David Yoon

This mines every single Hallmark, rom-com movie trope and throws it on the page. Daddy's little girl with the million dollar wedding that's on a bridezilla hair trigger, her bland, smiling fiancé still dealing with the death of his first wife, his surly tween daughter, the blue-collar best man hitting on anything that moves, along with the day drinking mother of the bride. The weeklong extravaganza collides head on into Phoebe Stone who is the sole guest at the posh Cornwall Inn that isn't part of the wedding and, if all goes to plan, won't be a part of the world either.

Phoebe's 12-year marriage has dissolved over Zoom. Her ex-husband has decided to shack up with Phoebe's work bestie which means she's forced to encounter them in her hastily fashioned office which also serves as the photocopier room and coffee station. Oh, and her cat has died. Determined to end her life, she instead finds new reserves of IDGAF, becomes Lila's maid of honour, and finally starts to say what she's thinking.

Now what if you take all of that seriously. (Let's not forget that Phoebe happens to be working on an academic paper that focuses on 19th century British novels concerning marriage) Here Espach imbues every single one of these characters, that could so easily be reduced to caricature and sneering pokes, with real human heart. They are fully realized people, a little ridiculous sure, but confused and hurt and just trying to catch up. I mean you can call Jane Eyre a romance too but it doesn't diminish the genius of Bronte's work a whit.

I loved the tension it created, and maybe it was just all in my head — but what does a more grounded story entail? Where does the author choose to end this particular type of book? How might this situation play out in the “real world” instead of within the constraints of a typical romance novel? What does a happy ending look like with clear eyed reasoning?

Maybe I'm overthinking it. The characters are a ton of fun, absolutely a blast to hang out with even as it all goes off the rails, and in the end I felt empathy for every one of them. A perfect summer read.

A prequel to the absolutely winning Legends and Lattes which first introduced me to cozy fantasy. Here we find Viv, the battle hardened orc, early in her marauding career. Headstrong and impulsive, she surges ahead of her crew in battle and sustains a serious leg wound for her troubles. She's left behind in the sleepy town of Murk as the rest of Rackham's Ravens set off in pursuit of the necromancer Varine the Pale.

From that breathless beginning we settle into the slower pace of the town where Viv finds a struggling bookshop and a sapphic love interest in the form of the town baker. (Baldree once again shows that's he's an unabashed fan of baked goods, treating us to more mouthwatering reactions to some heavenly pastries)

We're introduced to the rattkin bookseller who proves to be one hell of a bookish hand seller, slowly easing Viv from swashbuckling thrillers into steamy romance novels. We also get some wonderful creatures, from Potroast the pet gryphet that is part owl part begging dog, to the most adorable skeleton I've encountered in fiction yet (I'm already fan-casting Alan Tudyk as the voice) Top it off with Gallina, the overeager chickenhawk to Viv's Foghorn Leghorn and you've got another fun fantasy tale that was a breeze to read.

The Ministry of Time sits somewhere on the chronal courtship continuum between The Time Traveller's Wife and This is How You Lose the Time War. Apparently I've got a soft spot for timey-wimey romance.

Our protagonist is a “bridge” working for the Ministry of Expatriation. What that means is she's a live-in keeper and guide to the 21st century to one Commander Graham Gore. Instead of dying somewhere in the Arctic in 1847, Gore has been pulled into the present by the British government who have recently discovered time travel.

It's a bit cozy for a secretive government agency. Snatching random folks across history into the present, to hole them up in a lovely flat with a modern day member of the opposite sex is about as convoluted a meet-cute as you're going to get. The sci-fi equivalent of the busy big city executive going back to her home town to meet the chiseled Christmas tree vendor who's had a glow-up since his nerdy high school days. But hey, I'm all for a suspension of disbelief.

And it is interesting to see how these folks adjust to the new world. It's not just Spotify, airplanes, and washing machines, but the Holocaust, Hiroshima and 9/11. And what does it mean to exist centuries out of your own time? How does one maintain a “hereness” so fully removed from your temporal origins?

