What We're Reading: Editors' Picks, Fall 2021

We’re saying so-long to summer and turning toward this list of exciting new books for this fall. In keeping with the theme of our forthcoming youth issue, some of these titles represent books our editors wish they’d had growing up. Cozy up with us and these great new titles!

Living With Viola

by Rosena Fung

Annick Press, October 2021

“Heartbreakingly honest and quietly funny, this graphic novel from a debut creator is a refreshingly real exploration of mental health, cultural differences, and the trials of middle school.

Livy is already having trouble fitting in as the new girl at school – and then there’s Viola. Viola is Livy’s anxiety brought to life, a shadowy twin that only Livy can see or hear. Livy tries to push back against Viola’s relentless judgment, but nothing seems to work until she strikes up new friendships at school. Livy hopes that Viola’s days are numbered. But when tensions arise both at home and at school, Viola rears her head stronger than ever. Only when Livy learns how to ask for help and face her anxiety does she finally figure out living with Viola.

Rosena Fung draws on her own early experiences with anxiety and the pressures of growing up as the child of Chinese immigrant parents to craft a charming, deeply personal story that combines the poignancy of Raina Telgemeier’s Guts with the wacky humor of Lumberjanes. Exuberant, colorful art brings Livy’s rich imaginative world – filled with everything from sentient dumplings to flying unicorns – to life on the page.”

Recommended by Noelle Allen: “Belcourt is my favourite Indigenous artist and I’m really looking forward to a book filled with picture of her gorgeous work.”

Christi Belcourt

by Sherry Farrell Racette, Nadia Kurd & Dylan Miner

Goose Lane Editions, October 2021

“Christi Belcourt is a Métis visual artist whose ancestry originates from the historic Métis community of Mânitou Sâkhigan (Lac Ste. Anne) in Alberta. She has a deep respect for Mother Earth and the traditions and knowledge of her people. She is also known for her work as a community-based artist, environmentalist, and advocate for the lands, waters, and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Christi Belcourt is the first book devoted exclusively to Belcourt’s life and work: her early paintings showcasing the natural world’s beauty and interconnectedness, her monumental "flower beadwork" paintings, and her recent collaborations with Isaac Murdoch, an Anishinaabe knowledge keeper. Drawn from a national touring exhibition, these works of art inspire reflection, provoke conversation, and call for action.

The book, with text in English and Anishinaabemowin, features a powerful artist’s statement by Christi Belcourt, and illuminating essays written by scholars Sherry Farrell Racette, Dylan Miner, and exhibition curator Nadia Kurd.”

Postscripts from a City Burning

by Sam Cheuk

Palimpsest Press, September 2021

“How does one write a preemptive eulogy for their hometown, a transient metropolis arriving at its last stop? Composed over a span of three months, Postscripts from a City Burning reassembles the embers left behind by the 2019 Hong Kong protests (and ultimately failed coup), weaving nostalgia, loss, and possible redemption into a time capsule of diaristic verse, photographs, dramatic monologues, and historical testimony. At once angry, despondent and unflinching, Sam Cheuk’s second full-length collection offers up a microcosmic prelude of a city’s smouldering ruin among many in a world marching to the heartbeat of increasingly authoritarian impulses.”

Recommended by Brianna Wodabek: “This title appeals to my love of Nancy Drew, tying in both my younger self and my adult self.”

Pull Focus

by Helen Walsh

ECW Press, September 2021

“‘Part Real Housewives, part grown-up Nancy Drew.’ — Missy Marston, author of Bad Ideas

When Jane’s partner goes missing she needs to find out if he’s in danger while also contending with the politics of a large international film festival: Hollywood power brokers, Russian oil speculators, Chinese propagandists, and a board chair who seemingly has it out for her.

