nomadreader

  A brief timeline of my relationship with Casey Duncan: Summer 2016: I keep reading and hearing about City of the Lost , the first in a new mystery series set in Canada featuring a woman named Casey Duncan. I should read that. It sounds really good. September 2016: Oh, right, City of the Lost . Let me check that out from the library. October 2016: [receives an early copy of A Darkness Absolute ] Wait, the second Casey Duncan novel comes out in February? I should really read City of the Lost. [reads City of the Lost. ] I should really write a review of City of the Lost  before I start A Darkness Absolute . [Decides the temptation to pick up A Darkness Absolute  is too strong.] [Reads A Darkness Absolute .] [Tells Mr. Nomadreader to buy  City of the Lost  for his mom's birthday.] I should write my review of A Darkness Absolute  even though it doesn't publish until February. March 2017: It's March already? Should I just wait until the t...

The backstory: The Bear,  Canadian author Claire Cameron's second novel, is on this year's Baileys Prize longlist . The basics: Based on the true story of a couple killed by a bear at a Canadian campsite in 1991, Claire Cameron re-imagines the story to include two young children camping with the children. My thoughts: I've never been camping, and I have no real desire to ever go. As I read this gripping novel, I asked my husband, "are there really people who take a five-year-old and an almost-three-year-old camping?" It sounds excruciating to me, but I was fascinated by the characters and story. Cameron smartly opens with a descriptive author's note identifying the real-life inspiration for this novel. The novel reads so real, I likely would have been researching its origins as I read if I didn't already know. Anna, the five-year-old daughter, narrates this story. Traditionally, child narrators are hit or miss for me. Aside from Room  ( my review )...

The backstory: Fugitive Pieces  won the Orange Prize in 1997. The basics:  My library catalog had a better summary than I could write: "It is the story of World War II as remembered and imagined by one of its survivors: a poet named Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child and smuggled out of Poland, first to a Greek island (where he will return as an adult), and later to Toronto. It is the story of how, over his lifetime, Jakob learns the power of language--to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell--as he comes to understand and experience what was lost to him and of what is possible for him to regain." My thoughts: Fugitive Pieces  is the tale of two reading experiences for me. While I was reading it, I was captivated by the language. It's clear Anne Michaels is a poet: "a place so empty it was not even haunted." (p. 61) I wrote down pages and pages of passages. I would mutter "wow," freq...

The backstory: The Sentimentalists, the first novel from Johanna Skibsrud, won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which recognizes excellence in Canadian fiction. The basics: In some ways, The Sentimentalists is a war novel. In other ways, it's a daughter's ode to her father. Ultimately, my inability to share basic plot details of a short novel is a testament to how much power Skibsrud packs into those 224 pages. My thoughts:  I read The Sentimentalists in one sitting, which is remarkable enough alone for me, but this single sitting is made more remarkable because I started it on a Sunday night at 11 p.m. when I got home from an exhausting night waiting tables and had to be at work at 9 a.m. Monday morning. I lost sleep for this one, and it was so worth it.  Skibsrud's writing grabbed me from the earliest pages:  "My father was a great reader and a great rememberer of things, though he never remembered anything in the right order, or entirely, and always ...