The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me

Catherine Hernandez is an award-winning author and activist who has dedicated her career to promoting, capturing, and performing the stories of women of colour. The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to The Stars That Made Me, the plays that make up this collection, explore female empowerment, growth, and sexuality within the LGBTQ communities. Hernandez offers a focused commentary on vulnerability that arises from the imbalance of power in a hetero- and cis-normative society. The discourses surrounding abuse, love, and survival are made accessible to the audience through the breakdown of the “fourth wall” of literature, with there being no limiting descriptions of the main character. This technique is typical of Brechtian theatre as Hernandez is encouraging the audience to be active participants in the experience. They are immersed in the story while being reminded that this is a dialogue that must be voiced.

An Ocean of Minutes

In Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes, Polly Nader time-travels to the future to work off medical debts for her boyfriend, Frank, who needs a life-saving treatment. She plans to reunite with him after her work as a bonded labourer is done. However, Polly is rerouted an additional five years, and the book alternates between Polly’s relationship with Frank in the past and her present search for him. While the prose is gorgeous, it covers reflections on remembrance far better than it does Polly’s predicament, which lacks a strong sense of place and urgency. Dreamlike yet occasionally dreary, Lim’s novel explores love’s vitality in a world where time creates as many wounds as it heals.

Sludge Utopia
By Catherine Fatima

In Sludge Utopia, Catherine Fatima captivates readers with an auto-fictional take of a woman’s journey discovering her place within the world’s definition of love and desire. Protagonist Catherine’s life seems typical of millennial Torontonians—studying, pursuing romances, and trying to keep grounded while maintaining friendships and social networks. However, she is simultaneously struggling to understand her dependence on sex and intimacy while moving through tumultuous relationships with close friends and new partners. Readers will be hypnotized by Catherine’s enigmatic observations about herself as she explores her frustrations. Fatima’s disjointed portrayal of her characters leaves you questioning your own definitions of fulfilling personal relationships throughout the entire novel.

Adjacentland

“Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day.” Adjacentland is a twisted story of a man’s journey to discover who he is after waking up in an institution with no memory and only odd clues within letters and drawings to guide his way. As each “stage” of the story unfolds, the main character’s repeated bouts of amnesia will make readers hungry to piece together what’s real and what’s not. In this scary futuristic landscape where imagination has been rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence, readers will enjoy the challenging questions Maharaj poses about the soul and human mind.

I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, a touching letter to his daughter by the award-winning writer David Chariandy, is a book that speaks to third-generation children growing up in a very different Canada than the one in which their grandparents arrived. Aptly timed for the sesquicentennial, this is the third book written by Chariandy, who debuted with Soucouyant in 2007, followed by Brother, which won the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

In a series of four chapters, ranging from the sharp “Incident” to the grounding “Arrival,” I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You is both response and fatherly instruction. Chariandy tenderly expresses to his daughter the African- and Indian-Trinidadian and English Protestant origins of her parents while eking out his own sense of belonging in Canada—amid his own painful life experiences and his parents’ toil in their adopted homeland.

Reminiscent of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and others, the book is an insightful account fitting for Chariandy’s daughter’s coming-of-age— a timeless gift touching on themes of mixed-race identity, class differences, racism, and acceptance. Chariandy leaves us with something distinctly Canadian that is steeped in pride for his homeland, a rootedness in the words of authors like Khalil Gibran, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Countee Cullen, and Zetta Elliott, while moving into a future nurtured by a family’s love.

Shrewed

In Shrewed, Globe and Mail columnist Elizabeth Renzetti asks the questions many of us ask as women: Why are there so few women in politics? Why must we feel unsafe in public spaces? Will things always be this way? However, the collection of essays really shines when Renzetti turns the lens toward her own life, sharing her experiences as a daughter, wife, mother, and journalist in a male-dominated world. Quick-witted and eye-opening, Shrewed exemplifies that famous line: “The personal is political.”

Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401

Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401 is a book about success. In it, Edmonton’s Jason Foster, an associate professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University and former director of policy analysis at the Alberta Federation of Labour, investigates a union that has had “remarkable success organizing a group of workers that North American unions often struggle to reach: immigrants, women and youth.” The result is a deeply interesting look at how unions and their members can work together to create much-needed change.

This Will Be Good

Praise for This Will Be Good, written by Mallory Tater—a writer from the Algonquin Anishnaabeg Nation (Ottawa)—is thanks to flowing prose that evokes strong emotions. Unabashedly covering topics such as eating disorders, sexuality, and death, Tater’s stylistic voice paints a vivid portrait of a child growing into her womanhood and dealing with what that means. Although readers are advised content may be triggering, those looking to expand their poetry collection need to make space for this one.

Land Mammals and Sea Creatures

Despite the title of Jen Neale’s debut magic realist novel, it’s the Birds who dominate this story. Julie Bird returns to her coastal B.C. hometown to prevent her father, Marty—struggling with PTSD—from his long-desired self-destruction. When a stranger from Marty’s past arrives the day a blue whale beaches on the local shore, followed by a series of bizarre animal suicides, the town explodes in passion, turmoil, and the stench of decaying whale carcass. Insightful, gripping, and mysterious to the end, Land Mammals and Sea Creatures blows the reader to pieces, redefining life, death, love, and grief.

The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

The Wife’s Tale is an uncommon memoir that reads more like an epic, spanning decades of Ethiopia’s rich and tumultuous history, as well as one woman’s journey. It’s written by Aida Edemariam, a Canadian-Ethiopian journalist and the granddaughter of the book’s protagonist, who collected years’ worth of her paternal grandmother’s retelling of her remarkable life.

Yetemegnu, born in 1916 in northern Ethiopia, was eight years old when she was married to a man decades older than her, suddenly halting her childhood and launching her into a life of hardship. As the wife of a religious leader, her duty became to serve him and bear children—which she did. Ten of them. Her life is not chronicled by dates but rather by major events and dynamic characters, and Edemariam does a breathtaking job recalling a faraway time and world as if it were just yesterday.

The Wife’s Tale echoes Yetemegnu’s life with Ethiopia’s own turbulent history in the 20th century. Her life spans the country’s revolution, civil war, invasions, famine, and disease, all while she goes through her own trials with the deaths of her children, the imprisonment of her husband, and the invasion of her house and land. To have a genuine cultural and historical understanding of the complex history of Yetemegnu’s journey that has not been Westernized is a powerful addition to this memoir.

The author’s foray into her family’s past is done with meticulous attention to detail and care for the reader’s introduction to Ethiopia’s history. To know our own history is to know ourselves. Edemariam’s study of her grandmother’s life reveals that while history can often be tangled with sorrows, the rewards lie in the ability to find strength in looking back.