David Yoon

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.

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.

Let's get this off my chest right away - I thought this book was all over the place. It picks up threads only to discard them completely in the next chapter, lays out mysteries it will later explain away with a shrug, veers wildly through a growing cast of characters laying down narrative beats I must not be bright enough to fit into a cohesive whole and then, when you think you've got a handle on things, it goes supernatural?

And yet Mandel is still such a disarmingly great writer. She got a light touch that can draw on extensive research into international shipping and Ponzi schemes without completely derailing the story. And the beats she hits just sing. There's the notion of being pulled along in the wake of larger forces and the slow inevitable erosion of personal agency until it's all too late. How a single concession can assume mass over time is beautifully explored. And there is a character's slow descent into madness that is convincingly told both in its psychological causes and its clear manifestations.

Loved it a lot, longed for it be less lumpy.

Set in an orthodox Muslim village in Tamil Nadu the book tells the stories of several women. As girls they enjoyed brief glimpses of carefree abandon and sly subversion. As soon as they are married off as teens, the trajectory of their lives is completely at the mercy of their husbands.

Mehar has quietly had numerous abortions, her wildly misogynist and fiercely religious husband refuses contraception of any kind. She leaves with her two children when he decides to take a second wife. Mehar's daughter Sajida is caught between two warring parents, one perpetually miserable, the other intent on curtailing her dreams of becoming a doctor. Parveen is divorced and disgraced to hide her husband's impotence. Subaida is widowed when the man she is married off to at 14 is revealed as gay, prompting his death by suicide.

It is breathtaking how absolutely curtailed these women's lives are, how absolutely trapped not only by the hands of an abusive or disinterested spouse but by the very system that sees nothing wrong with marrying them off as children. Of a faith that empowers the men over their lives. Of a generational helplessness that feeds this cycle of misery.

I was invested in these women's stories but the constant wailing, weeping without end, cursing fate and lamenting their plight, the persistent sobs of hopelessness and the endless keening that seemed to finish every chapter became too much. Their cries became the background noise of the entire story and while it didn't obliterate my sympathies it did have me eager for the book to move on. It never does.

Translated from Bengali, the translation from Tilted Axis offers up a prologue on the idea of “niyoti” which is simply translated as fate in the novel. In India however it carries a lot more nuance. It is both the absence of agency but can also imply a state where the individual is merely under the illusion of being bound to their particular path.

So we find ourselves in Calcutta where we meet Homi, a hard-driving TV producer one year married to her equally successful husband, when she is approached by a ragged old yogi she perceives as her fate. Visible only to her, she finds in him a strange attraction and disgust. Homi then meets with a palmist and heeding his vague pronouncements nopes out of her middle class life surrounded by selfish climbers. It's fate! Or maybe it's a justification for abdicating from her mounting responsibilities.

We've even got a bit of a fairytale ending complete with a beneficent godmother courtesan. We leave Homi to choose whether to embrace her fate, or is she just f**king with it. Either way I enjoyed this modern day fable dripping with metaphor and a slightly hallucinogenic glaze.

Winner of Thailand's top literary honour and perhaps the first work of contemporary Thai literature to be translated into English in the 21st century from a then 20-something, multi-hyphenate sensation ...still a little lost on me.

Honestly the best review of this short story collection may in fact be from one of the characters in this short story collection. The sullen Marut from Marut by the Sea rails against the author Prabda Yoon and his penchant for “the type of bizarre story which he makes end so cryptically, as though the harder it is to understand, the better.”

I've often been stymied by translated short story collections and maybe it's the sheer density of symbols, hints and nods packed into every paragraph. In English you can infer all the codes buried in the specific choice of words, the allusions to common tropes or fairy tales, expectations subverted, the significance of a plastic bag floating in the air. Without that cultural knowledge it just gets harder with this collection to understand the choice of adopting overtly formal language when a couple discovers a body, or the relevance of exceptional large line spacing.

Marut warns us from trying too hard to decipher it all. “If you try asking Sir Yoon what the meaning of each of his stories is, believe me, he'd chuckle deviously, heh heh, before answering, ‘Why don't you try asking the stories themselves?' ...listening to that makes me want to strangle him until his eyes pop out of their sockets.” I feel you Marut.

“The words merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”

The book is rich with these perfect digressions and Patricia Lockwood gets a ton of leeway for writing the absolutely fantastic Priestdaddy ...but this reads like an advanced AI was fed Twitter posts and Reddit memes and forced to regurgitate a tragicomic novel.

Lockwood is a Grand Master Twitter user and there is no shortage of fragmentary emissions here that will elicit an ahahahahaha! (the newer, funnier way to laugh - don't ask me about sneazing) But you still have to read this like a novel and not the endless doom-scrolling consumption the internet invites. And I think that's what broke me.

