Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea

Sripathi Rao has made a lot of mistakes in his life but he doesn’t apologize for them. He has a lot of problems but he doesn’t see why he should make any changes because of them. His mother chastises him for never living up to her dream of seeing him become a doctor. His sister is unmarried and well past the average marrying age but that doesn’t stop their mother from scaring off any suitors. His son Arun is involved in political activism but Sripathi thinks he is just lazy. And his daughter Maya is, to Sripathi, the biggest problem of them all. When Maya broke off her arranged engagement to marry a White Canadian man, Sripathi cut her off completely. He and his wife Nirmala never attended the wedding, never saw Maya again, and never met their granddaughter Nandana.  But Maya and her husband have been killed in a car accident and Sripathi is seven-year-old Nandana’s only kin. He has to travel to Canada to bring his granddaughter home to their small city of Toturpuram, In...

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond very few can understand. Orphaned as teenagers, they were left in the care of their Sikh uncle who ran a bagel shop in a Hasidic community in Montreal. Their Uncle didn’t want much to do with them so they were left to raise themselves. But the deaths of their parents led the girls in two very different directions. Beena caught the attention of one of the boys who worked in her Uncle’s bagel shop. When she became pregnant at the age of sixteen, he took off leaving her to raise her son on her own. Sadhana was driven to achieve perfection and in doing so spent the rest of her life battling anorexia. Now, Sadhana has died suddenly, her body was left undiscovered for a week. Beena is hurting because she had stopped speaking to her sister only days earlier. She is feeling guilty because if they hadn’t had an argument, if she hadn’t cut her out of her life, then maybe things would have ended differently. As Beena and her son Quinn head...

Bernice Meetoos, aka Birdie, is a Cree woman who has left her home in Northern Alberta and travelled to Gibsons, BC. There, she hopes to find and meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, partly because of a teenage crush and partly because he is a working, healthy Indian man.   In Gibsons, she ends up meeting Lola, a white woman who gives her a place to stay and a job in her bakery.  But it is also here that her past catches up to her.  When she doesn’t find what she is looking for her on her travels, she has a breakdown and takes to her bed. Her Auntie Val and her cousin, Skinny Freda, soon arrive in Gibsons to take care of Birdie, as she embarks on a quest that will change her life forever. Birdie , by Tracey Lindberg, is an incredible novel about confronting and healing from your past.  Steeped in Cree lore and traditions, this novel touches on the life faced by Aboriginal woman in Canada and on the experiences all women face. I ha...

Keita Ali has been running all of his life.  Hailing from Zantoroland, an island in the Indian Ocean that produces some of the fastest runners in the world, he is a rising star in his homeland with the chance to travel the world competing in the biggest marathons.  But the political instability of his country makes it a dangerous place to live and after his father, a journalist, is killed, Keita knows that he must escape.   While running a marathon in a neighbouring country, Keita goes into hiding.  He heads to AfricTown, a community in the wealthy Freedom State where many other refugees before him have sought shelter.  But the government of Freedom State is determined to deport the refugees, and will go to great, clandestine, and terrible  lengths to do so.  And Keita isn’t just running for his own life anymore, he’s running to save the life of his sister who is in trouble back in Zantoroland.  He needs to win money from races to secure ...

Tom and Charlie are two men who have decided to live out the last years of their lives on their own in a remote forest in Northern Ontario.  Their only contact with the outside world are the men who grow marijuana on their land and bring them supplies.  But all of this changes with the arrival of two women. A young photographer comes first.  She is looking for one of the last known survivors of the catastrophic fires that swept the area almost a century earlier.  This man, Ted, used to live with Tom and Charlie but is recently deceased.  The second arrival is the elderly aunt of one of the men who brings them their deliveries.  The woman who wants to be known as Marie-Desneige, has been living in a psychiatric institution since the age of sixteen.  After the four of them come across what Ted has left behind, a magnificent series of paintings about the fires, they put together the history of the man and the region.  And as they do so, th...

What does it mean to be “Indian” in North America?  This is the question that Thomas King looks at it in his book The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America .  Serious and funny, history and anecdote, this is a timely and important book that will open readers eyes to the narrative of the history of the continent. The relationship between Natives and non-Natives has been going on for centuries and the entire time has been fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings.  There is a lot that the history books have either misinformed or omitted completely when it comes to the history of Native peoples in North America.  And this has led to a complete lack of understanding in our present day lives.  To counter this, King takes a look at historical events and figures, politics and pop culture, to create an account that isn’t easy, but must be read. The history of the First Nations people in North America is longer and rich...

Who Should Read This:   Someone looking for a young LGBT voice in literature. Sometimes life is just like the movies.  In the case of Jude Rothesay, sometimes it’s better to imagine that life is a movie rather than deal with the reality of it.   Jude is a gay teenager, something that doesn’t go over well in his small-town, especially at school.  He celebrates who he is but others around him don’t, and this results in horrific bullying both at school and home.  Along with his best friend Angela, he remains an outcast.  But Jude knows that he is destined for fame, he just needs to get to Hollywood.  Until that day comes, he lives his life as though he’s already there, even if the public can’t see what makes him so special. When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid is a young adult novel that takes on the very adult issues many young people are facing today. There is a lot to be said about this book and I don’t even know how...

