Review: The Girls by Emma Cline

“So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.” ― Emma Cline, The Girls

When I started reading The Girls by Emma Cline, I told people I was reading a story based on the Tate-Labianca murders, complete with a gaggle of obedient young female followers and a leader, Russell, echoing the personality and ambitions of Charlie Manson. I learned, quite quickly, that The Girls was anything but, rather it's a careful exploration of girlhood and identity set against the backdrop of a cult.

I read much of The Girls on a rowboat on Christie Lake while my better half fished and I fell in love with Evie Boyd, a curious and lonely teenager with the privilege of boredom and freedom in Northern California during a summer at the end of the 1960s. After catching sight of exotic Suzanne, a few years her senior, Evie finds herself on a run down ranch with a likeminded group of misfits also grappling with their identities and searching for a place to belong.

The Girls is hardly about a rabid cult hungry for murder. Instead, it's about place, and the human desire to belong and be part of something. Edie longs to leave behind the normalcy of her daily life and her parents' new lives following a divorce.

 "I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that had always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave behind." 

The Girls is a brilliant debut by California's Emma Cline. (You may remember, it was at the centre of a bidding war, eventually selling to Random House as part of a three-book deal for a rumoured "$2 million and change"). Cline's prose is so delicate, it reminded me of Us, Conductors, and I found myself jotting down passages on almost every page: "You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?"

I've written before that most of my favourite books are non-fiction, but every once in a while I find myself gobsmacked by a work of fiction that I can't stop talking about. The Girls is one of those books. It's thoughtful and intelligent, but above all else, it's relatable, a trait I didn't expect from a book loosely based on one of America's most grisly murders.

Read this book. Read it, read it, read it, and let me know how much you love it. I can't imagine you won't.

Review: Mountain City Girls

This article originally appeared on rabble.ca. 

Critics have called Mountain City Girls, the first memoir by Canadian musicians Jane and Anna McGarrigle, a tribute to their younger sister Kate, who died of a rare form of cancer in 2010. However, the intimate and witty book is equally an ode to the trio's unconventional parents, Frank and Gaby, and the many other memorable ancestors who came before them.

For those unfamiliar, Anna and Kate McGarrigle formed an award-winning folk duo that inhabit an important space in Canadian music history. Their older sister Jane was integral to their success, managing their careers in the late 1970s to 1990s, a time in which she was a co-collaborator on and off the stage. A younger generation of Canadian music fans might know the McGarrigles as famous kin to Rufus and Martha Wainwright (Kate was their mother).

However, Mountain City Girls isn't a music memoir. Rather, it's an affectionate look at the sisters' upbringing in a one-and-a-half storey white board and batten cottage in the small Laurentian town of Saint Sauveur in the middle of the 20th century. It's a coming-of-age story that doesn't take readers beyond Kate and Anna's burgeoning career as folk musicians. In fact, it ends right where a biographer might begin, around 1975, shortly after Kate and Jane signed a record contract with Warner Brothers.

Review: Tomboy by Liz Prince (plus giveaway)

This post is part of the Zest Books True Stories Fall Blog Tour.

There’s a joke among my friends. If I ever get married, I’ll have the least attractive bridal party. It will be made up of beer-guzzling 30-somethings who sport flannel shirts and beards. It’ll be made up of my best friends, all of which are dudes. Being one of the guys has always been part of my identity, standing in line with being bookish and being shy. I never gave it much thought. These friendships just always seemed natural. Obvious.

Yet while reading Tomboy, a graphic memoir by Boston cartoonist Liz Prince, I thought a lot about gender and friendship. I thought about navigating that in-between space when you don’t feel like a girl, but you don’t feel like a boy either. I thought about how Prince articulated this in-between space so much better than I ever could through her clever dialogue and illustrations.

Growing up, Prince was anything but a girly girl. While girls her age played dress-up, wobbling in their mother’s high heels and painting their faces with make-up, she preferred emulating Luke Skywalker and Dennis the Menace. She played sports. She drew comics. She befriended boys. She was by all definitions a tomboy. But what exactly does that mean?

The definition Prince uses, and dismantles, is “a girl of boyish behaviour.” But “boyish behaviour” is all kinds of subjective. In order to understand that definition, you have to have pre-conceived notions about what it means to behave like a boy. (As I saw in an advertisement for Toys’R’Us the other day, society has no trouble pushing what that means on children from a young age.)

Tomboy begins with Prince as a toddler, screaming bloody murder at the sight of a dress, which turns out to be the least of her problems. In the decade and a half that follows, she’s bullied mentally and physically as she navigates love, friendship, and loneliness as a tomboy. It’s impossible not to relate to Prince and her funny, heartbreaking, and often awkward tale. This is especially true if like Prince you were a child of the 80s and 90s. Tomboy not only has multiple Popples, but both a Frog and Toad and an Are You Afraid of the Dark reference!

But I digress.

I can’t call myself a tomboy. As a kid, I loved pink. I played with Barbies, I loved my plastic Fisher Price food, and I thought Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid was the handsomest of all the Disney princes. But there was also one birthday when I only asked for a soccer ball, and I got three. I loved my Easy-Bake Oven, but I much more preferred baking up Creepy Crawlers. I wore nylons and dresses, but never minded getting them dirty. I caught frogs, minnows, turtles, and snails. I was all kinds of contradictions, and I still am today.

