What We Miss by Glen Sorestad Published by Thistledown Press Review by Andréa Ledding $17.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-75-1 Glen Sorestad, first Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan, infuses his twentieth book of poetry with a strong sense of place combined with gentle wonder. Readers are guided through a landscape both urban and rural, populated with memory, observation, humanity, and the inanimate – personable postcards from the everyday, to be savoured page by page. The book is like a walk with a longstanding companion, sharing thoughtful interior and exterior observations. Many poems contain first-person narrative, creating a tone of intimacy – poem as memoir, poet as friend and mentor , poetry as a fleeting encounter on a remote trail. Divided into three sections, each grouping begins with a quote from another author or public persona, and a journey through season, nature, weather, and a cast of companions – from a robin with “gaudy orange breast/spinning a small sun at us” to “umbrella sky a boundless blue” above, to an old man and his dog encountered daily in a shared walking path ritual. Of particular delight is the third and final section which powerfully mines poetic memory – decades-past childhood in rural Saskatchewan brought effectively…

The Beautiful Children by Michael Kenyon Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-47-8 I’ve just finished The Beautiful Children, a poetic novel by BC writer Michael Kenyon, and feel I’m waking from a trance. In Kenyon’s mystifying story one’s never quiet sure what’s real and what’s imagined, or how the author – who hass previously published four books of fiction and two poetry collections – manages to shape-shift this harrowing tale about urban street kids and lost adults into a book that celebrates life. That sleight-of-hand, Kenyon’s musical language, and the book’s surrealistic qualities are its charms. The plot is easiest to follow in the first of the book’s three sections. Sapporo, a Japanese man, awakes with amnesia and finds himself in a hospital. In time he leaves the hospital with his son, a boy of ten. The awkward pair play catch, and at home, the uneasy roommates are “two animals who were shy of each other.” Sapporo regularly sees a therapist, but as time progresses he sinks further into his dreamlike world. He tracks the passing of time and records impressions but doesn’t understand their meaning. And he has no idea how to parent:…

The Adventures of Caraway Kim…Right Wing by Don Truckey Published by Thistledown Press Review by Kim McCullough $10.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-43-0 Set in the dead of a 1960s Alberta winter, The Adventures of Caraway Kim…Right Wing is the story of eleven-year-old Kim and his race to become Top Scorer of the Caraway hockey team. Kim was first introduced in author Don Truckey’s first ‘Caraway Kim’ novel for middle years readers: The Adventures of Caraway Kim…Southpaw, published in 2005. To win the title of Top Scorer, Kim he has to beat Brad Rooks, the local troublemaker. The boys’ rivalry continues off-ice, forcing Kim to confront his own sense of right and wrong, as well as stand up for himself against Brad’s overbearing ways. In Kim, Truckey continues to follow a likeable young hero who makes realistic choices. Truckey’s clear rendering of a time he calls “before now” makes life in the 1960s come alive. Young hockey fans interested in the old days of the Original Six will be thrilled with the detailed descriptions of the difficulties players faced back in those days: the rough ice; the biting cold; and the thin, not-so-protective equipment that left heads, knees and throats vulnerable to injury….

Einstein Dog by Craig Spence Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $14.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-65-2 “It’s a dog’s world,” or so it’s been said, but imagine if that statement turned literal? What if dogs were technologically-enhanced and became smarter than humans? And what if a fascist organization trained and bred these SMART dogs to achieve global domination? These seemingly outrageous ideas are investigated in Einstein Dog, the new juvenile novel written by Langley, BC author Craig Spence, and recently published by Thistledown Press. In 258 action-filled pages, Spence unleashes confident writing, distinguishable characters, and interesting subplots, but what really sparkles are his explorations of what could be; his flair for adventure; and the care he takes in portraying the singular loyalty between humans and their four-legged best friends. The story opens with young Bertrand and his friend Ariel – each of whom live with their single parents in the Forestview Townhouses – hoping to have the research dog, Libra (aka SMART 73), released from being “cooped up” in the lab where Bertrand’s father, Professor Smith, is conducting Sequenced Mentally Accelerated Research Trials. The Dean of the Biology Department has other ideas, however, especially after a medical supply firm…