Jane has been appointed interim director of the Worldwide Toronto Film Festival after her boss has been removed for sexual harassment. Knives are out all around her, as factions within the community want to see her fail. At the same time, her partner, a fund manager, has disappeared, and strange women appear, uttering threats about misused funds. Yet the show must go on. As Jane struggles to juggle all the balls she’s been handed and survive in one piece, she discovers unlikely allies and finds that she’s stronger than she thinks.”

The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

McClelland & Stewart, August 2021

“A humorous coming-of-age novel and a sharp-edged look at how silence can shape a life, from the winner of the Journey Prize. A Chatelaine Summer Reads pick. Named one of the most anticipated books of the fall by CBC Books and 49th Shelf.

”But wait, what happened to the girl?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t tell him that what will happen to her is what happens to every girl.

Nina, a bright, hilarious, and sensitive 14-year-old, doesn’t say anything when her best friend begins to pull away, or when her crush on her English teacher intensifies. She doesn’t say anything when her mother tries to match her up with local Halifax Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, or when her worried father starts reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. (“How can your dad be happy when his only daughter is unsettled?”)

And she won’t speak of the incident in high school that changes the course of her life.

On her tumultuous path from nineties high school student to present-day high school teacher, Nina will learn difficult truths about existing as a woman in the world. And whether she’s pushing herself to deliver speeches at Toastmasters meetings, struggling through her MFA program, enduring the indignities of online dating, or wrestling with how to best guide her students, she will discover that the past is never far behind her.

Darkly funny, deeply moving, at times unsettling and even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel examines the fraught relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. Rich with wry humour and sharp-edged insight, The Most Precious Substance on Earth is an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.”

A Factotum in the Book Trade

by Marius Kociejowski

Biblioasis, November 2021

“A lifelong antiquarian bookseller’s memoir describes the trade from the factotum’s perspective – and in doing so reveals its ticklish underbelly.

A memoir of life in the antiquarian book trade, in London, England, and, in keeping with Kociejowski’s travel writing, a journey through people’s lives. Beginning with his childhood in rural Ontario, where at the annual village jumble sale he would buy books not so much for their content as for their tactile qualities, and from there to Ottawa, where he first learned books can have a value, and from there to England, where he fell into the book trade almost by accident, A Factotum in the Book Trade is an elegy for a floating world on the cusp of disappearance.”

The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary

by Tim Bowling

Wolsak and Wynn, December 2021

“‘Nearly sixty years of life, with all of its diversities and social pleasure, its joys and sorrows, successes and failures, a whole changing theatre cast of characters, some still loved and on the stage, others long since slipped into the darkened wings, and I remain most entranced by the simple glories of a fruit tree and a songbird. Why should it be so?’

In this lush collection of essays Tim Bowling picks up the common questions, and beauties, of life and examines them closely. From questions of love and money, to the search for solitude in a clamouring world, to poetry and the place of art today, Bowling writes beautifully and thoughtfully on what it means to be alive now. And in the end, we come back to the moon, the trees, the salmon that swim to the sea and the call of the red-winged blackbird, which his mother imitated to call him inside at night, as a child.”

Recommended by Jen Rawlinson and Jessica Rose

The Annual Migration of Clouds

by Premee Mohamed

ECW Press, September 2021

“A novella set in post–climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community

The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away – to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society – but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?

With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.”

Recommended by Noelle Allen: “I’m also a fan of Ian Williams works and I’m very much looking forward to his new work of non-fiction.”

Disorientation: Being Black in the World

by Ian Williams

Random House Canada, September 2021

“Bestselling, Scotiabank Giller Award-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes and new insights to today's urgent conversation on race and racism in startling, illuminating essays that grow out of his own experience as a Black man moving through the world.

With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people – the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one's own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Spurred by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams realized he could offer a perspective distinct from the almost exclusively America-centric books on race topping the bestseller lists, because of one salient fact: he has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of "only").

Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such things as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person's smile; and blame culture – or how do we make meaningful change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. With these essays, Williams wants to reach a multi-racial audience of people who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Examining the past and the present in order to speak to the future, he offers new thinking, honest feeling, and his astonishing, piercing gift of language.”

