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.
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.
Title: We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir
Author: Samra Habib
Date Read: March 8, 2020
One and a half snaps.
One of this year’s (indefinitely postponed) Canada Reads Selections.
I liked it, but I am not so sure it meets the criteria as the: “one book to bring Canada in to focus.”
Habib writes honestly and irreverently, and with a distinct and lovely prose, but I didn’t find her story particularly compelling, and I am not sure why I didn’t feel much. It was more factual than tender and more clinical than emotional. Her memoir helps us to understand the racism, bullying, and sexism she faced– as it happened to her both in Pakistan and Canada; illuminating the duplicitous trials of her sexuality, culture and faith. But understanding something is different from feeling it.
In anticipation of what lay beyond the glass doors, I thought back to the lush green landscapes I’d seen in episodes of Little House on the Prairie. That is what I imagined Canada– the entire Western world for that matter– would look like. Miles of green hills dominating the horizon. Rich with abundance. Nothing like Pakistan. In my ten-year-old mind, war and persecution didn’t exist this many oceans from home. Bodies weren’t disposable.
But that is not the Canada I encountered on that ripe July day in 1991. Instead of blooming with potential, Canada felt oddly sterile. Or maybe overly polite, as though it didn’t want to ruffle any feathers with a jolt of personality.
(Habib, p.45)
She did help me pass the time on a few flights… but I will need to read another of the finalists to find the book that brings Canada in to focus.
Title: The Woo Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family
Author: Lindsay Wong
Date Read: July 16, 2019
Two snaps
Almost unbelievable. Like, when Oprah couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around James Frey’s memoir… but here it was, wildly incredible– but just grounded in enough legitimacy that you have to let go and trust Lindsay Wong as she recounts her wildly eccentric life with keen prose that is at once castigating of her parents and her upbringing and also graciously sympathetic to the mental illness that ran unchecked amongst them all.
In the prologue Wong sets us up for the ride. Finding herself in a neurologist’s office in Manhattan, she discovers that she has migraine-related vistibulopathy– an intense neurological disorder that plagues her with acute vertigo. This diagnosis is a relief to her, because it is not the Woo-Woo. The Woo-Woo are the ghosts that her Chinese family believed responsible for cancer, viruses, and psychological disturbances– and she and her family actively evade the Woo-Woo as best they can by camping out in Walmart parking lots, not sitting too long on the toilet, or living at the mall eating processed food and endless amounts of candy.
As a parent, my heart ached for Lindsay and her siblings and the disregard for their emotional and physical well-being as centuries-old beliefs kept her grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles from facing and treating the mental illnesses that made them unprepared and unable to cope with the needs of their generations of children. These disorienting relationships left Lindsay feeling crushingly alone, and often pushed her to react and retaliate with physical anger. A lot of her physical aggression was meted out as a goon in the hockey rink– and widely championed by her parents as they collected her medals and encouraged her high-sticking and brutal checking.
Wong offers an unflinching look at mental illness. Hers was a life filled with anxiety and uncertainty, where her needs were often neglected as she competed with the symptoms of her family’s crippling mental illnesses. Wong miraculously succeeds despite it all and shows a personal resiliency and fortitude beyond what could ever be expected.
It is a stunning memoir. Like a car crash in slow motion– you cannot look away. It is heart-breaking, candid, and somehow all at once funny, bitter and melancholy. It is a must-read. Wong’s bravery in telling this story makes her the real poster child for the Let’s Talk About Mental Illness campaign.
In a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by global warming, Frenchie and his compatriots are on the run from the Recruiters.
Indigenous peoples have the one thing everyone else is missing: the ability to dream.
“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
You will be compelled to draw parallels to Canadian Residential Schools, they are mentioned as past markers in the story, but serve to show how when a dominant group wants something– they will stop at nothing to get it. She moves our past into our future– making it impossible to look away.
Surely, readers can draw connections to our present reality and the plausibility and gravity of her story. For me, it brings to mind the environmental degradation caused by Canada’s oil sands and their emissions-intensive extraction process and destructive land use. Canada is also home to 75 percent of the world’s mining companies. And they don’t have a great record around the world. Murders, rapes, and beatings have been reported at mines owned by Canadian companies. They’re not doing so well on the environmental front either. Contamination of water bodies from tailings pond and dam failures has become commonplace. In B.C., wild salmon have been the backbone of Indigenous food systems for millennia. Much more recently, fish farms have begun popping up on the coast. They concentrate hundreds of thousands of fish in floating farms using open net pens. The farms breed pests and diseases like Infectious Salmon Anemia, sea lice, and Piscine Reovirus, and can pass those on to wild populations. Indigenous-led activists have attacked the industry for its effects on wild fish. I would be remiss to not also mention issues of violence against Indigenous women and the violation of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights.
“Indigenous peoples are being forced into long and costly court battles to defend their traditions and ways of life because governments in Canada still refuse to accept the need to work collaboratively with Indigenous peoples on important decisions about environmental protection and resource development,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. “It’s ironic that the Committee report should come out in the midst of today’s court hearings into the Site C dam, a megaproject approved by the federal and province governments over the objections of First Nations and despite a highly critical environmental assessment.”
UN human rights report shows that Canada is failing Indigenous peoples JOINT PRESS RELEASE PUBLIC STATEMENTS JULY 23, 2015
Dimaline’s novel is not entirely fiction. But it is essential reading.
Cherie Dimaline is a Canadian Métis writer. In The Marrow Thieves, she explores the continued colonial exploitation of Indigenous people and the land. She has received great acclaim for her novel: the Governor General’s Award for English-language children’s literature at the 2017 Governor General’s Awards and the 2017 Kirkus Prize in the young adult literature category. It was also a finalist in the CBC’s 2018 Canada Reads competition, successfully appealing beyond the YA category to adult readers in the competition.