Besides, it's hard to keep up with the online easter eggs. While some memes like the “this is fine” dog can reach ubiquitous status so that even the normies on Facebook are gleefully reposting it as a reaction to the last year, most bits of online ephemera never rise above their brief, blazing week of relevance. We're all ants now? Big Hero 6 suddenly relevant? What's up with Ocean Spray Cranberry juice or Gorilla Glue? Is everyone eating ass now?

And just as Twitter can foster an endless stream of hot takes, irreverent shit-posts and ironic trolling it can just as quickly offer up flashes of sincerity and heart. Here too the book switches gears in the second half when the protagonist's sister's baby is diagnosed with Proteus syndrome - mirroring Lockwood's neice's condition that would ultimately take her life at 6 months of age.

Lockwood is momentarily seized with doubt “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?” The endless scroll turns stream of consciousness and you remember that before she was writing enigmatic tweets like “can a dog be twins” Lockwood was a poet and memoirist of the highest order. The book didn't fire on all cylinders for me but I will still pick up anything she writes.

7 year old Nainoa Flores is gently carried back to the boat he has fallen from in the teeth of a shark. The shark holding him as if made from glass, like he was its child, head up out of the water like a dog. Later Noa will heal a boy's hand torn apart from a firework mishap.

There is magic at work here, the old gods of the island working through this golden boy. But Washburn can't let the story tumble along without dropping ominous portents, foreshadowing some grim future. Meanwhile Noa's two siblings, who interchange chapters tell their story. Of being eclipsed by their brother, or worse being plied for information about how he's doing. How it feels like they are being muscled out of the spotlight of their parents affections and how it sits like a heavy weight with them both. It's this dark cloud rumbling ever present in the distance and it hangs heavy over the story. And then it really starts to pour.

I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize I was reading an indigenous story, of the generational trauma of the colonized. How it breaks them and calls them home all the same. But man, just out of the teeth of winter and this was such a grey tale that just sat hard and heavy on the heart.

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.)

Jonny Appleseed is a two-sprit, full-metal indigiqueer, NDN glitter princess who leaves the Rez to make his way in the ‘peg hustling as a cybersex worker. He's getting men off online, whether they're closeted and curious, or nourishing some connection to idealized Native sensibilities and the spiritual connection they believe Indigenous people have to the land, or simply want to explore some Village People Indian fetish, Jonny deals with them all. Even more so now as he tries to make enough money to return to the Rez to support his mother after the death of his stepfather.

Jonny discovers his sexuality watching Queer as Folk at 8 years of age. But that sort of gay seemed awfully white, evoking a certain class and body type. Even queer is tied to colonialism, queer rights and Stonewall while two-spirit can trace its arc back to the indigenous people inhabiting the land for generations before. But it doesn't make it any easier for Jonny on the rez. And yet there are glimmers of tenderness, his childhood friend Tias and their love weaving in and out of their lives.

Congratulations to indie Arsenal Pulp Press for having two of their books in the showdown to the Canada Reads 2021 final and congratulations to Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed for taking home the prize this year!

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 could tell you the plot, about 13 year old Jojo and her 3 year old sister Kayla accompanying their indifferent and often high mother Leonie to Parchman Penitentiary to pick up their father Michael from jail. About his racist (white) parents as well as Leonie's folks, her mother wasting away from cancer and her father, whom Jojo idolizes, still working the little patch of land in Bois Sauvage on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her brother Given. Yes haunted as in Given shows up silently whenever she gets high. Jojo picks up his own ghost at the prison. Richie we find has a tragic history with Jojo's grandfather. Maybe it's a story of generational trauma, of the low thrum of lingering pain paired with the keen awareness of black bodies dead and discarded by a white system.

Maybe, but what is certain is the pure poetic song of Jesmyn Ward's writing that is just gorgeous. Honeyed words burnishing a horrific history. Another incredible read.

It's another in a growing work of literary nature writing that I find I'm a sucker for. From The Overstory to Greenwood it's the personal entwined with the natural world and Lee, as an environmental historian, is uniquely poised to tackle this growing genre.

It is the history of Taiwan, a relatively young island at a spry 6-9 million years and barely 90 miles wide, variously occupied by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. It is the home to thousands of endemic species specific to the island, plants that have yet to be found anywhere else. And here in this lush, damp greenery Lee explores her past after the death of her grandfather. He a pilot with the Flying Tigers during WWII who came to Canada and worked as a janitor at the Chef Boyardee factory in Niagara. Her grandmother from Nanjing who lived through the horrors inflicted there by the Japanese.

The stories never fully cohered for me. While it's a mere sliver of an island and she was never more than an hour or two away from where her grandparents lived, it felt as if she was climbing the Rockies while limply gesturing to her family's past in rural Saskatchewan. I enjoyed the nature writing but I shouldn't want less of her grandparent's history when their lives seem so ripe for storytelling.

