David Yoon

Despite the narrator also being a Muslim-American, son of Pakistani doctors, Pulitzer Prize-winning author named Ayad Akhtar, the author Ayad Akhtar is adamant that this is a novel not an autobiography. I get it. No doubt after the acclaim of his play Disgraced, Akhtar probably tired of being asked if he, like his character Amir, felt a blush of pride after the events of 9/11. Surely he must have been writing himself on the page. Best to leave yourself a little wiggle room for subsequent novels and avoid that altogether.

What Akhtar is doing is nothing short of an examination of our current reality in the midst of the Trumpian era. Rampant capitalism, the elimination of checks on private enterprise, the financialization of modern medicine, college as a customer experience, the stock market as an unregulated casino, the warping effect of massive wealth and the strange appeal of Donald Trump for so many unlikely folks. And somehow this sad parade of modern travails is wrapped in a story that is as edifying as it is entertaining.

It's a warts and all approach that includes some unflattering relationships with women and his clear seduction by fame and wealth. But all of it is in service to unveiling certain truths - to me it reads like a book from Malcolm Gladwell adapted for the stage. (I assure you the end result is immensely better than the prior sentence might have you believe.)

Despite being written prior to the pandemic it feels like the perfect encapsulation of that fraught time. The escape of affluent New Yorkers from the city to some wooded retreat to mitigate against the push of people in elevators and the subway. The think pieces and countless “Why I Left” essays that appeared constantly in the early days of lockdown. All of it mirrored by Amanda and Clay's retreat to a rental that promises to “leave the world behind” with their teenaged kids in tow. It's all sunny relaxation until the Washingtons arrive at their doorstep.

Surely this wasn't a home that black people owned thinks Amanda, that this was some con perpetrated by the cleaning staff to some nefarious end. Her liberal values completely overrun by previously hidden prejudices, fuelled by the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing. Sounds familiar. And the disaster, much like Covid, isn't clearly defined. Things are bad, we're just not exactly sure how bad.

So what do we do when the end of the world comes? Bake a cake, pour ourself another drink and go swimming. Or bake sourdough bread, adopt a pet and buy a Peloton. Either way it seems we just keep moving forward in uncertainty. So yeah, the book is all undercurrent and uneasy vibes that I can see being frustratingly vague - but that's a feature not a bug. The book feels all the more relevant with most of us having emerged from Covid. A pitch perfect Netflix adaption to boot.

16 year old Rye Dolan and his older brother Gig are a part of the cold millions, two orphans among the thousands of wandering labourers looking for work at the turn of the century. We find them in Spokane Washington, Gig's head filled with the righteous fire of the Industrial Workers of the World or the Wobblies. They're a labour movement looking to organize mine workers against corrupt employment agencies, the brutal tactics that steal their wages and the dangerous work they're subjected to. The Wobblies gathered in protest and hundreds were subsequently beaten and jailed in brutal, inhuman conditions.

It's slow going for the first half with countless character digressions and backstories. The book seems almost unwilling to set clear stakes and move forward but Walters is just setting the scene and building tensions across a slew of characters. It's when Rye is released from prison that things start to pick up steam. Freed on account of his age, Rye finds himself travelling with the “East Side Joan of Arc” the “she-dog of anarchy” a feisty union organizer and labor activist who happens to be 19, pregnant and very real. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was very much a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World and would go on to be a founding member of the ACLU.

We have a rich mining magnate, double-crossing agitators, thuggish police officers, a burlesque actress, and lots of murder and mayhem to close the book off. Rye is caught in the middle of all of it all but as Gig wrly notes; “We were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires, fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn't possibly swat us all.” Disinformation campaigns, the downtrodden working against their own better interests, moral compromises and the heavy gravitational pull of the wealthy sounds just as familiar a century ago as it is now. A great read but one I couldn't help but wish was a little tighter in the telling.

Deborah Smith again translates with florid language, evoking a surreal landscape where phrases echo word for word throughout the novel. Stories overlap and intersect. Episodes overlay each other as if written on diaphanous paper filling out and filling in the larger narrative as each page is laid on top of the other.

