Tag: book blog

Top 8 Books from 2021

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This is usually one of my favourite posts of the year, but I haven’t done it since 2018, so I’m thrilled to return again this year! Almost the entire year of 2020 was a book slump for me and while I didn’t do much reading through summer of 2021, overall this was a much better year and I’m a lot more excited about the books I read.

As usual, I’ll be doing 2 posts that collectively feature my top 15 reads of the year. This post is dedicated to my favourite books of the year that were actually published in 2021 (because I read a lot of new releases) and the second post will feature my Top 7 Reads of 2021 that were published in other years. So without further ago, let’s get into it – these are intentionally ordered in terms of how much I loved them.

8. What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster

What’s Mine and Yours snuck on to my list this year. It was an impulse purchase on Audible that I ended up really enjoying. It has low ratings on goodreads, but I felt it was such a meaningful story that touched on huge number of social issues: race, class, status, family, grief, and of course, love. It features a large cast of characters and I liked how the author examines nature versus nurture and how blinding privilege can be to another’s experience.  

7. Where Hope Comes From by Nikita Gill

Where Hope Comes From is a short poetry anthology by Nikita Gill that I cannot stop thinking about since I read it. I find her poetry a bit hit or miss, but picked it up when I saw it was about the pandemic. I wasn’t really looking forward to the pandemic starting to show up in books, but I couldn’t deny that it was exactly what I needed. Reflection is an important part of processing things that happen to you and it was cathartic to read about someone else’s experience with the pandemic and to feel solidarity and acknowledgement of some of the crap we’ve all been through in the last year.

6. If I Tell You the Truth by Jasmin Kaur

I’m sensing a bit of a theme, but If I Tell You The Truth was another impulse buy from my local bookstore. Jasmin Kaur is a local author (to me) and this story is written in prose and set in the BC Lower Mainland. I ended up loving it. The writing is fantastic and features a young Indian girl who moves to Vancouver for university to find herself pregnant. The author explore a lot of themes, particularly family and gender dynamics in Indian culture and the struggles of immigration. The writing is incredibly honest and heartfelt and I felt so connected to the characters.

5. The Strangers by Katherena Vermette

The Strangers was my second read by Katherena Vermette and was nominated for the Giller Prize this year. This book gutted me within the first chapter and I couldn’t stop reading about the 4 female members of the Stranger family. It’s a multi-generational story that examines the circular nature of trauma and the racism that still exists in Canada’s family and social services. Vermette is an excellent writer and I connected deeply with each of her characters.

4. Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

This is book that I had no right to enjoy as much as I did! It’s a mystery/thriller about a crime writer who is mistaken for a hired killer when overheard talking about her latest book plot with her publicist. When she’s offered a huge sum of money to off a woman’s husband, things quickly get out of control and spiral into a fast paced train wreck of epic proportions. It’s an easy-to-read style that translated so well to audiobook. It’s not a literary masterpiece in any way, but I had a lot of fun with it and couldn’t put it down!

3. Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

Infinite Country was yet another surprise read that I picked up on Audible and ended up loving. It’s a very short book, but succinct.  It’s a beautifully written immigration story split between America and Colombia that captures the heartache of having your family separated and your kids growing up as part of two different cultures. The struggle to make a living in a hostile environment and the dream of one day reuniting your family. We all just long to be together.

2. Please Don’t Sit on my Bed in Your Outside Clothes by Phoebe Robinson

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while you probably know I love Phoebe Robinson. She consistently gets better with every novel she publishes and this audiobook was easily my best of the year. It’s a collection of essays written for a large audience and I love how she seamlessly blends humour with her astute observations on social issues. She is so relatable and an important voice for black women. I still think about essays from her last novel and I loved her reflections on the pandemic, on her decision not to have children, and her thoughts on the white saviour complex.

1. Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Without a doubt this was my favourite book of the year. Once There Were Wolves is a haunting story about Inti Flynn and her determination to re-introduce wolves into the Scottish Highlands. The townspeople are vehemently opposed to the wolves out of fear and when one of the villagers go missing, Inti is worried her wolves will take the fall. It’s a wonderful blend of literary fiction and mystery and has the most lonesome atmosphere of grief and sadness that permeates the entire novel. Inti is trying to come to terms with the traumatic events of her shared past with her twin sister and McConaghy uses the loveliest prose to explore themes of loss, abuse, feeling, and sisterhood. Can’t recommend enough!