But that's all speculative window dressing to the slow burn romance on display. Bradley could have just as easily relied on the wonder of the sci-fi conceit, but instead the prose sparkles and Gore is overflowing with old world charm. He's got charisma for days, freed from the constraints and cold of a tireless Arctic expedition. In fact, all the temporally displaced “expatriots” are wonderfully realized eccentrics with a penchant for snappy dialogue. I just love the way Bradley turns a phrase.

There are disappearances and double-crosses, not to mention casualties and conspiracies to ratchet up the tension but in the end it's the characters on the page that won me over. This is made for adaptation and ripe for a sequel. I can't wait to see more from Kaliane Bradley!

It's incredibly fascinating how our understanding of tequila has evolved over time. From the mixtos of our youth, served more as a dare and leading to mornings of regret — to the first wave of 100% pure agave tequilas including Patron that broke open the North American market. As the market began to grow exponentially, conglomerates looked to mass production, leading to the industrialization of the spirit. Massive planting of blue Weber agave is creating a monoculture which threatens genetic robustness, leaving entire yields vulnerable to a single blight. Big business is also working to crowd out independent growers and celebrity tequilas are more concerned with turning a fast buck. Even the 100% pure agave tequilas could sneak in a single percentage of flavouring agents without having to change the labeling, leading to aficionados looking for truly additive free tequilas still using traditional methods. Which leads us to folks seeking out mezcal for a truly small batch, terroir infused, artisanal spirit.

Chantal Martineau tells the whole story in an engaging, in depth way that makes this essential reading for the tequila fan.

I don't know if I fully get this story. There seems to be no shortage of threads you could tug at to reveal something deeper. There is the repeated theme of language pushed past the point of understanding, dissolving into near gibberish, incapable of imparting any sort of understanding. Is that a reflection of our current political discourse or the acceleration of information through social media dissolving into noise? How about testosterone filled teenaged boys living in the white affluence of the 90's affecting gangster poses while singing along to hardcore hiphop, the simmering anger lying just underneath the surface. Maybe it's just auto-fiction, the story of a Kansas poet being raised by two psychologist parents, Lerner's mother notably famous in her field.

What I do know is that I'd read Lerner writing about his experience walking to the local CVS. Citing these diverse themes makes it seem like it's heavy literary fiction that needs deep analysis to understand when it's just an incredibly good read. Lerner's got a poet's ear for language and an assured sense of his subjects. Can't wait to check out more from him.

I think having read The Burnout Society and The Scent of Time I've gotten the gist of Byung-Chul Han. Indeed this feels like an extension of his thinking from those earlier works. Here Han argues we've gone from a disciplinary world of limitations and commandments to one of freedom and self-expression. We've moved from should to can. But Han reveals the trap. We've simply replaced God with capitalism. We're no longer living under firm edicts and weighty “thou shalls” but have instead become commodities trying to maximize our market value while being traded as packages of data for economic use.

This existence in Neoliberal society is one where we are free to achieve our dreams, to become successful or rich — we just need to put in the work, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and grind. We have only ourselves to blame for our failings. If we're not rich and famous it's because we lack hustle or we didn't want it badly enough. We are filled with self-loathing and guilt because we aren't better. And this constant focus on work and optimization inevitably leads to burnout, anxiety, and depression.

Throw in ideas of the necessity of narcissism, politics as an extension of shopping with the electorate treated as consumers instead of citizens, the digital panopticon that sees us as both slave and master willingly throwing all of our information onto the internet, Neoliberalism as the capitalism of like with our smartphones serving as rosaries, and you're getting a hell of a lot of philosophical bang for your buck.

But I like that Han doesn't simply throw his hands in the air in desperation. He advocates for a world of contemplation, quiet boredom and playing at the idiot — someone veiled in silence, who doesn't need to say anything at all.