You have to be in the mood for this. It's so contemplatively weird, intent on pushing you off balance and messing with your equilibrium. A hazy fever dream in the liminal space between waking and sleep. Honestly, how many more cliches can I jot down here. I enjoyed the experience, I'm just ill equipped to really talk about it without resorting to all this folderol.

I struggled at the onset, feeling it important to situate myself in this new space, to know where I was in relation to the third Northern Hall and the Ninth Vestibule with flooding in the Lower Staircase. Like this was some physical zodiac with clues to something larger, a riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted. Surely all this points to some hidden Knowledge or greater mystery. I am the Other dismissing the rooms full of decaying figures covered in bird shit, mere scenery that obfuscates something truer. There are scattered letters, messages in chalk, words formed by pebbles and ideas transferred through the language of birds. To speak more to this puzzle box of a story is to spoil it.

I will say Susanna Clarke laboured through the writing of this while suffering debilitating chronic fatigue that trapped her at home, a situation not unlike what many of us found ourselves in this past year. Despite the confining situation, like Piranesi himself, there is still the opportunity to bear witness to the splendours of this world. Just lovely.

On the surface the Galvins were the picture perfect family. Mimi comes from upper-crust Texan wealth while Don, soon to become an Air Force Academy official, exudes confidence. They will grow their family until it encompassed 10 boys and 2 girls. But turmoil is a constant companion to the family. Six of the boys would eventually be diagnosed with schizophrenia bringing chaos, abuse, murder and lots of denial to the family. Honestly I'm still not sure whether Mimi Galvin was an absolute narcissistic monster or a tireless crusader hell bent on keeping the family together. It's a testament to Kolker's empathy that he can write this story where both are possible.

This is also a medical mystery - following the varied research and theories over the years. It's heartbreaking to see how advances are stymied by a lack of clear profit to be made. And to see how, even decades later, the illness still proves difficult to define.

For all the madness on display, the endless tragedies and erosion of normalcy, Kolker manages to pull hope from the mess, bookending the story with how the youngest takes on her mother's mantle and works to keep the family together. Years in the making, this is meticulously researched, pulling from extensive interviews with the entire family and the researchers looking to uncover the mysteries of this ill-understood disease.

Anna Tromedlov is a tiny cog in the villain gig economy. Henching means filling out the ancillary roles that make up a traditional bad guy roster. The camera crew that films the dramatic hostage situation, the IT resources hacking into the network feed, the getaway driver at the ready should things go south and Anna, behind the scenes crunching the numbers. But her latest gig drags her into the spotlight and she joins the line of Meat at the latest villain presser, a token diversity prop to better show off evolving bad guy allyship.

In typical hero fashion the uber-hero of the book, Supercollider arrives to save the day but leaves Anna with a shattered femur, incapacitated, jobless and probably never able to walk again without the aid of a cane. While recuperating she starts calculating the cost of heroes in the world and shares the numbers in her tiny blog The Injury Report. The thousands of hours of lost productivity, not just from the Meat horribly injured as the hero sweeps in to save the day but the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, the firefighters dying under the rubble of a collapsing building and the millions in property damage. The arrival of Supercollider is akin to a catastrophic earthquake and no less expensive. Heroes are just villains with better PR.

I could go on. What starts out as a clever examination of the hench ecosystem, the oft overlooked infrastructure of villain endeavours which could easily fill an entire novel swiftly morphs into superhero economics drawing on the real-world research of Ilan Noy and his examination of the “Disability Adjusted Lifeyears Measure of the Direct Impact of Natural Disasters”. All carried out by the wickedly snarky Anna and the sharp banter between her and June. But it's also such a perfect office novel once Anna finds herself at Leviathan HQ. Walschots nails the adrenaline and camaraderie of a functioning office in contrast to the psychotic disfunction built mostly on hype and ego of Anna's earlier experiences. Social media and its impact in this new reality is smartly deployed and we still get a classic good guy/bad guy showdown to boot.