Five Little Indians

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Michelle Good
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Apr. 2020 (read Jun. 2021)

It’s been months since I read Five Little Indians, but I think it is a very important book and I do want to take some time to review it. It’s been getting a lot of press since over 200 children were found buried at the Kamloops Residential School (and thousands more since), shocking many Canadians, but not many indigenous people.

As the title suggests, Five Little Indians follows the lives of 5 survivors of a residential school on the north part of Vancouver Island. Some of these children aged out of the school, while others ran away or were smuggled away by family members. All suffer trauma as a result of the experience and many of the survivors end up in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) in Vancouver.

This is not an easy book to read and that is the way it should be. It doesn’t focus so much on the atrocities committed within residential schools (though they are still featured), but more on the long term trauma that comes with having survived such an experience during your most formative childhood years. The impact the schools had not only on the children, but on parents and entire communities.

When the children leave the school, some of them are lucky enough to have families to return home to, while others have no one and are forced to try and make it on their own at just 17 or 18 years of age. Some of the teens find each other in the DTES and create a new little family, but struggle emotionally and financially, turning to alcohol, drugs, and sex to cope with the trauma and memories they are saddled with from school. Those that are able to return home find that they are returning to families that have been just as broken by the loss of their children to the schools.

Family members turn to their own coping mechanisms and the teens find it hard to return to a culture and community that they now feel divorced from. The role of residentials schools was to “kill the Indian” in the child. The government and the Church succeed in this mission by cutting out the heart of indigenous communities and creating shameful cultural associations in the children. This separation traumatizes the community and the shame of the abuse perpetrated against the children makes it hard for many to return home at all. They have been abused mentally and physically and no longer have any kind of self worth, making it hard to be with the people who love them, even if those people have suffered in their own way.

The writing is simple and I found it effective in that it doesn’t sugarcoat anything. The storyline does a great job of shining a light on the long term impact of residential schools and how many aspects of the schools are still alive in society today. Many would argue that our child welfare system has basically just replaced the schools, with indigenous children still regularly being removed from their families at disproportionate rates – families still suffering from the trauma of residential schools. I recently finished reading The Strangers by Katherena Vermette, which I also think does a really good job at exploring the ways in which indigenous people are still marginalized today.

Everything about this book made me feel uncomfortable and that is kind of the point. Reconciliation is a big and uncertain topic and to think we can attempt it without feeling very uncomfortable is folly. I’ve been trying to work my way through more indigenous literature this year and welcome any other recommendations.

Em

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Rating: 
Author: Kim Thuy
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Sep. 2021 (read Oct. 2021)

This is going to be a short review to match a short book. Em was the last of the Giller Prize nominees that I read. I’ve seen the author’s other book, Ru, floating around the Canadian Lit scene for years and decided to give this one a try when I saw it on the longlist. I was intrigued by the time period, ‘Operation Babylift’, and the impact of the Vietnam War on the beauty salon industry in North America, as detailed in the synopsis.

I’ll say upfront that of all the nominees I read, this was my least favourite. I did still like it and was impressed by how much history Thuy was able to cover in such a short book – I thought it was a solid 3 star read. But it was an ambitious novel and I felt it just didn’t deliver on what I thought I was getting from the book jacket. The book is told mostly in prose, which makes for a quick reading experience, which is exacerbated by how quickly Thuy jumps from topic to topic.

I can see why it would be nominated for it’s unique style and it is perceptive. She says a lot with a limited amount of words, which is definitely a skill, the style just didn’t quite work for me. I think the first part of the novel is the strongest, which focuses on the My Lai massacre. This really drew me into the book and it was interesting the associations Thuy made to move the story along. I just wanted more from the rest of the narrative and didn’t find the part of the story set in America to be as tightly executed. It almost worked, I just wanted a bit more from it.

The Strangers

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Author: Katherena Vermette
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Sep. 2021 (read Oct. 2021)

I read and loved The Break several years ago, so I was really excited to see The Strangers on the long-list for the Giller Prize. I think this was my favourite of the four nominees I read, so I was a little disappointed not to see it make the short-list.

