A Snake and a Feathered Birdby Angie EllisPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872812 Angie Ellis’s ambitious debut novel, A Snake and a Feathered Bird, began in such a way that I wasn’t sure I’d like it: the characters seemed guarded, the relationships and context opaque. After a series of events in the second chapter, I wondered where the story would go. What was it about? Really, I just needed patience. Ellis slowly peels back the layers of her characters, and the result is a deeply felt yet often restrained novel. While historical, it is relevant to our times. This is the story of Ben Maclean’s coming-of-age in late-nineteenth century Vancouver Island, mostly around 1890-1891, with flashbacks to the 1870s and 1880s following characters connected to Ben. At the beginning of the novel, Ben is living in a rural cabin with Agda and James, who he thinks are his parents. At nine, on a bootlegging run with James to a city that’s presumably Victoria, he meets Lily, who he’s told is his cousin, and misfortune strikes. Soon after returning to their cabin, Ben’s protective mother Agda mysteriously dies. Further summary cannot capture the complexity this novel offers –…

Kohkum’s Royal Bannockby Wilfred Burton, Illustrated by Hawlii Pichette, Michif translation by Irma Klyne and Larry FayantReview by Michelle ShawPublished by Thistledown Press$14.95 ISBN 9781771872744 I wasn’t surprised to discover that Kohkum’s Royal Bannock, a beautifully illustrated full colour picture book, was written by a former elementary school teacher, because it’s full of details, concepts and questions that are cleverly designed to keep young readers fully engaged with this very entertaining story. One day Xavier’s Kohkum gets a letter from the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan. The letter states that the Queen will be visiting the next day and asks Kohkum to make her famous bannock and jam for the royal visitor. Startled by this news, Kohkum quickly works out that that she would need to make enough bannok for six people. So, she and Xavier go to the store to stock up on flour, baking powder and shortening. Back home, Kohkom suggests that they get a good night sleep and bake the bannok in the morning so that it is fresh. But the next morning when they get up very early, they turn the letter over and discover that there will actually be 300 guests joining the Queen! And the…

The Discovery of Finnegan Wildeby Caroline Pignat, Illustrations by Alan CrannyPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$16.95 ISBN 9781771872874 It’s daunting to receive a 406-page novel for review. If poorly-written, it’s a tremendous slog to read. On the flip side, if the story’s seeped in richly-described settings, features distinct and memorable characters, and showcases deft plotting (including a major twist), the pages quickly slip by. Fortunately, The Discovery of Finnegan Wilde—a historical novel for young adults by Governor-General Award-winning writer Caroline Pignat—fell firmly into the latter camp. My first surprise was that the title character is a girl. Fifteen-year-old Finn lives rough on the streets of 1913 Dublin. She “was in the business of surviving,” which included pickpocketing, and “lying was Finn’s mother tongue.” The scrawny lass has no memory of family, is targeted by another young urchin, Dooley, and—when she can escape the Woodhall Workhouse orphanage where she’s kept in a medicated fog—she sleeps beneath “a rusted sheet of metal,” cold, hungry, and among rats. This lively book’s two other important characters are Eddie, a lonely apprentice archaeologist (under his archaeologist father) at the National Museum, and the 9th century monk, Tomás, who penned a mysterious illustrated manuscript,…

Tunnel Islandby Bill GastonPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872683 Tunnel Island is a collection of linked stories set on a fictional island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea, a place both familiar and otherworldly, realistic and mystical. Bill Gaston is a sure and steady practitioner of the short story form, with seven previous collections and a heap of award nominations to his name. All of this comes across in his quirky rendering of Tunnel Island, a place “mostly forest” with “a few thousand people” and “a bit of everything,” including people “who looked like poets, islands unto themselves,” and “wild turkeys and peacocks, descendants of farm stock that had either escaped, been let go, or wandered away from dilapidated circumstances.” There are stories that I like more than others, but all eleven are animated by a creative slant on familiar scenarios: a brief romance, taking care of a dying loved one, spending time with a reclusive uncle, nervously preparing for a date, a group of disparate characters coming together for a unique Christmas dinner. Gaston’s stories work because of a subtle blending of tones that is difficult to achieve. The prose can appear relaxed and breezy, but that…