This would make a perfect punk rock, alt superhero movie in contrast to the grim bluster of DC and the candy coloured optimism of Marvel. As it stands, it's a near perfect read that is a blistering fastball right down the centre of my own personal strike zone. Worth check out true believers.

I picked this up shortly after reading George Saunders Braindead Megaphone which features a chapter on the author approaching Slaughterhouse V as a young reader. The first reading confounded his expectations for a much lauded book on the Dresden bombing. Saunders finds himself faced with a man travelling through time, meeting aliens, living in an alien zoo ...and obliquely mentioning his time during WWII. There was no gravitas. No wounded, flinty author - changed by his witnessing the horrors of Dresden. Instead he finds that Vonnegut was funny. He wrote “in the vernacular”, like he was still just a regular person from the Midwest. He writes with humility.

As Vonnegut says in the book ““It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

There was little doubt that I was going to pick up this book given my love of Texas Hold'Em — but Maria Konnikova's latest isn't some poker guide to get you to the WSOP. It's part memoir, self-help guide and business read from an accomplished non-fiction author and regular contributor to the New Yorker who happens to hold a Ph.D. in psychology.

She will dedicate herself to mastering the game under the tutelage of Poker Hall of Famer Erik Seidel and a host of other poker luminaries. She will make the trek into New Jersey to camp at coffee shops to play online, building up to runs in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and Macau. But the hook, the reason you should read this even if you don't know what wins between Broadway and the nut flush, is it's all about poker as insight.

In poker, as in life, you are forced to make tough decisions armed with imperfect information. And to the careful observer, how we think through these problems hand by hand reveals a lot about your personality, your baggage, your biases, and more.

Erik Seidel early on gives Maria two critical words of advice: Pay Attention. Less certainty, more inquiry. Question everything, stay open minded and adjust as needed. Relevant on and off the felt, especially in this fraught and fearful moment. There are no perfect answers. It's about finding comfort in, and living with that uncertainty. And accepting that you can do everything right and still lose. That chance and fate are always lurking in the background ready to flush us down the river when we least expect it. I mean Maria was supposed to launch this book to coincide with her run at the 2020 World Series of Poker. A perfect marketing one-two punch that ran head first into a worldwide pandemic that had other plans.

You assess and readjust. No bad beats allowed. Good poker demands you shake it off, stay focused and continue to make strong decisions based on available information. Steer clear of superstition, notions of what you're due for, and staying blind to your own biases. Good poker play models effective behaviours in the real world. I'm all in.

A memoir about growing up in the sweltering heat of Trinidad, the island patois singing in my ear. Little does our narrator know that in the short time left to him there his beloved grandmother would be arming him with the tools he'd need to survive and flourish in this life - music and storytelling.

At 11 he finds himself in the frozen and completely foreign tundra of northern Canada in the care of a God-fearing, Aboriginal-aiding aunt, in what could barely be considered a hamlet. From that frigid introduction to Canada, Antonio Michael Downing would eventually find himself in my hometown of Kitchener Ontario.

Along the way he adopts a series of personas to better understand the world around him and his place in it from Tony to Mic Dainjah, Molasses to John Orpheus. These names both a refuge and an escape.

It's a raw and moving memoir about survival, starting over again and again and finding your own path through trauma.

Eternity Martis left the multicultural streets of Toronto to attend the mostly white Western University and encounters the usual litany of micro-aggressions and racially motivated hostility. A bi-racial woman by way of an absent Jamaican father and a Pakistani mother, she is still perceived by the world as black. Despite growing up on curry, keema and nihari she is still expected to weigh in on behalf of Black people when slavery is brought up in class, is tokenized by men looking to go black, calling her Ebony, Ma or Chocolate, looked to for a pass to say the n-word from friends, endure blackface Halloween costumes, repel constant hair-touching requests and even face numerous incidents of outright hostility and a very real threat of violence.