The Strangers focuses on 3 generations of metis women in the Stranger family, featuring 4 perspectives in total. The first two perspectives are from Phoenix and Cedar, sisters and some of the youngest members of the family. Phoenix is in a youth detention centre and Cedar has been bouncing around in foster care before settling in to live with her father’s new family. The other two perspectives are from Elsie, their mother, who suffers from a drug addiction and is continually trying to get clean, and Margaret, their grandmother (Elsie’s mother), who never quite got to live the life she wanted. 

Vermette is a very accomplished writer. She had me hooked from chapter 1, which is so emotional and left me immediately gutted. The first two chapters are about Phoenix and Cedar and these two characters kept me captivated throughout the entirety of the novel. They both have two very different stories and I think the juxtaposition of their two lives is what made this narrative so compelling. Elsie’s storyline was probably my least favourite of the 4 as I found her narrative to be a bit repetitive, but the inclusion of her perspective is so important to the overall themes of the novel. 

I liked Margaret’s storyline as well and found her to be a fascinating character, but it’s the only perspective that’s not told at the same time period as the rest of the characters. We get flashbacks from all characters, but none of Margaret’s story is told in present day, which I found made it feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the novel. Singularly, every single one of these perspectives is powerful, but I found the first 3 to work together as a more cohesive story. Margaret’s felt like it could have been it’s own narrative and while it added further context, it was somewhat separate from the rest, though still impactful.

But really this is a minor complaint. Multi-generational family dramas are my favourite kind of story and this is one that packs a punch. I was sad not to see this make the shortlist for the Giller, but so glad it’s still getting the praise it deserves! Definitely recommend checking this one out. Also, that cover art is gorgeous!! 4.5 stars.

Fight Night

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Miriam Toews
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Aug. 2021 (read Oct. 2021)

My attempt to read a bunch of the Giller Prize longlist has been going so well this year! As a Canadian I always get excited about this list, but I’ve never dedicated so much time to working through the nominees before. I usually get more into Canada Reads in March, but I have to say, reading through the Giller nominees was a much more satisfying experience than I’ve ever had participating in Canada Reads. This just seemed to be a much more quality selection for me and I can say that I really liked everything I read!

In total I read 4 of the 12 nominees on the long list, but Fight Night was the only one I read that made it to the short list. I’ve been aware of Miriam Toews for a long time, but the only book of hers I’ve read is Women Talking, which I absolutely loved. I didn’t like Fight Night as much as that one, but I was so pleasantly surprised with this book! Because Women Talking tackles such a heavy topic, I think I was expecting something a little darker from this book – it was so lovely to read this humourous take on a multi-generational family instead.

Fight Night is told from the point of view of 9 year old Swiv. She has been expelled from school and as a result is living at home full time and being (somewhat) tutored by her grandmother. Her mother is pregnant and her father is missing; to help her process her circumstances and surroundings, her grandmother has her write letters to her unborn sibling “Gord”.

I’ll say upfront that I struggled a bit with Swiv’s voice – not that I found it hard to read or that I didn’t enjoy it – just that I struggled to believe she was actually 9 years old. She read a bit more mature to me and kept picturing her as a 12 year old rather than 9, but otherwise, this was such a sweet and fun book to read.

We get to spend time with Swiv, her mother, and her grandmother and I came to love each of them very dearly. Grandma has an incredible zest for like that immediately endears everyone around her, while her mother struggles with her mental health and missing husband. She loves Swiv fiercely and fights to stay strong for both her and Gord. It is an entirely character driven novel that captures a truly beautiful relationship between 3 generations of women.

I don’t have too much else to say about the novel except that it’s a great read if you’re ever feeling down and the humour is really what carried the book for me. I did think there were some structural weaknesses – one of my favourite parts was when Grandma recounts Swiv’s mother’s history for her while they’re on the plane to California, but I found the timing and delivery to be a bit awkward, like Toews knew what she wanted to include, but couldn’t find a graceful way to do it. Overall I could have done without the trip to California entirely and found it a bit distracting to the greater themes of the novel. I don’t think it’s the strongest of the nominees I read (I really would have liked to see The Strangers make it to the shortlist), but I would definitely still recommend Fight Night. Overall it was a joy to read!