Endgames by Andrew Stubbs Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-72-0 I don’t know the writer and University of Regina professor, Andrew Stubbs, but I’m certain he’d make a great dinner guest. I make this claim after devouring Endgames, his new book of poetry with Thistledown Press. It’s the breadth of interests and knowledge that wow: Stubbs writes intelligently about theology, psychoanalysis, history, and, most importantly to this reader: love in the here and now. Character-based titles reveal his range: from heloise\ abelard” (tragic lovers) to “the count of monte cristo” and “bond james bond”. One part of the book is dedicated to a poetic portrait of Daniel Paul Schreber (d. 1911), a judge, “failed candidate for the Reichstag,” and artist who suffered from paranoid fantasies that attracted the attention of Freud. The author includes an illuminating introduction to this section. Many of the pieces are written in a minimalistic, “snapshot” style. To illustrate, here’s the poem “foreign affairs” in its entirety: foreign affairs it was a town. it had a beach, vacancies. chat over brandy, bartok. morning: tim’s on the run lunch in the car. somewhere up north. Look at the references here: from…

Draco’s Child by Sharon Plumb Published by Thistledown Press Review by Sharon Adam $14.95 ISBN 9781897235706 This is a story of space pioneers who have been settled on an alien planet. They have encountered many hardships, including the loss of several of their members and the companion ship that was part of the settlement plan. Through trial and error, the members of the settlers try to adapt to the harsh realities of their new environment. Life is difficult and the settlers are not well. Then they are visited by the “star child”. Varia and her father are distrustful of the star child and refuse to drink his star water, even though all the other settlers drink and seem to recover from the various symptoms that have plagued them since their arrival. As the settlers improve, they begin to change physically and seem to be adapting to the planet that they now inhabit. Varia remains suspicious of the star child and deliberately tries to thwart the plans that the rest of the community has so trustingly embraced. She wanders into a cave where she discovers a wondrous stone that turns out to be an egg. Her decision to hatch the egg,…

Gaits by Paulette Dubé Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-74-4 I’m positively wild about Paulette Dubé’s new book. Walking through the numbered poems in Gaits was a meditative experience; they ferried me into the understory – with its seeds, scat, berries, pine needles, creatures, bird song, and autumn leaves (which “follow as brown tap shoes”) – and readers, there’s no place I’d rather be. There’s ample white space around the stanzas in the award-winning Jasper poet’s fifth collection, which fittingly allows both the pieces and their readers room to breathe. As the title suggests, the poems examine “gaits” – both animal and human – through the seasons. It’s an inspired idea, and one which required a hawk eye and owl ear-to-the-ground (and air). Although brief and deceptively simple, the finely-honed pieces are actually multi-layered: the masterly poet weaves descriptions of the natural world, mythology, contemporary life, and philosophy into a spider-fine lace of words. Look, for example, at how the following lines pull double duty: “a day of soft rain\melts a hard week of snow”. I highly agree with the poet’s assertion that “healing is\water over stones, wind over grass, sounds\of deer, fearless.” Like…

The Wolsenburg Clock by Jay Ruzesky Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-62-1 BC poet-turned-novelist Jay Ruzesky’s The Wolsenburg Clock is an admirable book, and I recommend you take time to read it. It’s often riotous. It’s impeccably researched. And its passionate characters offer minute-by-minute fun. Best of all, it made me recall the singular experience of being swept up in a good, old-fashioned fable. Yes, the years wound back as I read this book, and I felt a child’s delight again. The story unspools at a civilized pace, in a way reminiscent of novels of an earlier era. This is most fitting, as the novel traces the conception, building, and rebuilding of an astronomical clock through the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history, and it delivers us into the hearts and minds of the brilliant engineers who understood and added to the clock’s magic. Think carved stone; copper; dials; statues; a model of the universe; crowing cocks; blossoming flowers; and automatons so realistic and advanced, they play musical instruments, walk tightropes, and “juggle whining kittens.” In the prologue we meet an academic on sabbatical in the small Austrian city of Wolsenburg. The…

His Sweet Favour by Diane Tucker Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $16.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-64-5 In my experience, it’s rare to discover a young adult novel in which the characters are allowed to think, act, and speak without censure. Even though the fictional characters may be on the cusp of adulthood, the powers that be (editors, publishers, reviewers) sometimes argue that said teens lack credibility if their words and deeds are “too mature.” As both a writer and a mother (who has seen her offspring through their teens) I absolutely disagree—in fact, in literature I feel there’s often too much pandering toward the youth-as-innocents argument—and thus it was refreshing to meet the intelligent, articulate, and not-so-innocent crew in Burnaby, BC writer Diane Tucker’s first novel, His Sweet Favour. Tucker, who has also published two poetry collections, delivers an atmospheric story about loyalty, love, and loss. It’s gritty, it’s imaginative (ie: there is an element of telepathy between characters), and it speaks to the kaleidoscoping emotions that people of any age experience in times of great transition, while asking the intriguing question: Can things be too good? The story revolves around Favour and her four closest friends, all…