The Pious Robber by Harriet Richards Published by Thistledown Press Review by Justin Dittrick $18.95 ISBN 978-1-927068-18-2 Harriet Richards’ The Pious Robber presents its readers with eight stories that will mesmerize, disturb, and delight. Every story in the collection strikes to the bone, and is brilliantly conceived and beautifully realized. One will be tempted to read the collection in one sitting, though the depth of the stories provides much fruit for multiple readings, honest reflection, and some animated and imaginative discussion. Richards is blessed with an unimpeachable understanding of illness, childhood, family, loss, and human psychology. Her narration is cool and detached, her dialogue crisp and seamless. This work is weighty and balanced: highly observant, darkly comic, and always fascinating. This collection especially shines where it examines human frailty within the accepted boundaries that mark convention, produce (unwanted?) self-knowledge, and touch that squishy place in our psyche where we are most vulnerable and recriminatory. There are plenty of cringe-worthy moments in the stories “Tangible Reminders” and “Sometimes it Seemed”. These seem to be the moments in which intelligent people must work with the seemingly harmless social and cultural excesses that make day-to-day life a minefield. In “Tangible Reminders”, the main…

The Sometimes Lake by Sandy Bonny Published by Thistledown Press Review by Alison Slowski $18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-99-7 “My daddy used to say things about what we’re made out of to make my mom roll her eyes. Like crystals vibrating. Also energy balls.” – “Marrow”, by Sandy Bonny Sandy Bonny, a Saskatoon-based writer, creates a compelling collection of stories from all corners of life in The Sometimes Lake. These are funny, moving stories of real people in contemporary settings. They warm the heart with dynamic characters the reader can’t help but want to know more about. These stories include a pair of young, bereaved children in the exotic mountains of a Buddhist nunnery in India; the bored girlfriend of a beekeeper devoted to his vexing family; a new teacher trying to get his bearings-culturally and otherwise-with a Northern Canadian Dene community school; two lesbian university students brought together by a special mutual friend; and a little girl’s musing upon death and loss after her grandfather passes. Myth and belief intertwine when a young man who is situated at a commune becomes trapped and unable to leave, and when road builders from bygone days explore legends of their past. Bonny’s love of…

To Everything a Season by Helen Mourre Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Alison Slowski $16.95 ISBN 978-1-894431-89-7 Helen Mourre’s short story collection, To Everything a Season, is her latest work, after the books Landlocked and What’s Come Over Her from Thistledown Press. Throughout her short stories about parents, about children, about young unmarried men and women, Mourre displays a strong understanding of the bonds that hold community and family together. She captures the reader’s attention by painting a portrait of the hardships families endure while experiencing the loss of a parent, the loss of a spouse, or even the loss of a cherished family home in exchange for a new one. The theme of loss carries through the entire book, paralleled and mitigated by the spark of hope. Though the characters have experienced some dark times, there is always the hope that things will improve. Mourre’s writing is candid and honest, and each swell of each story told, while it may be tragic, is also filled with hope.  Her words are penned with obvious love for the Saskatchewan prairies, a small-town community, and the ties between that community and friends and family. THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT…

Love, Loss and Other Oddities by Saskatchewan Romance Writers Review by Karen Lawson $16.95 ISBN 978-0-9878337-0-9 Thanks to the Saskatchewan Romance Writers, romance is alive and well in Saskatchewan. In celebration of twenty-five years as a writing group, its members decided to compile their best stories. The result is an entertaining and diverse collection entitled Love, Loss and Other Oddities. There are seventeen talented writers involved in the compilation of this anthology. The stories included in Love, Loss and Other Oddities are as diverse and different as the writers themselves. But there are two things that all the contributors have in common: they all love to write in the romantic vein and they are all residents of Saskatchewan. Romance is a huge genre that encompasses many different components. This book covers every aspect of romance and love. It is a potpourri of love stories. There is everything from historical romance to contemporary romance. It also includes urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Some stories are lighthearted. Several are touching and sad. Many of the stories focus on young love. Some deal with characters that are facing middle and old age. Some look at the sweetness of a new relationship. Others zero…

Dibidalen by Seán Virgo Published by Thistledown Press Review by Hannah Muhajarine $18.95 ISBN 978-1-927068-06-9 The stories found in this enchanting collection by Seán Virgo are almost fairytales, familiar and fascinatingly fresh at the same time. The collection starts simply, with “Before Ago”, a story that sounds like a poem or a song. Its rhythmic and repetitive phrases gave me the feeling I was listening to the story being told rather than reading it from a page. These opening tales are short and cryptic, full of symbolism and meaning. The characters are unnamed-‘a man’, ‘a stranger’ or ‘a priest’-and contain elements of folktales-three eggs found in a field, talking animals, dreams and transformations. As the stories progress, however, new ideas are introduced. A priest struggles to find the best way to live his faith, a soldier finds it difficult to return to his old life after the war. All the stories are neatly linked, some seeming to pick up where the last one left off. They build on each other, gradually gaining length and complexity, moving forward in time to a world more like our own. The last three stories-“Gramarye,” “The Likeness,” and “Dibidalen”-are the longest, making up most of…

