The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur My rating: 5 of 5 stars After reading June Hur’s The Silence of Bones last year, I was eager to see what her newest novel would bring. Hur has a way of embedding the reader into her setting that allows you to fully immerse yourself in the […]
The Doomsday Book of Fairy Tales by Emily Brewes My rating: 4 of 5 stars I want to confess that I’m having trouble reading anything dystopian these days because the truth is just too imaginable during the pandemic. I absolutely loved the setting of this book….something homegrown where I can imagine the PATH system in […]
The Witch’s Hand by Nathan Page My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m totally biased towards graphic novels and include a lot of them in collection development. This reads like a cross between Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Road to Riverdale Vol. 1 and Scooby-Doo! and the Haunted Castle. For a first in a series, […]
A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel My rating: 5 of 5 stars A revisionist historical fiction with a scifi twist…I’m worried about giving away spoilers before you’ve read it. Let’s just say that Sylvain Neuvel handles multiple time periods, and voices, with panache, in a way I’ve rarely seen before. At first […]
Just like Madonna, I’m reinventing myself again and taking a Graduate Certificate in Instructional Design through Royal Roads University. I’m in the last third of my teaching career but I don’t feel nearly done yet. At the same time I’ve been remote teaching since March 2020 and it just isn’t as satisfying as being face-to-face. […]
Becoming Leidah by Michelle Grierson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I waited so long to get my hands on this debut novel for the Nordic setting and it’s dip into mythology. It’s just a quiet little Norwegian fishing village …or is it? One of the local fishermen, Pieter, happens to catch a little something […]
Before reading texts this week, I glanced through Taste (Winter 2020) and noted my first impressions. Generally, I found that the layouts of articles in Taste magazinewere comfortingly similar to the Ontario LCBO magazine Food & Wine, which I have more experience with. Yet the layout within the articles “More For Your Pour” (pp. 12-13) and “Wine & Bonbons” […]
I met a builder from a vapid land, Who said — “I can oust those pillars of wood, Convert your cupboards to something less bland, Give you a new artisanal range hood. My amber hands spin drywall into gold, The steel sink of your dreams is within sight I’ll replace your floors with burnished vinyl, […]
My call to action: stop teaching chronologically.
This is the must-read book of the year and I can’t wait to teach with it.
Apocalypse Kitchen by Jen Mt. Pleasant My rating: 4 of 5 stars I can’t wait to try out the recipes! Jen has some whacky treasures of how to save and preserve food for an apocalypse. I particularly enjoyed the section on proteins. She also has a taste for spicier stuff than I usually go for. […]
I haven’t had such a big crying cathartic end to a book in a loooong time.
He Must Like You by Danielle Younge-Ullman My rating: 3 of 5 stars Caution spoilers ahead! I realize that last year’s Danielle Younge-Ullman book Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined was stellar….like I gave it 10 out of 10 and it was in my top 3 of the year. So I had high hopes for He […]
If I were you and I had just come out of this semester feeling like a squeaky wheel, rather than a finely tuned speed racer, I would want to get back up to speed in time for the new semester or even for the next step in your post-secondary pathway.
Rescue Me by Anne Shillolo My rating: 5 of 5 stars Shillolo manages to develop her 3 main characters really well in just 150 pages. Rescue Me is a great title for the ‘me’ refers to each of the narrating voices, and also the polar bears that they seek to save through their protest actions […]
threadbare beauty 