by Allison Zhao | Apr 4, 2023 | Fiction, Literature, Opinions
In the blueberry fields of Maine in 1962, a four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl named Ruthie goes missing. Her family, who annually travels from Nova Scotia to Maine to harvest the berries, searches frantically for her, but no trace is found. Ruthie’s older brother Joe was the last to see her and is deeply affected for the rest of his life by her disappearance. As an adult man now suffering from terminal disease, Joe narrates much of the novel and describes how the family survives in the absence of Ruthie.
by Allison Zhao | Mar 6, 2023 | Fiction, Literature, Opinions
This Is the House That Luke Built begins with Rose stepping through a wall of the house that her husband Luke was working on. He has died at sea, but through the house, Rose can temporarily see him again. Violet Browne draws on her own experience with loss and builds it into the foundations of Rose’s story as it unfolds. Despite the title and opening scene, much of the book is not about the titular house or Rose’s visits with Luke; rather, we stay close to Rose as she navigates the impact of the loss on herself and her three children, both in the immediate aftermath and over the years that follow.
by Allison Zhao | Jan 3, 2023 | Literature
A quick scan of tourism sites for Prince Edward Island brings up photographs of red sand and lighthouses, as well as the occasional image of a redheaded young girl with two braids. Nicholas Herring’s novel Some Hellish is firmly planted on that same island but could not be farther from the bright whimsy of travel advertisements or children’s book covers. It follows a middle-aged fisherman, who shares the name Herring, quietly experiencing an existential crisis of sorts while going through the motions of his daily and seasonal work.
by Allison Zhao | Sep 28, 2022 | Culture, Literature
In a cultural era of movie remakes and Taylor’s Versions, an author choosing to retell their bestselling novel is still a relatively rare occurrence. However, the releases of Life and Death in 2015 and Midnight Sun in 2020 saw not one, but two instances of Stephenie Meyer revisiting her 2005 novel Twilight on its tenth and fifteenth anniversaries. Life and Death provides a genderbent take on the original, with protagonist Bella Swan being revamped as Beau Swan, and nearly all the other characters similarly altered. Midnight Sun, meanwhile, reverts to the original versions of the characters, but tells the same story from Edward’s perspective.
by Allison Zhao | Nov 17, 2021 | Literature, Opinions
Amelia Earhart’s bones are calling out from the dark drawer they’ve been left in. Two satellites are whispering to each other in between stars. You are tired. You want to go home1. And it seems that home is the dust you were made from. All this and more exists in Síle Englert’s new poetry collection The Lost Time Accidents, released in early October. She moves fluidly through time and space, and throughout the collection her voice is marked by mourning for the parts of the world that are overlooked and things that are left behind.
