Book of the Day Roundup: September 30-October 4, 2024
The Midnight Panther
Poonam Mistry, author, illustrator
Candlewick Studio
Hardcover $18.99 (48pp)
978-1-5362-3871-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Rich colors and spellbinding patterns add a dreamlike quality to this fable about being true to yourself. Panther wishes he was bold like Tiger or dazzling like Leopard, so he sets out in search of a way to be special. He fashions a mane from feathers, but Wind blows them away. He sticks wet leaves to his fur, but Sun dries his makeshift spots. As Moon rises proudly in the sky, Panther discovers a new way to shine that is all his own.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 14, 2024)
In Praise of Mystery
Ada Limón
Peter Sís, illustrator
Norton Young Readers
Hardcover (32pp)
978-1-324-05400-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A poem written by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón at NASA’s request to accompany their Europa Clipper spacecraft on its trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa is given the picture book treatment in this title for anyone who wonders at the mysteries of our world—and worlds beyond. A child is carried through the sky with a parachute made of stars, and a tree is encased in a streaking drop of rain in imaginative illustrations that reflect humankind’s endless capacity to dream.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 14, 2024)
Keep
Jenny Haysom
House of Anansi Press
Softcover $18.99 (280pp)
978-1-4870-1242-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
For the central trio in Jenny Haysom’s astute and appealing novel Keep, held and released secrets and possessions threaten to disrupt the course of life.
Harriet, a poet in her eighties, is slipping into dementia; ““if this last chapter of her life had a theme, it would be erasure.” Her son insists that it’s time for her to leave her overstuffed Ottawa house and move into a nursing home. Despite her resistance, he hires a real estate agent to prepare the property for sale. Eleanor and Jacob, brought in to clear the home and stage it for photographs, deal with relationship complications of their own.
Midlife changes and money shortages force difficult decisions on Eleanor, her English professor husband, and their three daughters. And Eleanor worries about becoming invisible as she ages. When Eleanor’s middle child gets her first period and Eleanor has a pregnancy scare, the archetypal divisions between maiden, mother, and crone are blurred.
Meanwhile, Jacob is a gay architecture student whose partner, Yves, is cheating on him. With nowhere else to go, he shelters at Harriet’s. The job prompts him and Eleanor to ponder what is worth salvaging. The more they sift through the old woman’s belongings—including a trove of poems that she wrote after her daughter’s death but never published—the more they both determine to shed what’s holding them back.
The novel contrasts hoarding and generosity, remembering and letting go. It also raises the moral issue of preservation versus progress via the possibility of Harriet’s home being torn down to build a condominium complex. Underneath that is a deeper question of ownership, represented by the graffiti “You are all on traditional unceded Algonquin territory.”
Keep is a compassionate novel in which three people learn that history and memory are “fluent and fallible.”
REBECCA FOSTER (August 14, 2024)
The Diapause
Andrew Forbes
Invisible Publishing
Softcover $17.95 (288pp)
978-1-77843-050-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The Diapause, Andrew Forbes’s speculative fiction treatise on a postplague world, is both a grim look at the dark side of survivalist psychosis and a heartbreaking love letter to the disappearing worlds around us.
Gabe is an only child, mired in the complicated family dynamics that the first phases of an unnamed virus unearthed. His parents’ decision to flee the city and take refuge at a remote family fishing cabin signals a seismic shift in the mundanity of survival and the beginning of a lasting family rift. Ensuing years find Gabe evolving through adolescent insubordination and the throes of first love, with his dissolving nuclear family backdropping his navigation through a world forced to tweak its problematic economical, geopolitical, or climate-based traditions. What results is a comprehensive novel about growing up, leaving behind what can’t be changed, and moving forward despite the pain and confusion it can cause.
The force of the prose punctuates bleak prognostications on the not-too-distant future of the Western Hemisphere, here having endured systematic writhing due to earthquakes, an American migration, and a near-constant state of rain. The title references the dormancy that living things can settle into when their traditional environment is altered, with the Diapause placing the remnants of our recent pandemic in a theoretical light by spotlighting the tricky what-ifs that such occurrences can provoke on seemingly happy microcosms.
The Diapause could be read as a cautionary tale were it not for the beauty that Forbes manages to coax from beneath the unstoppable depression his speculative landscape serves. That the possibilities of the future he creates seem so achievable makes it something of a somber journey—its loneliness perhaps misconstrued as a bad thing. In fact, it’s Gabe’s unavoidable solitude that fuels his vigor and which Forbes writes into mesmerizing, unforgettable prose.
RYAN PRADO (August 14, 2024)
The Go-Between
Jennifer Maruno
Red Deer Press
Softcover $14.95 (208pp)
978-0-88995-731-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A Japanese Canadian girl exercises her newfound courage in Jennifer Maruno’s historical novel The Go-Between, about an island summer in domestic service.
Sumi and her family live in Vancouver’s Little Yokohama during the 1920s. At twelve years old, she wants to become a reporter and is already known for her bold curiosity. She’s also kind: to allow her sister to attend sewing school, Sumi takes her place working in a doctor’s remote home, where she lives in a yurt, alone. In this new setting, she faces the prejudices of villagers who are outwardly cruel and make insidious assumptions about her. Sumi also contends with the doctor’s stern housekeeper and repetitive chores like tending to the furnace.
Sumi is a spirited heroine and a plucky observer who’s fueled by her sense of duty. She makes the best of her situation, as when she encourages the doctor’s frail Scottish wife to venture outdoors and when she befriends the Stewarts’ cat, Silver. She meets a Japanese farming family, and their friendship helps her to make it through as well. For the sake of harmony, she also refrains from telling her family about the harsh elements of her situation, using cultural touchstones to remind her of home when she’s melancholy. As she faces challenges including a storm, a thief, and a nonviolent brush with union organizing, Sumi grows ever more capable and resilient.
Infused with cultural details, as of bento boxes and flower arranging, The Go-Between is an illuminating, based-in-truth historical novel in which a girl learns to stand up for herself against anti-Japanese sentiments.
KAREN RIGBY (August 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