Who Should Read This:   Anyone interested in the history and culture of the Middle East. Anyone wanting to know about LGBT life in Middle Eastern culture. Kamal Al-Solaylee was born into a wealth family in Aden, in the South of Yemen, in the 1960’s.  Though his mother was illiterate and married at an early age, his father had spent time in England and relied upon Western values as he crafted a career as a property owner.  But as his country began to move away from its colonial roots, the family found themselves on the losing end, all of their property confiscated, and forced to leave the country. They first moved to Beirut, but it quickly became a dangerous place to stay so the family then moved to Cairo.  There they were able to enjoy the lifestyle they valued so much, one that placed importance on education and freedom.  Kamal and his siblings grew up in a very cosmopolitan world, listening to American music, frequenting the cinema, and watchi...

Snow Falls, a young Iroquois girl, has witnessed the brutal murder of her family at the hands of a Huron warrior.  That warrior, Bird, sees in her the ghost of his murdered daughter and recognizes the special powers that Snow Falls possesses so he kidnaps her to take on the rest of his journey.  One member of Bird's group is Christophe, a Jesuit missionary who has devoted himself to learning the language and culture of the Huron in the hopes that he can bring them to Christ. Bird's tribe have long been at war with other tribes but now they are facing a bigger threat, one that comes from overseas.  As we follow Snow Falls, Bird, and Christophe, we see a people desperately trying to hold on to their way of life and a people trying to lead them to a new life.  As these two worlds collide, life changes dramatically for everyone. The Orenda is Joseph Boyden's incredible new novel that looks at the beginnings of our country and takes readers on an incredi...

Henry Hayward's life has come to a dead end.  His girlfriend has left him, his work is uninspiring, and he has nothing to call his own.  When an opportunity comes up to go to Afghanistan as an army-affiliated contractor, he sees it as a chance to get over his heartbreak and jumps at it.  But one day, while on routine patrol, everything changes for Henry.  A roadside attack takes the life of his friend Tender Morris.  When Henry returns home to Newfoundland, he is tormented by the guilt that he is responsible for Tender's death.   Back at home, Henry takes it upon himself to care for the people and places that were important to Tender.  Henry buys and begins to rebuild Tender's summer home.  And soon, he begins to care for Martha, Tender's pregnant girlfriend.  But what he isn't prepared for is Tender's family history and the trials that small-town life can bring. Minister Without Portfolio by Michael Winter is an honest and insig...

In Vietnamese, the word "ru" means lullaby.  In French, it means small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, or money.  In Kim Thuy's book Ru , it symbolizes the flow of life across waters, in the form of a beautiful lullaby. The book follows a young woman on a journey from a well to do life in Saigon to a Malaysian refugee camp and then on to a new life in Quebec.  As she adapts to her new life, the American Dream life, she is thrown a curve as she must learn to love in a new way with her autistic son. Each page of this beautifully written book is its own heartfelt memory.  Kim Thuy draws on the memories of her own life in short, emotional clips, jumping back and forth between time and place to paint the bigger picture.  This isn't a book that builds a story from beginning to end or that takes the time to develop characters and give them back stories.   This is a short novel that weaves pieces together to create a life. It wa...

In 1940, war had spread throughout Europe. In Paris, a brilliant young jazz musician named Hiero was arrested by the Nazis. He was a German citizen and Black. Hiero was never heard from again. Fifty years later his friend and fellow musician Sid, who was there the night he was arrested, is at the premiere of a documentary chronicling Hiero's life. The film spurs Sid to relive their time together, a time of brilliant music and culture but also of trouble, racism and war. Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan is an engaging, stunning and original novel set in a time that continues to haunt our world. It is a unique story to emerge from the time period of World War two, giving a voice to to the many stateless people who were lost during that time. What makes this story so gripping is the way it is woven with the beauty and soul of the jazz scene the time. The narrative is in an incredible language of the time, a sort of German-American slang, peppered with jazz and ...

In the near future, the world is run by corporations with names like HelthWyzer, ReJoove and SeksMart. Order is kept by the corrupt police force known as CorpSeCorps. Many of the animals we know now are extinct and the world is inhabited by new genetically engineered species such as Rakunks, Liobams and Mo'Hair sheep. Social and environmental stability are nearing an end. Inhabiting this world, apart from mainstream society, is an eco-cult named God's Gardeners. Their beliefs combine religion and science, dedicating themselves to the preservation of plant and animal life. Their leader, Adam One, has long been predicting a natural disaster that will forever change life on earth. And now, it has occurred. The Waterless Flood has wiped out most of human life on earth. But two women have survived. Ren and Toby are both God's Gardeners. As they search for other survivors, they navigate through a changed world and begin a new life as a part of a new human race. ...