The Weeping Chair by Donald Ward Published by Thistledown Press Review by Hannah Muhajarine ISBN 978-1-927068-00-7 The sixteen stories found in The Weeping Chair by Donald Ward cover a wide range of highly imaginative situations, ranging from humorous to heartbreaking, from cognizant chickens to the criminally insane, from Saskatoon to outer space. Many of the stories present a deceptively normal situation, such as traveling on a train, preparing dinner, or ordering coffee, which quickly evolves into something fantastic and profound. Ward turns the mundane ever so slightly, giving the reader a new and illuminating perspective. The stories are full of interesting characters, some more eccentric than others. Ward is able to quickly sketch out these people and bring them to life using just a few words: “She was wearing a black, floor-length cape today,” he writes, “high-collared, like some anthropomorphic creature from a children’s tale.” His dialogue is both witty and truthful, and he skillfully captures the brief relations formed between strangers in day to day life. Some stories are hilariously quirky, others are deeply moving, and some are both. The humour is often dark, as with the observation “Death is the ultimate treatment for a sleep disorder.” There are…

A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes Published by Coteau Books Review by Michelle Shaw $18.95 ISBN 9 781550 504767 On the surface, award-winning Saskatchewan-based author Dave Margoshes’s latest offering is a beautifully written collection of biographical stories about his father’s life. Except that the stories are fiction. Although based, says Margoshes, on “a seed of truth” and imbued with “the persona and personality of [my] father”, they are all fiction. The result is a selection of carefully crafted tales, written over a number of years, which relate various incidents in his father’s life. Margoshes says he “worked hard, with the stories’ structure and a sort of old-fashioned expository style, to make them feel like memoir — like truth…[he] also worked hard to imbue these stories with a tension created by that unstated question of how the narrator came to know not just the stories, in their broad strokes, but the fine details.” He succeeded. At first I was consciously trying to work out what was true but I soon found myself enveloped in the stories. Most of the book is set in New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century. Margoshes crafts an almost sensory…

The Maladjusted by Derek Hayes Published by Thistledown Press Review by Gail Jansen $18.95 ISBN: 978-1-897235-90-4 For those that tend to a more sunny disposition, The Maladjusted by Derek Hayes might be a journey on a road seldom trod, but it’s a road well worth travelling. Hayes has written a collection of short stories that lets you look at life from a new perspective, and allows you to identify with characters that often live on the fringe of what we would consider a “normal” existence. Hayes puts us in touch with that voice inside that speaks incessantly as we go about our daily lives by introducing us to characters who, as much as they differ from us on the outside, echo many of our own thoughts and beliefs on the inside. This creates a connection that allows us to view those “maladjusted” members of our society in a whole new light. From the grimy back alleys behind the apartment of the “mentally ill” Mike, who finds solace and perhaps a life in the game of Chess, to the dignity we can so plainly see in Melanie as she struggles to find her own level of normal, Hayes characters are people…

Leaving Berlin by Britt Holmström Published by Thistledown Press Review by Sandy Bonny $ 18.95 ISBN-13 987-1-897235-91-1 I recently crossed Saskatoon driving behind a battered Honda Civic with the bumper sticker: ‘Change is inevitable – growth is optional.’ This might well be the motto underlying Britt Holmström’s first collection of short fiction. In Leaving Berlin this experienced Regina-based novelist tapers her prose to focus on female characters thrust, often unexpectedly, into moments of revelation. These women, of all ages and origins, struggle with the assumptions and constraints that structure their lives. Complicated relationships unravel, personalities collide, and as time and memory turn back on themselves, yearnings, hopes, and reality itself, beg to be reframed. Rendered in candid, conversational prose, sharp physical descriptions position the reader as confidante to Holmström’s characters, and they certainly do confide In “ The Company She Kept” a group of divorced medical-office mates startle themselves out of a comfortable friendship by first obsessing over, then energetically attacking the transparent lies of a newly hired temp. She is young, beautiful, and clearly unstable, but they find themselves driven to best her, delighting in her weaknesses as they swirl into self-improvement. Their circle is scattered, ultimately, by shame…

Nothing Sacred by Lori Hahnel Published by Thistledown Press Review by Andréa Ledding $16.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-63-8 Lori Hahnel’s collection of 21 short stories, including the title piece “Nothing Sacred”, skillfully navigates through a working woman, city-gritty, dust devil tour of life rooted in the Canadian prairies and western foothills. Hahnel populates the pages with believable and provocative characters and situations with a strong sense of place, grounded solidly in the exceptional everyday. She questions and probes societal norms, values, and conventions with perception, humour, and sensitivity. Her language is direct and simple; she is a master at the art of “showing, not telling”. The alternating perspectives of mother and daughter in “The Least She Could Do” demonstrate this knack, or the complex depths of loss in the simple statement of a character in “Blue Lake”: “The body must have a memory of its own. I remember things about you I didn’t know I’d forgotten.” Her cast of dozens, almost exclusively female leads speaking in the first person, act as both personal tour guide and societal magnifying glass: examining relationships, roles, and institutions. Each story is an encounter where connections are made, secrets are shared, and insights sparkle out in an…