Baba’s Over the Moonby Marion MutalaPublished by Millennium MarketingReview by Michelle Shaw$19.99 ISBN 9781777371371 Award-winning author Marion Mutala’s new book is, quite literally, a love song to her new grandbaby Oliver. I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing a couple of Mutala’s other books and each one has been a unique delight. In Baba’s Over the Moon, Mutala showcases her skills not only as a writer but also as a singer and songwriter. The book reads like a poem but at the back of the book is a QR code that you can scan that takes you to a page to hear Mutala singing along to an accompanying guitar. If you’re musically inclined, you can follow along as sheet music is also provided. The words of the book are simple and heartfelt. Mutala beautifully blends repetition, rhythm and rhyme to create a wondrous sense of expectation as Baba contemplates the arrival of her new grandbaby. What will he look like? What will his name be? When will he arrive? At the very back of the book there is a colourful word cloud created by Kate Hodgson — all synonyms for the word grandmother, such uGogo, Oma, Baba, Grootmoeder, Kohkom, Abuela, and…

The Musician’s Compass: A 12-Step Programme by Del Suelo Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $19.95 ISBN 9-781988-783321 Regina writer and Juno Award-winning musician (with band The Dead South) Erik Mehlsen – who writes under the pseudonym “Del Suelo” – explains in the author’s note for his second book, The Musician’s Compass: A 12-Step Programme, that he wrote this text because “the music industry is an environment that fosters mental illness, and [he] had no idea how to talk about it”. That said, and first person voice aside, he maintains that this isn’t a memoir. What it is: 131 gritty fictional pages about a band. For many in the arts, what begins as a passion can become terribly hard and unsexy work. Suelo presents a grueling day-in-the-life of a young (and at times extremely juvenile) four-piece Canadian rock band on tour in Germany. He peels back the lid on the rock and roll road trip, and it’s a bleak, barely-holding-it-together experience, complete with a groupie who overdoses on cocaine, band in-fighting, severe sleep deprivation, excessive drinking and marijuana imbibing, reeking clothes, and a narrator (Dev) who’s almost ready to pack in his bass-playing days, yet…