Recommended by Jaclyn Desforges and Jen Rawlinson

Satched

by Megan Gail Coles

House of Anansi, September 2021

“Named after a local word meaning “soaked through” or “weighed down,” Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Megan Gail Coles’s debut poetry collection, Satched, is a vivid portrait of intergenerational trauma, ecological grief, and late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a woman of rural-remote, Northern, working class, mixed ancestry.

Honest, penetrating, and often darkly comic, these poems explore the extraordinary will it requires to stay alive in the face of economic precariousness, growing inequality, and prevailing dissatisfaction. With a fierce dedication to place, the collection explores the conflict inherent to individualistic priorities and collective needs present in a hyper-commodified Newfoundland and Labrador. Satched demands compassionate advocacy for all as it resolutely strives for clarity and acceptance while celebrating the momentary glimpses of joy in the path toward shared values and resilience.”

Recommended by Brianna Wodabek: “This is a title that I wish I had as a child for more invisible disability awareness.”

The Words in My Hands

by Asphyxia

Annick Press, November 2021

“Part coming of age, part call to action, this fast-paced #ownvoices novel about a Deaf teenager is a unique and inspiring exploration of what it means to belong.

Smart, artistic, and independent, sixteen year old Piper is tired of trying to conform. Her mom wants her to be “normal,” to pass as hearing, to get a good job. But in a time of food scarcity, environmental collapse, and political corruption, Piper has other things on her mind – like survival.

Piper has always been told that she needs to compensate for her Deafness in a world made for those who can hear. But when she meets Marley, a new world opens up – one where Deafness is something to celebrate, and where resilience means taking action, building a com-munity, and believing in something better.

Published to rave reviews as Future Girl in Australia (Allen & Unwin, Sept. 2020), this empowering, unforgettable story is told through a visual extravaganza of text, paint, collage, and drawings. Set in an ominously prescient near future, The Words in My Hands is very much a novel for our turbulent times.”

The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health

Edited by Zena Sharman

Arnsenal Pulp Press, October 2021

“What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honoured and valued queer and trans people's lives, bodies, and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure, and liberation?

LGBTQ+ health care doesn't look like this today, but it could. This is the care we dream of.

The Care We Dream Of is not quite an essay collection, and not quite an anthology. Instead, it's a hybrid kind of book that weaves together the author's essays on topics like queering health and healing, transforming the health system, kinship, aging, and death, alongside stories, poetry and non-fiction pieces by Alexander McClelland and Zoe Dodd, Blyth Barnow, Carly Boyce, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas, Joshua Wales, Kai Cheng Thom, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Sand C. Chang. The book also includes interviews with activists, health care workers and researchers whose work offers insights into what liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health can look like in practice. Interviewees include Anita "Durt" O'Shea (of St. James Infirmary), Dawn Serra, Hannah Kia, Ronica Mukerjee, and Sean Saifa Wall.

The Care We Dream Of offers possibilities - grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future - for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it would look like if our health care were rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a calling out, a out, a calling in, and a call to action. It is a spell of healing and tranformation, rooted in love.”

The Breaks: An Essay

by Julietta Singh

Coach House Books, September 2021

“A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive the looming political and ecological crises of our day, Singh contends, we must break from the conventions we have inherited, and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and brown girlhood, complicating the US’s stark binaries. With nuance and care, Singh connects the crises humanity faces—climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. Drawing upon feminist autotheory and the Black epistolary traditions of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Singh offers us her own generous invitation to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.”

Coloniality and Racial (In)Justice in the University: Counting for Nothing?

Edited by Sunera Thobani

University of Toronto Press, December 2021

“Coloniality and Racial (In)Justice in the University examines the disruption and remaking of the university at a moment in history when white supremacist politics have erupted across North America, as have anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Situating the university at the heart of these momentous developments, this collection debunks the popular claim that the university is well on its way to overcoming its histories of racial exclusion.

