Category: Fiction Book Reviews

March 26, 2013

Unmasked

A review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Iron Justice Versus the Fiends of Evil” (in Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories Ed. Claude Lalumiere and Camille Alexa, Tyche Books LTD., 2013) Many superhero stories in the golden age of comics tended to focus on young, white, straight, able-bodied men. Silvia Moreno-Garcia seeks to disrupt that exclusionary notion of the ‘regular’ superhero by injecting...

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March 24, 2013

Frankenfoot

A review of Julie Czerneda’s “Left Foot On A Blind Man” (in Silicon Dreams Ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Sergiff, DAW 2001) As a scholar of disability studies, I am always excited to read a work of Canadian SF that really engages with ideas of disability. I have rarely encountered a short story that engages with so many disability...

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March 19, 2013

Between Pages of Experience

A review of Jo Walton’s Among Others By Derek Newman-Stille SF has a pedagogical value – it teaches, it shares experiences, and it opens the mind to new horizons. Outsiders and social outcasts are often drawn to SF as a means to explore a world that seems strange and alienating to them – reading the alien as a way of...

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March 17, 2013

Sex, Drugs, and Country and Western Horror

A review of Derek McCormack’s The Haunted Hillbilly (ECW Press, 2003) By Derek Newman-Stille Hank is a country and western star looking for an image that will bring him success and Nudie is willing to assist him with an eye toward aesthetics he picked up in the carnival. Nudie recreates Hank in an image he desires, planting evidence of infidelity...

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March 12, 2013

Travel Guide to Fairy

A Review of O.R. Melling’s The Hunter’s Moon (In The Chronicles of Faerie, Penguin Canada, 2000) By Derek Newman-Stille O.R. Melling’s The Hunter’s Moon explores the idea of place and landscape saturated with the mythic and the historical, the overlapping realms of reality that are facilitated by time and story-telling. Two cousins – Findabhair and Gwen – linked by family,...

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March 7, 2013

Magic, Mazes, and Math

A Review of Ari Goelman’s The Path of Names (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille Despite wanting to go to math camp and magic camp, Dahlia is convinced by her parents to attend Jewish camp. It comes complete with everything she would expect – sports, crafts, outdoor activities, friends, Hebrew lessons, and mean girls… and a few things...

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March 3, 2013

Rejected by Magic

A Review of Erin Bow’s Plain Kate (Scholastic Inc., 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille In a world where magic is real and witches are hunted, Erin Bow’s Plain Kate explores society’s trend of scapegoating people who are different, making villains out of people who don’t fit the ideas of normal behaviour. Plain Kate is a woman whose appearance is plain, but...

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February 27, 2013

Dissolving Selfhood

A Review of Brett Savory’s In and Down (Brindle & Glass, 2007) By Derek Newman-Stille Brett Savory’s In and Down is a truly horrifying novel, not necessarily because of the haunting images of bodies, clowns, and flies, but because it reminds the reader about the fluidity of identity – that we are not fixed, unchanging things, but are rather constantly...

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February 25, 2013

Five Stages of Grieving Yourself

A Review of Corey Redekop’s Husk (ECW Press, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille Corey Redekop’s Husk is a visceral, body novel with philosophical ponderings on existence. Redekop’s protagonist is a queer-oriented zombie actor, trapped in consciousness as his body deteriorates around him. The reader is put into the position of experiencing death and resurrection into a desiccated body and Redekop captures...

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February 21, 2013

Empowering the Freak

A Review of Leah Bobet’s Above (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille Leah Bobet’s novel Above focusses on a group of people who have taken up residence in the sewers. Chased from society above the ground and called “Freak”, “Monster”, “Sick”, and “Cursed”, they retreated beneath the city to create their own society, free of discrimination. Their most...

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