressReview by Toby A. Welch  $24.99 ISBN 9781069345998 Twice Cursed, the fifth installment of Robyn Tocker’s Ever After Tales series, takes a beloved fairy tale and gives it a fresh twist. Tocker began developing this series when she was just twelve-years-old and what a great idea for a book collection it is! She takes classic fairy tales and reworks them, putting a creative and entertaining spin on them. Tocker plans for the series to eventually span sixteen books. Each tale is set in a different country and in a different time period, adding to the literary punch. Twice Cursed is a spin-off from the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. It takes place in the 1700s, a hundred years after Brier Rose woke from her century-long sleep. Now married to Tsar Leo and living on the outskirts of the haunted forest, she falls into a second cursed sleep. Her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Eliza, must uncover the cause and break the spell, aided by a cast of ragtag characters. (I did struggle to keep all the characters straight at first, but once I made a quick list to tuck inside the book it was much easier to follow.)   As…

Blue thinks itself within meby Kim TrainorPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$27.95 ISBN 9781779401205 I knew I was in for a different kind of book when I read the author’s dedication, which begins: “For the flying beings, the ones with sharp teeth,/the ones who swim, the fire stones, the trees, the rain.” By the end of prize-winning Vancouver writer Kim Trainor’s text, Blue thinks itself within me, I can affirm that her dedication tracks. Trainor sees, hears, experiences and questions with the intensity of a scientist and the detail of an artist as she draws readers both into the forest at the two-year Fairy Creek blockade near Vancouver Island’s Port Renfrew—where she joined other protestors to protect old growth logging—and through her elegiac and philosophical quandary re: how best to approach writing a long lyric poem about the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen (a rare and threatened species found on yellow cedar in ancient forests) in a kind of respectful co-making with this oldgrowth resident. Trainor describes artist Natasha Lavdovsky’s discovery of “over sixty trees draped in glittering specklebelly,” and explains that “The finding of such a large community of oldgrowth specklebelly was evidence of the age of…

The Laundrymanby Dwayne BrennaPublished by Shadowpaw PressReview by Brandon Fick$26.99 ISBN 9781998273522 If you’re looking for a fast-paced historical crime novel, presenting a cross-section of frontier life and a region on the brink of massive changes, then The Laundryman is for you. What Dwayne Brenna achieves in his third novel is twofold: a mystery with twists and turns and two protagonists of differing but complementary personalities; plus, like most worthwhile historical fiction, he touches on issues we still deal with today, including racism, corruption, and the nature of justice. This might sound like a heavy story, and while solving murders is at the heart of The Laundryman, Brenna’s work is more along the lines of Agatha Christie than the ruthless westerns of Cormac McCarthy. The Laundryman focuses on two North-West Mounted Police Officers: Corporal Belvedere, a hard-drinking, laudanum-using officer with five years of experience, and Surgeon Virgil Montgomery, a strait-laced recruit haunted by mistakes in his previous medical practice. They are sent from Battleford to investigate the murder of a Chinese laundryman in Prince Albert in the fall of 1883. But what initially seems to be a one-off murder over a disagreement or racial prejudice expands into a wider conspiracy…