And hell, that would have been meaty enough for this debut memoir but the title tag mentions race, campus life and growing up. There is her candid and unflinching look at her time as a victim of intimate partner violence. How despite lecturing younger girls about dating violence and recognizing red flags she finds herself blind to those same warning signs. That even as her abuser moved on, she still found herself wanting to reach out and connect again. And then to making the same mistakes with subsequent boyfriends, once again missing the clear signals.

It's an examination of rape culture still prevalent at university, of waving off indiscretions with a “boys will be boys” and dismissing bad behaviour as just “being dumb”. The staggering figure that 1 in 5 women will experience some form of sexual assault while at university. That women under 25 experience the highest rate of sexual violence in Canada. That up to 50% of students across Canadian universities claim no one has ever educated them on how to report a sexual assault.

It's also about how friends can find themselves drifting apart as each seeks to find their own path. How your goals and vision of the future you dream for yourself can change as you progress through the years of post-secondary life. This isn't just a memoir, this is deeply personal, long-form reportage from the trenches of Canadian academia right now and an examination of university as a crucible for immense change and growth.

26 year old Margot Lee makes the trek from Seattle to see her mom in Los Angeles after she stops returning her calls. She discovers her dead in the apartment and begins to realize how little she really knows of her. Margot feels like a hand-waving chaos engine careening into a potential murder mystery, chasing down an elusive father, and uncovering family secrets. So basically K-drama in novel form.

This is contrasted as we hear Margot's mother's story. Mina Lee arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of ‘87 - utterly alone and bereft. She finds a job stocking the shelves at a supermarket and begins to find a measure of hope. Mina's story holds all the answers to the questions Margot suddenly finds herself asking, and maybe that makes for an unfair storytelling balance but I just wanted more of Mina's story. It's an Asian-American K-Drama - a specific difference I would have loved to have seen explored further.

It's another collection of stories shortlisted for the Giller Prize that seems an unlikely choice given the opening stories...

Distraught over the growing separation with his travelling girlfriend, guy organizes a Day Camp for tweens and falls for one of them. Followed by day drinking teacher cuckolded by his wife finds solace in “ample” coworker. Followed by grizzled cowboy in danger of losing his ranch screws rich paraplegic.

Do I really need to read about this sad parade of hand-wringing white guys?

But Bergen manages to nail the tone. There is this minor chord of entitled obliviousness that thrums in the background and the early cringey behaviour soon takes a darker turn with subsequent stories. Each unique and malevolent in their own way.

And then the titular novella about a Brethren girl questioning her faith and her place in the community. Coming to terms with her own feminist awakening and a stubborn refusal to merely submit to the ways of the patriarchal church. It feel like a stark turn from the previous stories and yet it's also faith, sex and being trapped within the narrow confines of our own histories but from a more traditional gendered lens.

Ok, maybe a bit of a stretch there - but nonetheless this collection is a polished effort with a high level of difficulty that Bergen manages to pull off.

This taut novella starts strong and blazes to a climactic finish pulling from a rich vein of Black History. Makes sense considering P. Djeli Clark is in fact Dexter Gabriel who holds a doctorate in History and teaches at the University of Connecticut. Like TV's Lovecraft Country or Watchmen, this tells a fantastical story grounded in recent history.

Our troupe of fighters features sharpshooter Sadie and her trusted Winchester, explosives expert Chef who served in WWI with the Harlem Hellfighters, and Maryse Boudreaux holder of a mystic sword that sings to the long dead and enslaved, to the chiefs and kings that sold these men to slavery, and ancient African gods.

They find themselves pitted against the clan, newly empowered by pale, pointy headed and powerful beasts with fearsome claws that appear to most as human. Known as Ku Kluxes they are a terrifying force to be reckoned with. And yet there are bigger dangers in store in the form of Butcher Clyde, a climactic showing of The Birth of a Nation and a faustian bargain.

It's a tight piece of work that builds a world, inhabits it with memorable characters, and gets the job done in under 200 pages. Not too shabby.