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.

We've seen this story before - a young child with a tragic condition armed with a buoyant outlook on life, sprinkled with a preternaturally wise sense of the world. It's Wonder's Auggie Pullman or more recently (and Korean) Almond's Yunjae.

Here we have Areum. Diagnosed with progeria, Areum ages at an accelerated rate so at sixteen he's inhabiting the body of an 80 year old teetering on the brink of death. His parents, pregnant at 16, find themselves barely over 30 and faced with mounting hospital fees and the unavoidable certainty of their child's imminent death.

Areum is determined to write his own story and reconstruct the life of his parents meeting and having him. His tale also includes a quirky 60 year old neighbour and best friend, an inspiring TV spot and a secret admirer and Areum's parents just trying to do the best they can. The whole plot is almost its own genre and the story hits the expected beats with a few twists delivering just the right dose of heartwarming and hopeful without veering too far into misery and mawkishness. All you can hope for really.

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.

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.

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Korean translator Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony didn't cohere for me. The Orphan Series is a devastating account of the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre and Ahn Hak-Sop's testimony from his home in the Civilian Control Zone on the South Korean side of the DMZ is nothing short of harrowing. But then the poetic tricks of Mirror Words and whatever is happening in The Apparatus is just lost to me. The literary journals I seek out to decipher the words on the page only frustrate me more, drenched in oblique language, literary folderol and referencing an artistic tradition I'm unfamiliar with. It's like I'm missing the key that brings it all into focus, the rosetta stone that brings the language into clear focus. I don't doubt it's art - but it flew well past me.

This was 20 years in the making after inspiration struck peering into an actual Clyde Fans shop window in downtown Toronto. There past the dusty desks, rotary phones and old fans were the black and white photographs of two middle aged men looking back at author Seth. And here the rich imaginings of their lives.

It can feel at once like the limp whining of white privilege, the benefactors of generational wealth reminiscing about how it used to be, veering dangerously close to every bigoted uncle holding court at Thanksgiving or otherwise spewing nonsense on Facebook. Simon, after a disastrous attempt at sales in the field, is able to retreat back to the family home and bide his time collecting vintage postcards and conversing with his collection of mildly racist knick-knacks. His brother Abe opens the book, monologuing like a Southern Ontario Willy Loman for a good 70 pages.

But it is a story of the death of mid-century capitalism and locality as well. About our industrious town, and many like it, of meat-packers, tire manufacturing and parts factories. The days of raising a family, buying a home, sending the kids to school while socking money for retirement thanks to these jobs on the line have long disappeared. Now we're home to code jockeys, scrum masters and agile sprints. The small shops handed down for generations have slowly disappeared as sales move to big box stores sitting on acres of property and online retailers with next day delivery. Something has been lost as a result.

Maybe this recognition comes from my own middle age - I recognize the factories rendered here on the page and how, even laying empty when I was a child, still managed to invoke something. It's that melancholic remembering of things, the ineffable dream that can be weaponized as a call to wanting to be Great Again but just as much a nostalgia for a strong middle class and community that didn't hide behind mouse clicks and refreshed browser screens.

I admit I flipped through the first few pages at the bookstore and noped it right back on the shelf. I've little knowledge of the Cultural Revolution and it seemed a far cry from the expansive sci-fi promised on the cover. But Ye Wenjie witnessing the death of her father in these opening chapters informs her motivations going forward as she becomes an astrophysicist who makes first contact.

I've never really examined my pollyanna notions of first contact, informed by Zefram Cochrane and his contact with the Vulcans in Star Trek lore. Rationally it would be more akin to colonizers landing in the new world spreading small pox, religious indoctrination and mass genocide - Earth, just another world ripe for plunder. And of course there would some among us hungry for this alien annihilation believing it a punishment we so rightly deserve.

And then there's the alien Trisolarans who, understanding that an invasion will take 400 years, can admit that our current explosive technological progress might quickly outpace their alien knowledge in the ensuring centuries. That something must be done. That they must kill our science.

I'm giddy with the slow burn of first contact and the ideas explored here. This is hard-sci-fi that still manages to be absolutely wild with a wonderful translation by Ken Liu.

I loved this read. The island patois of Trinidad quickly becomes familiar and intimate, it feels as if this story could be told in no other way. It's been awhile since I felt so much love for a collection of literary characters and was as devastated by their various trials. Betty Ramdin, newly a single parent after the death of her abusive husband, her son Solo finding his way in the world and Mr. Chetan, the boarder who enters into a platonic partnership with Betty to raise and give a home to Solo.