John Doe dies in a Belfast hotel room and sets in motion a flurry of conjecture, maudlin sentiment, and mercenary careerism that typifies the celebrity industrial death complex. Mr Doe is clearly a thinly veiled stand-in for Anthony Bourdain and the story is a chance to revel in the sordid machinations of high profile chefs, Michelin starred restaurants, and the vast, opportunistic ecosystem of fame. One wishes the three authors had kept their knives sharp instead of resorting to a slapstick sledgehammer in the form of a broad drunken antagonist and the random vagaries of viral sensation as orchestrated by a slightly bipolar 20-something. It makes for a chaotic read with a motley crew of characters chewing through the scenery in a world that has the interior logic of a schlocky 80's TV movie. Approached as such, it makes for a fun, if forgettable, distraction.

Green Valley is a plugged-in, autonomous virtual community sequestered behind concrete walls. It's a technological paradise surrounded on all sides by the community of Stanton who have turned their back on digital technology.

Of course the story is bound to be a cautionary metaphor for the dangers of our increasingly online world as we escape further into our carefully curated bubbles to avoid the messiness of the real world. But I was not ready for the third act turn toward horror. I should have suspected when children begin showing up dead in Stanton which prompts Lucie Sterling to investigate, driven by her need to know if her niece is ok.

The setup is all there but I still struggled with the world building. There's a lot of handwaving to create the story's conditions and I found the writing a bit clunky as the author moved characters around the board. I could sense the taut thriller this might have been given some judicious editing.

Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977. At the age of four she is “activated” when her father leaves the family after pushing Adina into the concrete of their yard. Adina realizes that she is a citizen of planet Cricket Rice, sent to earth to report on its inhabitants via a fax machine her mother has rescued from the trash.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is merely a childhood coping mechanism to being raised without her father on the edge of poverty, mostly isolated and alone. But her transmissions continue into adulthood — eventually being collected into a novel that receives wide acclaim. Lovely, but the conceit could quickly devolve into twee musings of life on Earth but Bertino is also writing a story of loss and grief. The acknowledgements speak of an Adina Talve-Goodman, a writer integral to the New York literary scene who passed away just prior to the pandemic at the age of 32 from cancer. The story is at turns devastating and yet Bertino managed to marry these divergent tones. I think in large part it's because Adina and her friends are queer, in every beautiful iteration of the word.

It would make a heck of a movie with its murderers' row of juicy characters that could happily chew the scenery for its duration. In the midst of a mythomania epidemic, one Boyd Halverson decides to rob a bank. From there it's a mopey road trip across the continent with his willing hostage Angie Bing, a Pentecostal motormouthed former bank teller who is at once ardently enamoured with Boyd while leaving hints for her unhinged, narcissistic fiancé Randy Zapf. There's the husband and wife owners of the bank, hesitant to report the robbery lest it reveal how much they've been stealing from it all along. The CFO in name only, goon to Boyd's ex-wife's husband, sent to find and grievously hurt Boyd. A couple ex-cons, a possibly schizophrenic Finnish lap-dancer, a corrupt cop, an upstanding dispatcher and her best friend all converging on that same Boyd Halverson and the $81,000 he managed to run off with.

I just couldn't see the point of it all - other than to illustrate the absolute shit-show, lying-ass, oblivious monkey show that seems to be Trump-era America. It's not quite incisive enough to hold as a book but could make for an appropriately over the top lampoon on screen. Neither the tragic motivation or the intriguing idea of a cross-species contagious lying epidemic deliver on their initial promise to really shore up the rest of the shenanigans on display here. It would have been better off to just really lean into the absurdity.

I feel like I've missed the point of the story, that the considered discourse around the weighty themes of the novel eluded me. I went in buoyed by the sheer love I had for her debut novel Goodbye Vitamin. Once again I found myself carried through the story by the confident and lovely prose. But I just couldn't seem to find a foothold into the story. The first third feels like a will-they-won't-they Crazy Rich Asians pastiche only to switch gears in the second part leaving a sizeable gap that alludes to something nefarious. Again, I enjoyed the coming of age story, but there were dark corners that seemed to promise something more.

I think the story could have worked just as well, if not better, without the genetic technology through-line. That just as much work could have been done without the vague scientific MacGuffin that pervades the narrative. Alternately, the genre elements could have provided firm scaffolding instead of the slight filigree it amounted to. If we're going to mess with genetics let's really lean into the stakes. I wanted to like this more.

