More wonderful writing and captivating story telling.
Robinson moves neatly through the mess of Jared Martin’s life. He is a sixteen-year-old pot cookie dealer, smoker, drinker and son with the scariest mom ever.
Many tribes of Native American Indians tell stories that feature a trickster, which are mythical, mischievous, supernatural beings who take the form of animals. Jared’s grandmother insists that he is the son of Wee’git the Trickster, that dangerous shape-shifter who looks innocent but wreaks havoc.
“The world is hard. You have to be harder.” That’s Jared’s mother’s favorite saying. When he starts seeing purple men who follow him everywhere he goes, fireflies who wax philosophical about the universe, and river otters who look like people he knows, at first he thinks it has to be the weed. But Jared is about to find out some hard truths about himself and his family: these supernatural creatures are hell-bent on revenge against them.
The world is hard. Now Jared has to be harder.
Another clear winner amongst the titles in this year’s Canada Reads competition.
Backman weaves beautiful stories. Human stories. Beautiful human stories that are insightful, and empathetic, and honest, and ugly, and brave.
Anxious People is a story about a robbery. A botched robbery. Or, moreover a love story. No, a hostage taking. Anyway, doesn’t matter how they all got there. Eight odd strangers all show up at the New Year’s eve showing of an apartment in Sweden (but most definitely not in Stockholm)– and become unwitting confidantes, counsellors, and chums.
Here’s the passage I shared with my students today:
She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who has spent twenty minutes next to a barbeque but has never served a full meal in his life.
(Backman, p. 230-1)
When I got to the end, I wanted to start all over again.
New this September to book stores, on your bookshelf or to be read pile next!
Title: Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club
Author: Megan Gail Coles
Date Read: August 17, 2020.
Two snaps.
This year’s Canada Reads has had many winners in my mind. This is yet another amazing contestant, and I loved it.
The subject matter is heartwrenching and powerful. The writing is absolutely beautiful.
Set in Newfoundland, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club explores the lives and interwoven stories of Olive, Iris, John, George, and Damian as they prepare for guests to arrive at The Hazel, the over-priced artisnal restaurant in which they are employed. The book is split in to three sections: prep, lunch, and dinner. As guests arrive for Valentine’s dinner we begin to understand the complicated connections between the employees and their guests.
Coles pens a compassionate portrait of poverty; highlights the juxtaposition of privilege; and bravely confronts rape and sexual assault and the complicated and disasterous unravelling of its victims. Her forward to the novel reads simply: “This might hurt a little. Be brave.”
Her writing is nothing short of poetic prose to be slowly inhaled like clean laundry.
While waiting on an incorrigible customer, Iris detaches from reality and [feels] “Like a person drowning on the bottom of a pool, Iris is held down by some unknowable force, looking up through the shimmering blue crest at the surface just beyond her reach. She kicks and stretches and struggles. She tries to retain breath yet it escapes her. She watches the bubbles break.” (224).
A terrible rucus breaks out in the restaurant: “Damian approaches the scene reluctantly and hyper aware of the booze his body is focused on metabolizing. He places his man mask on as that is the only mask acceptabe in this particular circumstance.” (252).
When yet another dramatic incident unfolds and a guest calls Damian a faggot, “[George] had stood horrified over by the linen vestibule holding folded cloth napkins in a stack between both plams. Transfixed by the language. The man’s sharp decriptors came as no surprise. His nature held firm to everything George presupposed about the class of people that caused scenes such as this in dining rooms such as these.
Raw skeet, she had thought when she walked past the table hours earlier. (356)
And, as the dinner hour is cut short by the raging white out outside:
“Iris registers the sound of the wind first.
The power loss has created a vacuum seal temporarily absent of human sound. The first wave of shock cascaded over them but now everyone is held in place willing the music to return. They can suddenly and properly hear the storm surge against the corner picture windows. It is swirling and unpredictable. Great arms of it feel hauled up by a Precambrian grudge as if the weather patterns themselves were trying to break the place even further apart to right an ancient wrong. A great shoulder of air heaves itself against the door and blows it open. The candles near the entry fall victim to the gale and the whole front of house falls into complete darkness as Ben dashes out from behind the bar to push the door closed again. Shuttering them all in here together. Everyone can hear things being picked up outside and thrown down.
Don’t want that. Don’t want that either. Don’t want none of this.” ( 386)
Although Canada Reads has declared their winner, I submit that there are two better choices for this year’s win: Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes, and Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.
I watched this series recently on Prime Video. I really enjoyed it. I knew it was first a book, and so I had to backtrack and read it. The book was better. And the series was pretty awesome.
The story is set in Shaker Heights, a planned community near Cleveland, Ohio. Everything in this community is planned out– the heighth of your grass, the colours of your home… and when Elena Rochardson rents to Mia Warren, we realize that the house is built to conceal the fact that is a duplex, separate entrances are within the front door, but from the outside the house on Winslow Avenue looks just like the rest. Appearance is everything in Shaker Heights.
Elena and Mia have a strained relationship through the course of the novel that intersects with their differing parenting styles; the relationships formed between their children; and the court case regarding the custody of a baby with whom each woman is differently connected.
Ng is a beautiful writer and many passages stood out as compelling. This one caught my attention in both the TV adaptation and while reading.
“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
A really fun read! Jenkins Reid explores a unique format for storytelling in this fictional oral history that reads like the transcript for a rock band biopic.
Set in Los Angeles in the 1970s– we are taken backstage, on the bus, and in the studio with the characters who fuel the band: Daisy Jones & the Six. There are two founding brothers, handsome and talented Billy (lead singer and song writer) and the shy, dutiful Graham (lead guitar); Warren the surly drummer; Karen the feminist keyboardist; Eddie (rhythm guitar) and his brother, Pete (guitar). The Six get their start as a blues-rock band called the Dunne Brothers in the mid-sixties. As they grow in fame, they pick up Daisy Jones and the real roller coaster ride begins.
As they are interviewed, we begin to understand that memory is not always reliable; many characters outright contradict the recollections of their bandmates. Searching back over decades makes it difficult to remember the events clearly– but so does the haze of hard living in a rock and roll band on tour in the 70s– when many of them indulged widely in drugs and booze. But we come to understand the bandmates as fallible humans; more fleshed out than the flat characters known by their fans.
Dasiy Jones & The Six is an examination of fame, addiction, love, family, and friendship. The narratives of these fictional bandmates echo lyrics you have heard before and they thread throughout the story. Eric Clapton wrote about cocaine; David Bowie wrote about fame; Sister Sledge wrote about family– and everybody writes about love; it hurts, it scars, it lifts us up, it’s a battlefield, it’s a drug… But it is also all we need.
Get on the bus with Daisy Jones & the Six. You’ll have fun, promise.
