Tess

I thought the concept of this book was really cool - the characters are duplicated with a four month gap and have an opportunity to make different choices - but the execution didn't work for me. The setup is way too long and the book is much more about the simulation theory than any of the characters. I never felt really connected to anyone and nothing interesting happened. Also the book within a book of The Anomaly sounded terrible.

This is a fun little sci-fi story about a boy processing his grief over his father's death with the help of a wild substitute teacher. I don't know what it was about it exactly but this book just didn't grab me the way I wanted it to. The characters felt like vague stereotypes and the plot does the job but could have been more. The whale descriptions were cool though.

There is a lot of good, valuable information in this book, but the lack of editing makes it a difficult read, both on the basic prose level (words and sentences repeated) and on the level of the information provided (misattributed quotation, mixing up fair and free trade, describing England as an Eastern European nation).

Heaven's Vault was one of my favourite games of the year when I played it back in 2019, and I bought the books mostly to support the devs since I find tie-ins to be pretty hit or miss.

I was surprised to find I enjoyed the book in its own right. It does roughly follow the story of the game, but is able to shine a light on different aspects. I really liked the descriptions of the physicality of sailing (this is not as apparent in the game since as the player you operate the ship from the outside) and the enriching of Aliya's history and POV. The character has a lot of rough edges and can be tough to get a handle on - I feel like I know her a different way after reading this.

It was interesting to see the character trying to solve the mystery on the page (there is a part where Aliya immediately jumps to a conclusion that I jumped to at that same point in the game, which was funny to me) and I liked reading her analyses of artifacts and attempts at translation. And of course, the banter between Aliya and Six is great.

I'm not sure how well it would hold up for someone who hasn't played a few loops in the game but I have and I'm really enjoying it.

This book was just really bad. Full of typos, weird homophobia, frankly astounding racism and a terrible plotline about framing a guy for rape as revenge. This story has no redeeming qualities, I would give it zero stars if I could.

Don't read this.

I really liked that sort of listless feeling of being in your twenties that this book evokes: you're an adult but still really learning what that means, you're having this new sort of adult to adult relationship to your parents, and I feel like that feeling was captured really well. I also loved the sense of place, and the nostalgia and love for a place that was changing.

Unfortunately I felt like the relationship stuff was overall really boring, especially right at the end. All that seemed like it came out of nowhere.

“But as long as they gave us medals, that fixed it, as far as the army was concerned. You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don't ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.” He made a flicking gesture with his fingers. “How else are you gonna have heroes?”

This was a really charming story about a teenage baker and her group of misfit friends joining forces to save their city. The writing is punchy and fun (Mona's bakery creations are fantastic) and the character's voice is great. I loved how she would constantly describe things in baking metaphors, and she had realistic fourteen-year-old reactions to what was going on around her. I liked that she was heroic but the story carried a message about how heroism basically requires the failure of all measures to prevent a crisis first.

I did notice a few editing errors (Uncle Albert became Uncle Earl in one scene for example) and I was kind of disappointed that in a story about how people shouldn't be judged based on stereotypes and rumours the Carex mercenaries were exactly the savages Mona thought they were. Aside from those complaints though I would definitely recommend this.

This book is a sci-fi domestic thriller that takes place over the Christmas holiday. The characters are fun and the mystery keeps you guessing, but a few parts dragged a bit and the ultimate “reveal” was underwhelming. No one's doing “good for her” in the indie space like Faith Gardner, though, and overall I had fun.

I think in the end, this book's biggest sin is that it's too long. I spent the whole thing kind of annoyed that nothing was happening and all the characters (and the extremely silly romance) seemed so stagnant, only to see all of the action and character development happen in the final 20%. There were some neat ideas here but I didn't really enjoy the read that much.

I liked the intergenerational family story and the different lenses each character looked through about the concept of race, but I was expecting this novel to be more directly about Africville than it was, so I was kind of disappointed. 

A lot of the writing is in a kind of detached style that sometimes made it hard to connect with the characters, and every depiction of a love affair was viscerally unpleasant.

Darkly absurd story about life under a totalitarian regime after a failed political revolution. The translation is breezy and readable despite the dark subject matter. Really liked this.

This is a book of poetry about being a Black gay man with HIV in America. Some of the poems were beautiful and had really clever use of language, but other than a few standouts I felt like a lot of them were very similar to each other.