I loved the eerie tension of the mountain aerie mixed with the absolutely stunning language. I had to stop at several points and determine for myself if it was too much, was it veering into purple and overwrought? Considered line by line it feels excessive, but reading at pace the language just gelled into glittering prose. The language felt right, perfect for this discombulated experience.

Our narrator is hired on as a chef for the billionaire elite who trade the grey smog that covers the world and the ubiquitous engineered mung bean flour for the sun bathed Italian Alps and lavish dinner parties. What could go wrong catering to the one percent of the world's one percent? Winning the hearts and minds of potential investors through gastronomical science and a veritable Noah's ark of heritage grains, abundant produce, and a vast deep freezer filled with protien. It feels like an easy set-up where there's a third act revelation of “it was people all along!” but Zhang avoids that easy trope. She does lean hard into the horrors of privileged consumption that left me queasy nonetheless.

Things get wild cooking for a widowed billionaire, his flamboyant geneticist daughter, and a scruffy cat — which now that I'm describing it makes it all seem like Rachel Ray stumbled into Dr. No's mountain lair. It's a lot of chaotic culinary energy here alongside the zeitgeist of anti-billionaire fiction.

Someone has finally articulated this nagging feeling I've been having for some time. The algorithmic anxiety that comes from living in the teeth of technology. How identity has been replaced by consumerism driven by algorithms that influence the music I listen to, the movies I watch, the vacations I take, and the next must have item I need to buy whether it's Allbirds, a Stanley Mug, or Taylor Swift tickets.

There is a flattening of taste, a statistical averaging of desires that is elevating mid content to stratospheric heights. It's keeping us glued to the apps by staying away from anything that might challenge or confound us. It's dispensing with anything that would require nuanced consideration in favour of the pre-packaged and instantly understood.

We have such a herd mentality. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and so it's not just the consumers but the creators chasing virality that influences and flattens content. Songs are necessarily shorter to monetize within Spotify, movies become focused on meme opportunities over thoughtful writing, everyone is seeking the same shot from the rooftops of Santorini Greece or the shores of the Amafi Coast which drives even more tourism to the same spots. And around the globe, coffeeshops have adopted the same aesthetic of subway tiles, reclaimed wood furniture, rusty plumbing, and hanging lamps with exposed Edison bulbs in a High Brooklyn lumberjack vibe that is instantly recognizable whether you're in Seoul, Copenhagen, or Reykjavik.

Sure this can be a bit of a baggy read at times but it's a necessary reminder to cultivate your own individual taste, to be aware of how the algorithms are subtly influencing what we consume and how, even in the act of consuming it, we are considering how we will present it to others. Of course you are unique, just like everybody else.

Cozy friends to lovers with medium spice. Maggie's getting over a bad breakup and has nine months to find a date to her best friends' destination wedding. This of course means firing up the apps and sifting through the sludge to uncover a travel-worthy partner. You know how it's going to go, so it's all about settling in and enjoying the ride. And McCoy does not disappoint. No one has a better ear for dialogue and every chapter is a feast for the senses. It's not dinner and a date, it's spicy lamb with red chilies and Thai basil, crab-stuffed prawns with bucatini pasta and blistered Marzano tomatoes, or porcini-mushroom-and-Gruyère-stuffed pork tenderloin with a spinach-and-Parmesan risotto. It's clear she's drawing on her past life as a private chef and we all benefit from it. Frankly we could all use a bit more Garrett energy in all our lives too.

It's a hell of a handsell. A 30 year old postman is diagnosed with a brain tumour with days to live when the devil appears to make him a deal. He's already fashioned an end of life bucket list but it ultimately feels an empty practice, seeking novelty when that's not what he's really after. The devil instead offers an extra day of life in exchange for him agreeing to something in the world disappearing. You've read the title - you see where this is going.

It's a sweet, gauzy lensed story filled with swelling music and heartfelt tears that I'm not opposed to. I can appreciate it when it's done well, even if it's clearly manipulative —but this felt a little rote and by the book for my tastes. And that's even with the addition (or possible subtraction) of cats.