Maybe it just plays better in Korea with its BTS recommendation and possibly different norms around therapy. Here in the West being able to take part in therapy is more a point of class distinction, while social media has normalized the open and frank discussion around mental illness to the point people are falsely laying claim to neurodivergent traits for a strange sense of clout. Still there is the thrill of eavesdropping on a therapist / client conversation and, at least for me, repeated feelings of recognition. But then again the self-loathing, tendency to extremes, body dysmorphia, insecurity, and general melancholic malaise discussed here — well isn't that just the current resting state of just about everyone in our social media saturated world?

Maybe it can provide some sense of relief to those suffering from mild depression, or at least a sense of being seen. That is huge and I don't want to dismiss the value others may find. Maybe I'm oblivious, I'm the dog, drinking coffee, being engulfed in flames exclaiming “This is fine” but the book just didn't work for me.

As far as genres go, romance and fantasy bottom out my list of likely reads so it's not without a bit of surprise that I find how much I enjoyed this read, shortlisted for CBC Canada Reads.

For a Regency romance it deftly ratcheted up the mounting tension of a fantasy world where women's lives are still curtailed, their vast magical potential cut short for the sake of bearing children and raising a family. A constraint made real in the form of a warded collar locked into place that renders the world dull and flat.

Beatrice Clayborn will do anything to avoid that fate and pursue a life of higher magic. Instead she finds herself tasked with finding a suitable husband during the “bargaining season.” This is a chance to more firmly secure her foundering families fortune. Dress-fittings, lavish balls, parlour games and picnics fill her social calendar along with ardent potential suitors. Even with magic on her mind she can't help but be taken by the elegant Ianthe Lavan.

Will it be love or independence? Will she chose to damn her family to financial ruin, destroy her younger sister's future bargaining prospects, and sully the family reputation? Will she attempt the Great Bargaining spell that could lead to her death, the loss of her soul only for the promise of being a hidden family advisor?

Beatrice is being buffeted on all sides with no clear path to victory, only grim concessions. and the ticking clock of inevitability. Like any thriller or mystery, the genre itself imposes its own set of rules to the story and I enjoyed how C.L. Polk worked within those confines to create a lavish, indulgent read.

OK this one demands your attention. I was on top of everything during the first third when Matt Kim feels like he's disappearing. But I took my eye off the ball and slowly started to lose the thread. Is this about the invisibility of being an Asian-American male, the unmoored sentiment of being raised a Korean adoptee or maybe it's a multiverse imagining of what your life might have been if you were born and raised in Korea. That there is a you out there that hasn't had to wrestle with minor feelings, being sidelined and othered and has flourished as a result. Maybe?

I lost the thread and Matthew wasn't throwing me a line. Instead I'm left with this weird collection of malapropisms that are part literary dad joke, existential pun and Konglish mangling of Western idioms. Nothing to fear but fear myself and two can play at that shame now live inside my head rent free.

Millennials graduated in the midst of a recession. They entered the workforce against the constant background noise of boomers boasting of their own “git-r-done” bootstrapping mentality that elided any sort of acknowledgement of how different wages vs cost of living was for their generation. Millennials are a product of helicopter parenting styles fuelled by the notion of “raising resumes” and packed lives filled with extracurricular activities that might put a sheen on future college applications. That “college-at-any-cost” mentality has left many with crippling debt paired with an anxious workaholic mindset. Now they're just trying to eke out a semblance of a living in spite of the rise of contract workers, high paid consultants shaving jobs and wages, the gig economy, unchecked capitalism and, lest we forget, “waves hand” all this.

And still they're dismissed as the “laziest generation.” OK Boomer.

The problems here are not unique to Millennials - work HAS gotten shittier, social media has created a sense of pervasive FOMO while turning meals, vacations and experiences into self-conscious, curatorial labour. We're sold the idea of “if you just work hard enough” success will find you while burning ourselves down to tiny nubs. And it's nothing we haven't heard before from erudite think pieces to Twitter hot takes and an abundance of internet memes. And sadly there's not much in the way of solutions here - more a sense of solace in being seen while advocating for, in peak millennial fashion, vague political action.