Written by faculty and students located at various levels within the institutional hierarchy, this book demonstrates how the shadows of of settler colonialism and racial division are reiterated in "newer" neo-liberal practices. Drawing on Critical Race and Indigenous theory, the chapters challenge Eurocentric knowledge, institutional whiteness, and structural discrimination that are the bedrock of the institution.

The authors also analyse their own experiences to show how Indigenous dispossession, racial violence, administrative prejudice, and imperialist militarization shape classroom interactions within the university.”

Recommended by Noelle Allen: “This looks to be a lovely reflection on nature.”

Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium

by Helen Humphreys

ECW Press, September 2021

“Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that are still with us and those that are lost. Over the course of a year, Humphreys considers life and loss and the importance of finding solace in nature.

Illustrated throughout with images of herbarium specimens, Humphreys’s own botanical drawings, and archival photographs, this will be the perfect gift for Humphreys’s many fans, nature enthusiasts, and for all who loved Birds Art Life.”

Pebble Swing

by Isabella Wang

Nightwood Editions, October 2021

“A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets

Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation – that which is unspoken, but endures.

The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection – with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd – the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form.”

Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult

by Faith Jones

William Morrow, November 2021

“Educated meets The Vow in this story of liberation and self-empowerment – an inspiring and stranger-than-fiction memoir of growing up in and breaking free from the Children of God, an oppressive, extremist religious cult.

Faith Jones was raised to be part an elite army preparing for the End Times. Growing up on an isolated farm in Macau, she prayed for hours every day and read letters of prophecy written by her grandfather, the founder of the Children of God. Tens of thousands of members strong, the cult followers looked to Faith’s grandfather as their guiding light. As such, Faith was celebrated as special and then punished doubly to remind her that she was not.

Over decades, the Children of God grew into an international organization that became notorious for its alarming sex practices and allegations of abuse and exploitation. But with indomitable grit, Faith survived, creating a world of her own – pilfering books and teaching herself high school curriculum. Finally, at age twenty-three, thirsting for knowledge and freedom, she broke away, leaving behind everything she knew to forge her own path in America.

A complicated family story mixed with a hauntingly intimate coming-of-age narrative, Faith Jones’ extraordinary memoir reflects our societal norms of oppression and abuse while providing a unique lens to explore spiritual manipulation and our rights in our bodies. Honest, eye-opening, uplifting, and intensely affecting, Sex Cult Nun brings to life a hidden world that’s hypnotically alien yet unexpectedly relatable.”

Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism

by Daphne B.

Coach House Books, September 2021

“A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

As Daphné B obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist politics. In a looks-obsessed, selfie-covered present where influencers make the world go round, she brings us a breath of fresh air: an anti-capitalist look at a supremely capitalist industry, an intersectional feminist look at a practice many consider misogynist. Blending together the confessional, the poetic, and the essayistic, Made-Up is a lyric meditation on an industry in full bloom.

Made-Up explores the complicated world of makeup, from how it’s made to how we wear it, talking about gender, identity, capitalism, and pop culture in the process. Makeup doesn’t get a lot of serious attention; it’s often derided as shallow. But Daphné proves that it’s worth looking at a little more in-depth.

The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley – like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist – the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.”

Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door

by Molly Peacock

ECW Press, September 2021

“Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career.

Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America’s Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life.

In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.”

Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Nora Loreto

Fernwood Publishing, December 2021

“As Canada was in the grips of the worst pandemic in a century, Canadian media struggled to tell the story. Newsrooms, already run on threadbare budgets, struggled to make broader connections that could allow their audience to better understand what was really happening, and why. Politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith.

This book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from racialized workers to residential care to policing. It demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of these issues and helped to justify the maintenance of a status quo that created the worst ravages of the crisis. Spin Doctors argues alternative ways in which Canadians should understand the big themes of the crisis and create the necessary knowledge to demand large-scale change.”