Abigail is a feminist economist lying awake in a hotel bed wedged between her husband and daughter, rehearsing her presentation on John Maynard Keynes she's set to give tomorrow. She's using the loci method, placing aspects of her speech in different rooms of her house that's she's moving through in her head, along with Keynes himself who offers up wry commentary throughout.

Which is kinda yawn TBH

Where the book really cooks is in the spot-on late night doom spiral, the dawning realization that past decisions have invariably led to this dark cul-de-sac. In this case Abby has lost tenure and, as the primary breadwinner in the family, the loss of income means having to move to a different town, a smaller house. And while she mentally lashes out at the sexist dinosaurs who denied her tenure despite her consistent publishing schedule and willingness to take on all the extra work thrown her way, she soon turns the blame on herself for pursuing an unsanctioned book project after a personal essay of hers went viral online.

It was a risk and it didn't pan out as she'd hoped.

She quickly goes from beating herself up over her critical misstep to dwelling on a collection of minor coincidences have brought her to this point, this career, this job - one that's she's not going to have for much longer. It feels like she never been completely in control. And then to all the relationships she's ruined on the way here, having lost touch, been called out, spurned, and ignored. And as she struggles to slow down the frantic gallop of her anxious mind, to redirect her energy back to the speech at hand, she can't help but heap on the self recrimination.

Been there. And that's why it just works for me. It's so immediately recognizable in a way that I haven't seen done so well.

...also lots of stuff about Keynes here for any budding economist, if that floats your boat.

I'm a sucker for any novel written by a poet. The dense amalgamation of poetry given room to breathe across chapters. And even as the narrator muses “a fiction of carefully crafted language with flowing sentences and paragraphs always makes me suspicious” I found the language hypnotizing.

A queer poet, uncertain or maybe ambivalent about his current relationship, and learning of the death of a former lover, escapes to India. It is the country of his parents and he recounts the sun of Varkala, the loneliness of Bengaluru, and the doom of Hyderabad. It's a queer, brown, Eat, Pray, Love — a travelogue filled with wry details of the many people he encounters that nonetheless reveals that “few are the people that live close, and listen hard.”

A fantastic collection of interconnected short stories focused on a century and a half of Arab women's voices inspired by the author's own ancestors' deep roots in Montreal. A family tree fashioned backwards from a seed of a story published nearly 20 years ago. From the incredible image of the red glow emanating from a tiny body wrapped in cloth being lowered into the earth, embers burning in the heart's cavity of the first chapter — the stories move through time, each filled with delightful details. There's a pearl necklace peeking above a collar, an incriminating hotel bottle opener, a still warm lemon cake. It's a jewel of a collection and just a lovely debut.

I'm only half kidding when I say it's a Rastafarian Educated, but that's too easy an analogy that doesn't do the language justice. Sinclair is a poet and it comes through in the absolutely gorgeous prose here. Describing her life of near poverty in Jamaica, living under the volatile whims of her father and his seemingly arbitrary adherence to Rastafarian tenets only gives you the barest of outlines. It is a truly incredible story that is both unbelievably restrained and measured while searing in its observations. Sinclair manages to extend grace to those whose actions would easily justify a scorched earth takedown. It was a bookclub selection that I wasn't sure about, but found myself grateful for the chance to experience this one.

It's a cozy anti-capitalist tale that reads like a gauzy K-drama. Yeong-ju leaves the unrelenting grind of her engineering job, divorces her career obsessed husband, and decides to open up a bookshop in a quiet Seoul neighbourhood. She discovers a found family that is likewise escaping from the prevailing hyper-competitive, burnout inducing reality that is modern life.

Jungsuh left the corporate world behind to pursue knitting, Mincheol escaped the hagwon to spend his afternoons at the bookshop, and Minjun has thwarted his parents expectations by devoting his time to being the bookshop barista. All of them are renegotiating their lives and looking for new meaning at a different pace than what the world might expect of them.

It's an earnest, heart-on-its-sleeve story that mirrors the authors own experience leaving her career as a software engineer at LG to pursue writing, eventually winning a story contest, and publishing it as an ebook to nationwide acclaim. So maybe fairy-tales do come true.