While the book didn't knock me out, Anne Helen Petersen still has one of the best newsletters out there with Culture Study. She's weekly thinking through everything she touches on in the book as well as bro culture, getting meeting'ed to death, the mental load of being “the Mom” and the invisible work of families as everyone struggles with the new WFH reality (and that's just in the last month). If you were even slightly interested in what this book might have to say, do yourself a favour and subscribe to her newsletter.

This feels revelatory in how it approaches the topic of being trans. What could have easily been an overly earnest intro to trans-life primer with empowering story arc or, more likely, veered into overdone misery porn, instead feels like author Torrey Peters has long ago dismissed those tropes and is interested in something more. Indeed she has a history self-publishing novellas and offering up name-your-own-price pdfs. She's well past explaining her world to the rest of us and is instead looking to see what happens when, as she puts it, you put a trans woman into a bougie domestic social novel.

Simple premise. 35-year-old Reese, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, is one day contacted by her ex, formally Amy, now detransitioned to Ames, who has knocked up his boss Katrina, a Chinese-Jewish divorcee, and is offering up the novel idea of a three-way, co-parenting of the yet to be born child. Wild.

Along the way we're gifted a ton of insight. Sure some are in your face, theories too good not to share like the “Sex and the City Problem” wherein women are constrained to one of four paths embodied by the women on the show. “Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie.” The idea that divorce is itself a transition story, or the extended metaphor of rampaging juvenile elephants likened to a generation of trans women in the early 2010 who, without the guidance of an older generation otherwise decimated by HIV, poverty, suicide and repression, inevitably lashed out, ostracizing and punishing those around them.

But Peters is far more subtle about the ideas around performing gender and these were just eye-opening. Reese and her questionable choice in men, the idea of being subjugated, even abused reinforcing society's somewhat backwards notion of femaledom. How Ames can detransition into a man but still retains a bit a “slither” when he walks and while identifying as male doesn't know if he can quite handle the title of “father”. Even Katrina trying on “queer” with all the confrontational assertion and zealotry of a recent convert.

There's a lot to unpack but it's wrapped up in a compelling narrative that I blazed through. It's not written for me but therein lies much of its strength.

Zhu Chongba is destined for greatness with deeds that will bring a hundred generations of pride to the family name as foreseen by the local fortune teller. But when he dies his sister takes his name, determined to capture his fated greatness while escaping Heaven's notice. This Zhu Chongba soon finds herself at Wuhuang Monastery.

Zhu will stop at nothing to realize the greatness she is determined to steal for herself. She's no Mulan. Zhu is equal parts ingenious, ruthless, lucky, and entirely single-minded in her pursuit.

Her story shadows Ouyang, the castrated general serving the son of the man responsible for the death of his family and his own mutilated body. (It's a lot) The son, Lord Esen-Temur, is the leader of the Great Yuan's armies, a bit of a privlieged himbo, and completely devoted to Ouyang who is no less committed to his particular path.

Zhu and Ouyang will find themselves face to face time and time again, each pursuing their own private goals. I was just ready for some bloody 14th century political scheming, backstabbing and unbridled ambition in the waning years of the Yuan dynasty. Worthy of the hype it's getting here in Canada from our largest book retailer.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for nature writing. What we have here is a collection of essays using nature as a a springboard. Talk of peacocks, corpse flowers and fireflies are a useful jumping off point to discuss growing up a latchkey kid, reflecting on otherness and what love means. All with the thoughtful and reverent wonder of a poet. It is a deft exploration of our connected lives and how nature, when considered more closely, can frame our experiences without devolving into cloying bromides and crunchy platitudes.

Fumi Nakamura provides the accompanying illustrations that preface most of the stories — and while beautiful, they don't fully express the biting sharpness of her original artistic works that are certainly worth checking out.

This is hard sci-fi. I thought Andy Weir's The Martian was technical and grounded in reality but it reads like an Ikea assembly manual in comparison. This is hard in every sense of the word and I'd need another reading just to digest half of what's going on here. As a first contact story it's more terrifying than the crew on the Nostromo encountering Giger's alien. This thing screws with you on an entirely different level that is at once entirely indifferent and yet hyper aware. I'm butchering this, I feel like a 3rd grader trying to explain the Kama Sutra - I'm just not equipped.