When I was about eight, my parents were chaperones on a class trip to Toronto’s Royal Winter Fair. I was given the high honour of choosing who would be in our “group.” I chose my best friends, who of course, were all boys.

“Do you realize you’ve chosen all boys?” my teacher asked with a raised eyebrow. “Are you sure you don’t want to choose some girls?” He looked at me as if I were mistaken, or worse yet, committing a crime.

“I didn’t understand why the schoolyard decided to function like an awkward school dance, with boys on one side and girls on the other,” writes Prince. I couldn’t understand either.

Tomboy is a coming-of-age memoir, but at the same time it’s something more. It’s cheeky and charming, but it’s also subtly political. It questions what it means to be a girl on society’s terms, and how difficult it can be to live outside that pastel pink box.

Toward the end of the book, Prince’s mentor asks her one of many, but likely the most crucial, questions raised in the book: “Do you hate girls? Or do you hate the expectations put on girls by society?”

It’s a good question, and one that Tomboy unpacks completely.

GIVEAWAY

Interested in reading this amazing book by Liz Prince? I'd love to give you a copy! This giveaway if open to all residents of the United States and Canada.

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Review: Everything Is So Political

In a 2005 interview with Salman Rushdie, interviewer Jack Livings of The Paris Review asked a seemingly simple question of the author: "Could you possibly write an apolitical book?" Rushdie, known for his novels with overtly political themes, replied that he had "great interest in it," using the example of Jane Austen, whom he said could "explain the lives of her characters without a reference to the public sphere."

Rushdie's answer, of course, begs the following question: What makes something political? In the introduction of her recent anthology, Everything Is So Political: A Collection of Short Fiction by Canadian Writers, editor Sandra McIntyre argues that everything is political. In fact, everything isn’t just political; it’s so political, she says, borrowing lyrics from a Spirit of the West song.

Considering only the public sphere to be political is a "too-narrow and so literal view," writes McIntyre in the book's introduction. Using the works of Jane Austen as an example, she responds to Rushdie's comments, reminding readers that the role of women and the property laws that discriminated against them were crucial, and very political, parts of Austen's novels.

"We know that everything is political and that political means and has always meant more than 'government, politicians, and the state:' it means who we know, who we have sex with, what we eat or how hungry we are, where we shop, even what words we use," writes McIntyre. This belief was the catalyst for Everything Is So Political, a collection of 20 contemporary short fiction stories by writers from all over Canada.

This review originally appeared on rabble.ca. You can read the rest of it here. 

Advent Book Blog

In 2009, the Advent Book Blog launched, fuelling me to begin my own challenge on my now almost defunct personal blog. Just as I've failed at maintaining my personal blog, I very much failed at my challenge to write a one-sentence book review every day in December 2009. Despite this personal failure, I still look forward to the relaunch of the Advent Book Blog every December, which always prompts me to add at least one or two new titles to my Christmas list. I'm so thrilled that it's December and the Advent Book Blog's mini reviews are pouring into my Google reader, but I'm even more thrilled to have contributed a review this year. Check out my mini review of the Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary. I don't think I need to write a post about my favourite book of 2011. It's pretty obvious!

Review: The Big Dream by Rebecca Rosenblum

This review was originally published in This magazine, and Rebecca Rosenblum was nice enough to write about it on her own blog. It was a nice reminder that sometimes authors actually read the reviews that I write!

The characters in Rebecca Rosenblum’s second collection of short stories, The Big Dream, have one thing in common: they work at Dream Inc., a lifestyle magazine publisher struggling to stay afloat. Like the troubled company, most face an uncertain future, navigating their problems from trial separations and parenthood to a terminally ill parent.

Drawing from her own experiences working in an office, Rosenblum creates characters who, despite their canned lunches and obligatory office parties, are anything but dull. Anyone who has ever worked inside the partial walls of a cubicle, ignoring the constant hum of a computer, while counting the minutes until lunch, will easily relate.

There is Clint, a contract employee, slurring his words as the result of an infected wisdom tooth he can’t afford to have pulled. There’s Andrea, the new hire, who is “straight out of school” and “as jittery as a jailbreak.” And among the most memorable are Mark and Sanjeet, the company’s CEO and COO, who are likely to blame for the company’s demise.

Rosenblum has crafted a reputation as a Canadian writer to watch for, especially after her 2008 collection of short stories, Once, earned her the Metcalf-Rooke Award. The Big Dream only accelerates this expectation. Each short story is rich with memorable dialogue, capturing the empty banter, complaints, and flirtations that often fill the halls of an office. Rosenblum’s natural dialogue and descriptive prose result in a collection that successfully depicts the complex balancing act between home and work that so often define the lives of office workers who struggle to stay afloat inside and outside of their cubicles.

Ricepaper 16.2: The Green Issue

Shameless self promotion twice in one week might seem like a little much, but I can't help myself, since I'm incredibly proud to be a reviewer for one of my favourite magazines — ricepaper.

The latest issue is out featuring my review of Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe DeRango Adem and Andrea Thompson, and some incredible pieces by some of my favourite writers, including the always-fantastic Evelyn Lau.