I’ve just closed the pages on the fourth CanLit book I read recently and it’s left me with a book hangover. Certainly. Most of these books left me with a bit of a hangover to be honest, they were really great reads. Which is exactly what I was hoping for and my thinking of in hopes it would help give a sharp reset to my reading. I felt I was flailing and that my reading was giving more setbacks then enjoyment. It just turned out that I reached for Canadian authors and found my enjoyment in reading returned to me.

The first I grabbed was Lesley Crewe’s A Recipe for a Good Life. I read this towards the end of April. This is the time where I was becoming deeply frustrated with the books I was reading, and felt I was floundering and stopping and starting more books than sticking with them. Nothing was feeling right, or they ended up being just “okay” books. I was desperate for something to pull me out of this slump. Lesley Crewe has always been successful for me in that regard. So I quickly downloaded A Recipe for a Good Life. Once again I was treated to characters that were difficult to leave behind, I had become so invested in them and so enjoyed my time with them. This is a story of one woman finding her agency on her own terms – finding her recipe for her good life. What I loved about this one was the ending, because it was one where Kitty’s life wasn’t wrapped up in a neat little bow with a typical ending, or an ending most would expect for her. Instead, she did what she felt was right for her and how she wanted to live her life. I was very pleased with how Crewe wrote the ending to Kitty’s story. (4 stars)
If you’re ever stuck trying to find something to read, I highly recommend reaching for anything written by Lesley Crewe. Every single one of her books has been a gem for me.

Next was Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier. This was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and it looked to be one of the only ones I really wanted to read from that list. After reading, I frequently said I hoped to see this beautiful piece of literary fiction on the Shortlist. Wasn’t this what these prizes are about? It was shortlisted but it didn’t take the prize. Hopefully though, seeing it on the shortlist will draw more attention to this lovely story. It is uniquely told too as sometimes the author inserts herself into it. Pale Shadows is a beautiful love letter to Emily Dickinson and is translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins. Truly this was an exquisitely written story with sentences so beautiful, so filled with meaning and emotion they left you stopping for a moment to go back and re-read them. I had to re-read them just so I was able to sit with them in their beauty for longer before moving on. While it was this love story to Dickinson and how the women closest to her life brought her poems to the public, I cannot say enough that it was an exceptionally beautiful look at grief as well. Emily’s sister and sister-in-law are stunned in their grief at the loss of Emily. The moments where her sister would wander around the house lost in her grief were so beautiful to read. To repeat myself, it was an exquisite exploration of grief as well as a lovely love letter to Emily Dickinson. (4 stars)

The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson and the next book below were books I went to my shelves in search of, purposely seeking books that were published long ago and from my CanLit section. I had just finished a book that I really did not like, oh deep sigh, so I was feeling deeply frustrated once again. I purposely went deep into my shelves looking for something that wasn’t new or hyped. I own many of Mary Lawson’s book, but before The Other Side of the Bridge, I had only read Crow Lake (such a fantastic book!). Reading the back of this one with its description about it being about two brothers and a novel of jealously, rivalry and the dangerous power of obsession, had me encouraged!
Oh this book! THIS is what I needed and Lawson delivered a 5-star read to me. I stayed up late, well past my bedtime, to finish this one. At that time, I had just a few pages left to go. I ended up going to bed a little teary-eyed and stunned that my time with this book was over. There were parts of this book where my heart was ripped right from my chest, and there were parts where the experiences and details of grief so powerful I was left breathless. This is an amazing story told in two timelines that connect into a devastating climax. We begin sometime during the 30s with two young brothers, so very different from each other. It then switches to the 60s with the son of the town’s doctor telling his part of the story while working on the farm with Arthur, the eldest brother. I was taken on this incredible journey through Arthur and Jake’s childhood, their differences, this longing each of them had for the love and attention from different parents (one the mother, the other desperate for his father’s approval, even a glance his way), into adulthood where it then connects into the storyline with Ian, the doctor’s son. The ending is one that kept me well past my bedtime to finish with its dramatic and heartbreaking end, leaving me with a definite book hangover. I do wish I could go back and start over and experience this for the first time again. (5-stars)

Island, The Collected Stories 1968-2014 by Alistair MacLeod. MacLeod was a beloved professor at the University of Windsor. It was pretty cool to walk on campus and see him out walking around near Dillon Hall. It warms my heart that the U honoured him with the “Alistair MacLeod Walk“. Anyway, oh, this collection of short stories. There truly are no words that could properly express how wonderful these stories are. MacLeod is the master of the short story. You lived with and shared in fully realized lives within every story. All hold deeply written love for Cape Breton -for the life, the hardships, the men working in the mines or on the water. There were sentences so incredible, it was another time where I would stop and re-read and ponder their greatness, and their poignancy. The ending sentences left you deeply satisfied and feeling so many emotions – sometimes loss that your time within this story was over with.
I’ll share the endings of two stories – by no means are these the best of the bunch, they were just ones that I’m still thinking about. Although I’m thinking of a good many of them. But one is from To Everything There is a Season. A son is experiencing Christmas as an adult and is remembering his childhood during this time, feeling the loss of it “the pang of loss at being here on the adult side of the world. It is as if I have suddenly moved into another room and heard a door click lastingly behind me. I am jabbed by my own small wound.” His father is old, and ill.
“But then I look at those before me. I look at my parents drawn together before the Christmas tree. My mother has her hand upon my father’s shoulder and he is holding his ever-present handkerchief. I look at my sisters, who have crossed this threshold ahead of me and now each day journey farther away from the lives they knew as girls. I look at my magic older brother bringing everything he has and is. All of them are captured in the tableau of their care. “Every man moves on,” says my father quietly, and I think he speaks of Santa Claus, “but there is no need to grieve. He leaves good things behind.”
There is another story called Winter Dog that has a pretty profound ending about how the dog saved his life when he was young and because of that he was allowed to experience the joy of his children playing in the first snow of the year. Deeply felt that one!
Really there are just all of them to talk about, but there was the title story, Island that ends in sadness but in great beauty too. This one family has spent generations on the island keeping the lighthouse. This is a story of the woman that is the last inhabitant. She is old and is remembering everything, including the time she met a young fisherman that promised to take her away to “live somewhere else”. He ends up dying so he can never return but now that she is very old, she has the vision this young man has come to lead her away. She walks into the sea.
“A dog barked once. And when the light revolved, its solitary beam found no MacPhedrans on the island or the sea.”
Loved it. That’s all that needs to be said really. (5 stars)
Now I’m going to be left hoping that all of my reads following will be 5-stars.

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