This is just a plain spoken, completely unsexy, wildly rational take on money. Becoming financially unbreakable, sticking to a program through market fluctuations, and considering it all in the proper time horizon. Folks should be reading this again and again as a patient reminder of keeping things in the proper perspective against the consumerist tendencies we're all soaking in daily. I think it'll hit different depending on where you are on your financial journey but it's well worth revisiting for some reassuring truths. A smart investment if ever there was one.

This is a trad wife manifesto railing against the godless liberals that dominate the entertainment ecosystem. It's about celebrating the pure sanctity of hetero marriage prevailing over Hollywood hedonism. Let's make America great again through ambitious procreation and relying on good old fashion American born labour, instead of foreign migrant workers. This may be set North of Richmond, but it's truly a harkening to the days of cherry trees, George Washington, and “I can't tell a lie.” This book bleeds red, white, and blue.

I mean.

This is a cozy, Covid-era story filled with warmth and love. The Nelson kids have all returned home during lockdown and are passing the time as the cherry harvest comes in. Their mother Lara indulges in some sun dappled reminiscing of a summer in 1988 down at Tom Lake when she is part of a young theatre troupe putting on a production of Our Town. It is there she first meets Peter Duke who would go on to massive Hollywood fame. Over the course of several days she will share her story, if only to convince her incredulous kids that there's no place she'd rather be than right here, picking cherries on the family farm.

Think of it as bi-partisan literary fiction. I loved it either way.

This is a gut punch of a novel that vividly explores a mother's grief and how it ripples outward across borders, reverberating across generations. The later chapters flip mid sentence, the present mingling with the past to probe at the compounding, echoing loss. An experimental work driven by the loss of the author's own child, it was almost too heavy to bear the first time.
I read it again, and the mounting body count of grief, the missing daughter trafficked or dead, the children left alone as their mother, unable to find her daughter flings herself off the cliffs, seen by a visiting woman who misscarries but refuses to give birth to the child and the recollections of cousins and best friends killed - it's a lot. Recounted here it seems almost ridiculous, but there is a plodding sameness to the passing of time, of moving forward that makes for a breathless read. This is an incredibly ambitious novel that's now stuck in my head.

Kazim Ali returns to Jenpeg Winnipeg to recall his typical Canadian childhood of full-body, zip-up snowsuits, tobogganing, x-country skiing, and slamming screen doors into multiple homes. He's not sure if he's coming back as a poet, journalist, ethnographer, scholar, or memoirist, or even if he can ultimately answer the underlying question of what does it mean to be from? What is it he thinks of when he thinks of home?

His father worked at Manitoba Hydro, building the hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River that brought his family to this tiny little outpost. But returning decades later he meets the local Pimicikamak community who have had to deal with the devastating ecological impact, and broken promises brought about by the dam. As Kazim is welcomed by the community, he learns about the long history of erasure — indigenous nations reduced to European style names, residential schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, physicians experimenting with Indigenous children, and restrictions on free passage and trade. Kazim begins to understand that his family as immigrants had more access to Canada than Indigenous people. Another interesting exploration of the project that is Canada.

Cyrus Shams is an unpublished poet, former alcoholic, and recovering drug addict pretending to have terminal illnesses to train doctors on their bedside manner. He's profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally, sad but comes off as a bit of an emo 20-something. As the story opens we find him lying on his mattress that smells like piss and Febreeze and dreaming of becoming a martyr.

Cyrus' mother was in a plane mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Navy, his uncle dressed as the angel of death to comfort dying soldiers in the field and now wrestles with PTSD, and his father made it to the US to see Cyrus off to college before dying himself. In New York to see an artist installation by a woman named Orkideh who, dying of breast cancer, sits in the museum and answers questions, Cyrus is immediately pegged by her as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man.”

Throw in some dream interludes where Lisa Simpson chats with his mother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes an appearance, one hell of a coincidence, and snippets of poetry and you've got a free-wheeling, debut novel with a poet's careful consideration of language that's still careening all over the place while riding a swelling wave of critical love. A messy, imperfect, but wonderfully ambitious outing.