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…

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…

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…

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…

The Lavender Childby Harriet RichardsPublished by Shadowpaw Press RepriseReview by Toby A. Welch  $24.99 ISBN 9781998273201 The Lavender Child is a beautifully unique and creative story with unforgettable characters and a plot that keeps readers intrigued. I wasn’t surprised to learn that this powerful read was a winner of the Saskatchewan Book Awards First Book prize when it was initially published. If you are like me and wonder what the title is referencing – what the heck is a lavender child? – I have the answer! When one of the main characters is born, Dion, he is limp and looks close to death. Another child was born into the family decades earlier that only lived for two weeks and fought for every breath. Both babies were a shade of blue, hence “lavender child.” (I should mention that this book might be a bit challenging for people who have lost babies or experienced children with health issues.) I loved that when reading this story about three generations of a family that we are thrown back into a time when life wasn’t so chaotic and technologically driven. But it’s not so far back that this would be considered historical fiction. After all, the book mentions…

The Sun Makes A Soundby Andy WhitmanPublished by Pete’s PressReview by Toby A. Welch  $24.99 ISBN 9781069000910 The Sun Makes A Sound starts off with a bang. The main character, Mason Brigster-Contreras, is deep asleep in his tent when a menacing sound awakens him. Suspecting a polar bear, he grabs his rifle and we are thrust into a fascinating story about a man struggling to find his place in a new world while simultaneously dealing with his past.  The Sun Makes A Sound takes place in Nunavut’s Kivalliq Region, a vast tundra approximately two thousand kilometres northeast of Edmonton, Alberta. It’s a desolate and dreary place that Whitman writes about with so much clarity that the location feels like a character in the book. While the ‘meat’ of the story takes place in Kivalliq, numerous chapters take place in Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto. Nature herself plays a massive role as well; from wildfires to wild animals to vibrant seasons, this book is filled with outdoorsy content.  I found Whitman to be an expressive writer. What I mean by that is he has a talent of making it easy for readers to sense very clearly what he is writing about. For example, when talking…

The Suspension Bridgeby Anna DowdallPublished by Radiant PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.00 ISBN 9781998926121 Anna Dowdall’s mysterious, allegorical novel The Suspension Bridge has the subtitle, “A Sister Harriet Mystery,” but it could just as easily be subtitled “A 1962-1963 Mystery,” considering the early 1960s atmosphere and tensions percolating in every chapter. There are many supporting characters in the novel, but it revolves around Sister Harriet, a nun in her first year of teaching at swanky Saint Reginald’s Academy, a Catholic boarding school for girls in the fictional city of Bothonville, located in southern Ontario. Once three popular senior girls at Saint Reginald’s go missing, unease and suspicion ripple through the school and wider community, and Sister Harriet, in the midst of her own identity crisis, is both wittingly and unwittingly caught up in the mystery. Looming over everything is the under-construction suspension bridge, expected to “confer untold benefits on Bothonville” and create a world that “was practically a new dispensation,” yet the bridge is also a nexus of sinister and supernatural activity, along with regular old urban conflict. While this has elements of a fairy tale, and sardonic humour of the wry grin rather than laugh-out-loud variety, where The Suspension Bridge…

I Think We’ve Been Here Beforeby Suzy KrausePublished by Radiant PressReview by Brandon Fick$25.00 ISBN 9781998926220 The biggest compliment I can give to Suzy Krause’s I Think We’ve Been Here Before is that it is a comforting, fuzzy-sweater-type book about the bleakest topic imaginable: the end of all life on Earth. Spanning three months, mostly in southwestern Saskatchewan, partially in Berlin, the novel follows Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen and their daughter Nora, along with Hilda’s sister Irene and her husband and son, Hank and Ole, and Hilda and Irene’s father, Iver, as they grapple with news of an impending cosmic blast. Those expecting an apocalyptic, sci-fi disaster narrative will be disappointed. I Think We’ve Been Here Before is about love, family, and community, the fundamental things that matter to all of us. It is about forgiveness, acceptance, and making the best use of a finite – or perhaps not so finite – life. Krause also injects some high-concept physics that are eventually tied to the characters’ recurring sense of déjà vu. What grounds this potentially baffling story that raises concepts like quantum entanglement is the family unit. Marlen, already diagnosed with terminal cancer, has written a book that mirrors the…

The Good Soldierby Nir YanivPublished by Shadowpaw PressReview by Kelli Worton$24.99 ISBN 9781989398821 People always say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but it was the cover that first drew me to The Good Soldier. An obvious mockery of war propaganda posters that boldly proclaim unstoppable military power and the imminent defeat of all enemies while also featuring images of ideal soldiers (I’m looking at you, North Korea), The Good Soldier’s cover instead shows a jubilant, chubby soldier riding a missile while holding a grinning, fluffy white dog. It’s a pretty good indication of what you’ll find inside: an absurd, yet blistering satire of military culture and war. The meaning of the dog is revealed in due course. The jubilant soldier in question is the book’s extremely unlikely hero, Pre-Private Fux (yes, really), a recent recruit to the United Planets’ Imperial Navy, stationed aboard the spacecraft UPS Spitz. He’s an idiot, second-class, a fact confirmed by the police on his home planet Bohemia IV, and noted on his ID. As he causes one incident after another on the UPS Spitz, he’s quickly labelled a menace; in the first five chapters alone, medical devices are broken, officers are…

Debut: An Anthology of Emerging Canadian Writers and ArtistsEdited by Diane FickeriaPublished by Spud PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch  $28.00 ISBN 9781738025503 I love trying out new writers. Their enthusiasm often reaches through their words and grabs me in a way I can’t always find with seasoned writers. After all, your next favourite writer could be one you haven’t read yet. So when Debut crossed my path, I eagerly dove in, excited to experience the works of emerging Canadian writers.  Debut is a collection of five stories by five different writers. Each of the stories is quite different, something I appreciate as it keeps things interesting. Gnomey Birthday is about cryptozoology, the study of things that don’t exist. Think Bigfoot, living garden gnomes, and gremlins. It’s a wacky premise for a short story but it works! Silverbird: A Halfway Home Story involves creatures from folktales, things like wizards, fairies, and daemons (not demons.) Throw in a car chase, a touch of magic, and a detective and you have the makings of an intriguing story. Silver Consequences takes place in the year 4620 when life is different yet also similar. There are still people who drink too much. Archery and swords remain a way to defend yourself. But the world is filled…