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…

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…

A Life in Piecesby Jo-Ann WallacePublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872560 Jo-Ann Wallace’s A Life in Pieces is a stunning memoir, brimming with wit, intellect, and poignancy. Wallace, who passed away in June, has left behind a book of gems, thirty short essays that map her life from childhood in a Montreal suburb to grad school in Toronto, onto years chairing a large English department at the University of Alberta, and her final chapter of life on the west coast. Wallace was a longtime academic, but she was also a poet, which is evident in the way these essays move associatively, back and forth in time, back and forth into ancestry, imagining, remembering, and questioning the life she lived, and the lives she did not. It is a challenge to select essays to highlight because each one offers something to ponder. Most start conversationally with an anecdote, then expand, retract, expand, like an accordion. “Whimsy” moves from the childhood memory of Wallace’s parents watching the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, about a man’s imaginary rabbit friend, to her own imaginary friend, to a friend’s distaste for “whimsy,” prompting her to theorize that beneath that “disavowal of whimsy” lies…

What Fills Your House Like Smokeby E. McGregorPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9781771872522 I must admit, the title of E. (Erin) McGregor’s debut poetry collection—What Fills Your House Like Smoke—greatly piqued my interest. I’m partial to similes and metaphors, and McGregor’s title was a poetic hook—what, exactly, does fill this Winnipeg poet’s house with metaphorical smoke? I guessed that butterflies and sweet peas wouldn’t be at the heart of it. McGregor holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and the sheer variety of poetic forms—prose poems; free verse; quatrains; couplets; concrete; and experimental, sound-oriented pieces—in the book is consistent with the range I’ve seen in other first books by creative writing students. What differentiates McGregor’s poetry, however, is its nearly singular focus on the theme of personal identity; often, first books “free range” across themes and subjects. McGregor’s poems weave pain into a story. McGregor is a “Euro-Settler/Métis,” and in her piece “Weeds”—another metaphor—she begins: “Don’t judge me too harshly/for not understanding the small things/that come with your blood”. In that same poem: “[white people] have me by the roots/it’s confusing”. The poet contends with her lineage, and,…

Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Sceneby Guy VanderhaeghePublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.95 ISBN 9781771872584 Because Somebody Asked Me To: Observations on History, Literature, and the Passing Scene is the first collection of nonfiction published by Guy Vanderhaeghe, one of Canada’s most distinguished writers. On offer are essays, reviews, vignettes, and lectures that explore Vanderhaeghe’s beginnings as a writer, the craft of fiction, amusing life anecdotes, the value of art in society, and the nature of historical fiction. It is a feast of compelling material, a peeling back of the curtain sure to enthrall existing fans of Vanderhaeghe, CanLit enthusiasts, and general readers. In his Author’s Note, Vanderhaeghe states that in gathering the pieces together, which span 1984 to 2023, “it struck me that they bore some resemblance to a spotty, desultory archive of my development as a writer and offered a record of my recurring literary obsessions and foibles.” Whether it is a short recollection or a lengthy lecture, each piece stirs the mind, and any reader of Because Somebody Asked Me To will come away with a strong sense of who Vanderhaeghe is. One of the most intriguing pieces is…

The Genius Hour Projectby Leanne ShirtliffePublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$16.95 ISBN 9781771872577 As a sexagenarian, I never imagined I’d so enjoy a novel featuring an eleven-year-old protagonist, but here’s the thing: good literature is good literature, and Leanne Shirtliffe’s juvenile novel, The Genius Hour Project, certainly fits the bill. This engaging and realistic book was a distinct pleasure to read, with compelling characters and interesting relationship dynamics, and a few serious subplots (divorce, depression) that elevate it leagues above many middle-grade novels. It’s refreshing to read a story for this age group that doesn’t rely on slapstick humour or silly hijinks—the cast may be young, but they’re mature and intelligent. Shirtliffe’s a longtime educator, a school counsellor and parent who writes credibly about the school and home life of Francine (aka Frazzy), a self-deprecating only child and audiophile with a passion for vintage vinyl albums like The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Frazzy’s mother is the busy mayor of “Riverdale,” and her dad stays at home, upcycles lampshades and sells items at flea markets—he also suffers from depression. The Calgary author’s deft treatment of how this manifests for Dad and how his family and friends deal with it…