Self awareness as a costly evolutionary hiccup that wasn't meant to happen. Vampires need to take anti-Euclidean drugs so they don't have grand-mal feedback seizures when faced with right angles. Saccadal glitches in human vision, alien hand syndrome and a robust complement of end notes grounding story ideas in cited research. If you want a hefty dose of philosophy and mind-fuckery in your book this is the thing for you. ...and it's available for free on the web.

It's a campus novel, Brandon Taylor's debut whipped up in just under 5 weeks - less created and more exhumed from his memories of being a young, gay, black man in a sciences PhD program at a midwestern university. An institute of higher learning, bastion of progressive politics, cherishing notions of inclusion and gesturing broadly to their own wokeness — that is also SUPER white. Like students sailing in their off hours white. And it's here under the crush of accumulating micro-aggressions, in a space that holds so much sway over you and your perceived notions of what your future can hold, that we find Wallace. Dismissed, made to feel small and unseen, and yet to give voice to that isn't an option. The evasions and justifications that flare into righteous indignation from white people when confronted make it easier to just shut down and move on.

All of this is happening in an academic space that Wallace has been working towards all his life but suddenly is feeling ambivalent about. What does it mean to have second thoughts when he's so close to finishing his PhD? What even is the world outside the walls of academia?

Of course this is only a glancing way into the novel but it's what stuck with me. Otherwise I admit I found it baggy, Taylor meandering around a burgeoning relationship, interpersonal drama amongst friends, and tennis. Wallace exists within this constant thrum of anxiety, a persistent discomfort that infuses every page expanding outward. Maybe it's the perfect manifestation of where he's at, an interstitial space seeking, but never quite finding, resolution. In that sense my frustrations could instead be read as recognition of how well Taylor captures the maddening inertia of academic life.

Good thing it's a trilogy, this feels like laying groundwork - a long, slow reveal. Atwood does a stellar job stringing it together and keeping it interesting but it feels like the payoff is still a few books off.

Apparently Atwood is not fond of the “science fiction” label for her work. Here we have science extrapolated. Genetic modification of animals, internet sensationalism, have and have-nots, environmental chaos and viral catastrophe. While ChickieNobs and deathrowlive.com may be a bit on the nose, I enjoyed the funhouse mirror look at the world that once was - I'm eager to see how the characters inhabit the world they've inherited.

The poor and disenfranchised made convenient scapegoats to larger political will otherwise ambivalent to people found on the fringes. Self interest and the slim chance of upward mobility are enough to turn a blind eye, to rationalize inaction. Tiny omissions, petty corruptions and the occasional lie - minor infractions easily justified even as their effects cascade. The press happy to fan the flames of scandal while politicians preen delivering vague promises to credulous constituents. And with this debut we're introduced to the tumultuous and completely foreign world of modern day India.

The book opens with a young Jivan posting an angry and pointed rebuke online after she is witness to a deadly train fire that kills hundreds of innocents. It is enough to have her arrested, a confession beaten out of her, and confined to a jail cell.

From there we are introduced to two individuals who might prove her salvation. There is Lovely, a hijra recognized as a third gender in India, an intersex and transgender people who are believed to have a special connection to god and get by in the community by offering blessings at births and weddings. Lovely knows the package Jivan was carrying wasn't a bomb but rather books she was bringing to help with the English she was regularly tutoring her in. We also meet PT Sir, a simple school teacher who remembers Jivan fondly for her athletic ability and sought to be her mentor, sneaking her extra food, knowing how poor her family was.

And yet their prospects seem to rise even as Jivan's falls. They will both have to decide what price their success. Is salvation possible for anyone? Thank goodness this is set a world away, the examination of self-justification and willful blindness in the face of injustice, of individual success regardless of a larger cost, or performative action and rampant opportunism might otherwise hit a little too close to home.