I did not like this at all. The prose was miserable to read (it's a bunch of sentence fragments telling you what everyone is thinking all the time), the “revolutionary” character is like a cartoon villain and the twist is both deeply stupid and reinforces the class divisions the book is supposedly against.

This was a haunting story about family, exile and love. Overall I enjoyed it, but it bounced between different time periods so often that sometimes it was a bit hard to follow, and some of the language used was kind of awkward (though I'm not sure if this was due to the translation from French).

This was an informative read featuring the Combahee River Collective's statement, as well as interviews with women involved in its writing and a modern Black feminist talking about its influence on her politics.

This book was fine, but it didn't feel like it had a lot of depth. The essays felt a bit like blog posts and were a bit too “of course not all men” to me.

This was a sweet little middle grade novel about a girl trying to get out of square dancing in gym class because it threatens the straight-A grades she needs to maintain in order to meet her favourite baseball player. The author did a good job of making these sort of trivial situations feel like as big a deal as they would to 12-year-olds, and Lupe's relationships with her friends and family felt natural. It was nice to see a biracial protagonist, and both her Mexican and Chinese family play a role in the story. It does drag in the middle a bit and there's one major plot thread I thought was a little silly but overall I loved the ending.

The commitment to style and theme in this book was really admirable, with the inserts of coupons and order forms and performance evaluations. The inserts start out as kind of bland parodies and get more sinister as the story goes along. (A few of the kind of “double entendre” product names I found too silly for a story of this type though). The bland corporate speak and the wording of the evaluations (along with the explanations of “retail disorientation” that anyone who has ever visited an IKEA is familiar with) fit well with some of the horror related revelations later on. The characters are a bit flat and a few of them have to do exceedingly ridiculous things to help the story along (the situation with the handcuffs was so ludicrous it threw me out of the story and that was before much horror related had happened). The scares get a little bland in the middle but I loved the ending.

A timely piece right now for sure. A prince and his wealthy friends decide to party out a plague safe in isolation, and it ends about as well as you'd imagine.

This is a multi-pov novel set in Barbados in (aside from a few flashbacks) 1984 showcasing the explosive ways several people's disparate lives come together in one moment in time. 

This book left me a little conflicted. In a general technical sense, the writing is beautiful, particularly in the sections in second person, and while there was sort of a feeling of being somehow distanced from the characters I think that might be necessary to get through some of the story's tough subject matter.

I was expecting a heavy read but maybe not quite this heavy. The hopeful note at the end was nice but I was left wondering what I should be taking away aside from how difficult everyone's lives were.

Parts of this book were great. Little hints at how each characters' story overlapped make you feel like a genius figuring them out.

But overall I had to force myself to finish it. The one important female character hated every other woman she came across in a really annoying way, the stream of consciousness writing style was meandering and often felt pointless, all the slurs and CONSTANT talk about rape felt more like an attempt to shock than an attempt to really say anything.

So much of this book is taken up by the mom's navel-gazing liberal homophobia. Hard pass.

I thought the world this story was set in was fascinating: people leave fragments of their memories on everything they touch, which others can experience with various levels of sensitivity. One character is “normal” and gets impressions but can't usually relive memories from people she's not close to, one is extremely sensitive and can relive any memory she touches like it's her own, and one is completely immune to feeling memories this way at the cost of having no memories of his own.

The things this story has to say about the ways the world is connected and people in the west rely on the suffering of people overseas but don't want to think about it are really interesting - one character works in a factory where she removes the anguished memories of the people who built smartphones from the devices before they go to the American market. Another character is a forensic memory specialist who is in the process of sniffing out a faked memory as part of a court case, and the third is the titular cleaner, who cleans memories from objects in his workshop.

However the actual plot of the breakup and Clara visiting the cleaner isn't really all that interesting. I would love to see a longer work set in this world, though.

This was a little bit more of a straightforward adventure story than Archivist Wasp, and a little less surreal, but I loved the relationships between the characters and the ending had just that little bit of hope that I needed to feel happy about how it leaves things.

I think that this is absolutely an important topic that needs to be spoken about more in Canada and British Columbia (especially since the government is still only kind of implementing the proposed changes piecemeal) but I was expecting more from this book. I found the organization of it a bit confusing since it jumps back and forth in time a lot, and I was expecting a stronger stance taken in the book itself based on the title. The actual book is more of a list of facts than an essay making a statement, and some questionable statements about the RCMP (that one officer saying he doesn't see colour was particularly egregious) are just stated with no clarification or authorial opinion attached.