HAIKU MAMA

 Kari Anne Roy. HAIKU MAMA. Quirk, 2006.

Haiku about young motherhood including breastfeeding her boy. Light and amusing as it promises. 

THE PARIS APARTMENT

 Kelly Bowen. THE PARIS APARTMENT. Forever, 2021.

University Book Club selection for January. I ordered it in and read it through quickly, making notes this time to make answering questions easier. Two time frames, and multiple POVs, clearly delineated in chapter titles. The present tense is opening up an apartment that had be uninhabited since 1942, with paintings hidden. The war story, about resistance fighters in Paris and England. The modern story is light romance. The war story is much more interesting and I was emotionally caught up in the story of women leading secret lives right under the noses of the occupiers. 

RETURN OF THE TRICKSTER

Eden Robinson. RETURN OF THE TRICKSTER. Vintage, 2021.

Jared needs help from stronger tricksters to fix a mess he has landed himself in. Third in the Trickster trilogy. 

WOMEN TALKING

Miriam Toews. WOMEN TALKING. Knopf, 2018.

Women in a Mennonite colony in South America ask a returned teacher to take notes at their meeting when they debate what to do to respond to the abuse from males in the colony. The women cannot read or write, but they can think and talk.

EDUCATED: A Memoir

Tara Westover. EDUCATED: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2018.

An uplifting story of an horrific childhood, in a Mormon family in Idaho. Physical violence. Blind denial, on the part of victims, abusers, witnesses, parents. And how escaping to an education helps the narrator see the mental health issues behind the extremist ranting and negativity. How it took her years to free herself because the convoluted logic of the ties that bound her were knotted with love. A story of hope hiding in the form of friends, boyfriends, roommates, professors, tutor/mentors, reading, writing, and travel. And the sadness of shunning and character assassination from those still trapped in the lies.

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW

 Amor Towles. A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. Penguin, 2016.

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, because of his aristocratic heritage, lives imprisoned in Moscow's Metropol Hotel from 1922 until 1954. Interesting. Amusing. Entertaining.

IMAGES FROM THE LIKENESS HOUSE

 Dan Savard. IMAGES FROM THE LIKENESS HOUSE. RBCM, 2010.

Fascinating images of Indigenous people and buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in BC and Alaska. This book was an award-winner at the time of publication. Now, it seems to show us a visual record of how much we have learned in the ensuing dozen years. Where this book is organized around the white photographers who took the photographs, today to this reader anyway, a more Indigenous-centred or geographic grouping would be more respectful of the subjects. Especially because so many of the photos were used as advertising for the studios. No mention is made of consent from the subjects or shared profits. 

I was most interested to find a brief info about James Teit, a Scot living in Spences Bridge who worked with Franz Boas and others. Sometime I used to hear the term "Teit people" and I was always curious as to whom the name referred.