Persaud excavates a rich mine of feeling here without dissolving into soap opera parody despite wild emotional climaxes. To distill this plot into its individual beats you could be excused for dismissing it as a juicy telenovela but there is so much here at its heart. There is the struggle against loneliness, bigotry, prejudice and our past mistakes while forging a path forward against it all. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Love After Love (from the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Alexander Paine Wilson is a pompous, hypocritical, super closeted dick. Coincidentally he's the Republican incumbent in the first congressional district in Virginia against the pantsuit wearing Nancy Beavers. He's a Ronald Reagan superfan, low key bigot, unconscious misogynist and a conspicuous consumer who knows exactly how much his Kohler vibrant Brushed Bronze WaterTile Ambient Rain Shower or ten-layered, California King–sized Kluft Palais Royale mattress costs - because of course.

And so it's not for nothing how delightful it is to see everything go monstrously wrong with the arrival on one stuffed aardvark whose provenance can be traced back to a richly moustachioed zoological naturalist, Sir Richard Ostlet of the Victorian Era. He has sent the recently captured aardvark to his taxidermist acquaintance, and sometimes secret lover, Titus Downing who makes up the other half of the book.

And of course it's almost painfully quaint to think an aardvark owned by some very fine people could render one so low given the cavalcade of crime on persistent display in the news from withholding military aid, insider trading, armed insurrection and jaw-dropping levels of credulity. But still, it feels like Jessica Anthony is having fun, revelling in words, poking in quaint digressions and, to top it all off, writing in the second person no less - so she gets my hearty vote.

This is so punk rock. While I finish another Asian-American novel wrestling with notions of identity, navigating micro-aggressions and the weighty calculus of being a “model minority” I get to follow it up with this debut from queer Korean-American Jean Kyoung Frazier. Her Korean-American protagonist Pizza Girl is 18 and pregnant. She's not wringing her hands about what it means to be bi-racial and raise a child who will technically be more white than Korean, or worrying about how her dopey white boyfriend and her Korean mother will get along (great actually). Instead she's a bit on the brink and actively trying to blow up her own life. She's sneaking off to her dead father's shed in the middle of the night to drink beers and watch infomercials. She's working pizza delivery and has maybe developed a bit of a crush on a middle-aged suburban mom who requested pickles on her pizza to placate her 7-year old son. It's an L.A. slacker novel that happens to revolve around a queer Korean-American girl I didn't know I wanted. While other writers are thanking George Saunders and Uma Thurman, Frazier is shouting out Tallboy who tackled the California neon cover based on a pizza shirt he designed that she owns. Frazier's just out here living her best life and I'm here for it.

Alicia Berenson is convicted of brutally murdering her fashion photographer husband. She is rendered complete mute when she is discovered next to the body of Gabriel who has been shot 5 times in the face. Silent throughout her trial she eventually finds herself remanded to a secure psychiatric unit called the Grove. This is where criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber, determined to help, finds her.

I don't read a lot of thriller but enough that I like to play along. The written form has proven immensely malleable and has given us some inventive takes in the genre. Here, Michaelides gives us an abundance of red herrings, more than a handful of likely suspects with plausible motives, (seriously, Alicia needs to find a better class of friends and acquaintances) some diary entries, and references to the tragedy of Alcestis from the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. You know with the economy of characters someone here is not what they seem and it's fun fitting different theories to the story as it progresses. This left me guessing til the very end and having a page-turning blast along the way.

In a just world the more recognized and lauded professor to emerge from the academic halls of the University of Toronto would be their professor of Philosophy, Mark Kingwell. He's been writing rigorous and thoughtful books for years, here tackling the notions of risk, especially pertinent during the pandemic dumpster fire of 2020.

Kingwell argues that we are just incredibly bad at assessing our own interests and misreading the baseline facts, distracted by an affinity for narrative construction instead of rigorously assessing available data. Add to that a tragic combination of behaviours fuelled by risk aversion (self-isolation) and risk tolerance (sending kids back to school) and we see the growth of meta-level risks that can create net negative results. These tend to congregate around different populations since, while theoretically neutral, risk is still unequally distributed.

So you see Kingwell is clearly a thoughtful writer thinking through available data and presenting it in all its complicated and nuanced glory. It's not easy reading and is inflected with philosophical tones that can sometimes be a challenge to parse as we have an affinity for narrative construction as he puts it.

And so the world betters knows of the University of Toronto's professor of psychology, Jordan Petersen instead. Throngs understand his brand of reactionary politics and polemical stance against the looming threat of social justice warriors, political correctness and, somehow, his perceived threat of incarceration for refusing to use transgender pronouns. He espouses easy bromides like “Clean your room” to rabid fans that are groomed to want easy soundbites and fist shaking diatribes.

None of that here, just the clear-eyed, if densely worded examination of risk and where we might seek answers. It's worth the effort and you'll feel less dirty after reading.