Letters to Omar

Letters to Omar
by Rachel Wyatt
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Sharon Adam
$21.00 ISBN 978-1-55050-448-4

Letters To Omar is a novel by Rachel Wyatt which revolves around three lifelong friends as they plan a dinner for a charity supporting Afghan civilians. Dorothy writes intimate fantasy letters to Omar Sharif and other notable people, none of which are sent. The letters attract the attention of a publisher, newly arrived from Europe and looking for his first project. Add to the mix an estranged husband
looking to return, a daughter who returns from a self-imposed exile and other family chaos and you have the beginning of a story that will surprise and delight.

Family is a huge part of the story: we feel Delphine’s confusion as her son leaves home for Afghanistan, not as a soldier but as a volunteer aid worker. We feel her guilty delight of having her home to herself, and resentment when a visiting cousin ruins that sense of privacy.

People do odd things, sometimes in the face of common sense and the advise of friends. We are not always in control of our emotions and the heart doesn’t always agree with the head. Eventually we know that family is the most important thing and we will do the right thing to preserve it. Rachel Wyatt has seamlessly joined all the tangled threads of the characters lives without confusing the reader and with humour and a knowledge of human nature that plainly exerts itself in the narrative.

This book is enjoyable to read and will make you laugh, as well as give you pause to think of what is important in one’s life. Dreams can come true and life has a way of forcing us to make the hard decisions and compromises that keep us strong and together in the end. Place Rachel Wyatts book on your list of must reads and great gifts and neither you or your recipient will be disappointed,

This book is available at your local bookstore or online at http://www.skbooks.com.

About Pictures

“About Pictures”
By Terry Fenton
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Andréa Ledding
$20.95 ISBN 978-0-9783440-9-2

“About Pictures” is just that –a perfect companion for students, collectors, art-lovers, or gallery-aficionados. Reading at the 2009 Saskatchewan Book Awards from this nominated book, Fenton said “It’s about pictures, it’s got pictures, it’s short, and it’s only $20.” All selling-points, but the book covers an impressive range of material in a short span, comprising brief essays interspersed with over 30 beautiful glossy images. Fenton’s portable soft cover edition is a witty companion and tour guide of the art world, drawing from careful research and personal philosophy combined with years of education and experience as gallery director, curator, and critic. It’s a must-have for everyone who likes art, wishes to know more about it, or wants to “brush up” on the basics.

Fenton believes in the value of a good question, using them generously before providing answers, while sharing professed favourite works of art. He explains of his title that artist Henri Matisse used the word “pictures” in his quote “Above all, pictures are illusions.”, and Matisse also described art as “something like a good armchair, providing relaxation from physical fatigue” – a likely goal of Fenton’s in creating this book, a work of art in itself.

A series of short essays and overviews leads the reader through the fundamentals of art, art history, and art appreciation. Readable in one sitting, picked through according to subject, or used as reference, the tone is always conversational, inviting, and engaging.

The author discusses various mediums, including both still and motion-photography. “Pictures captured by camera carry such a prosaic story of truth, it’s been suggested that photography isn’t an art medium at all. It is.” He goes on to define art as something which evokes “an aesthetic response in other human beings”, although he qualifies that. Balance is required – sheer response can lead towards “a form of barbarism”. Fenton’s definite views are gently well-informed, but never over-bearing, good-naturedly allowing the reader to consider their own positions, and frequently quoting the artists themselves.

Fenton also examines the North American mindset towards art, quoting Henry James in 1884 who notes the European Protestant mindset – “Puritans came to the Americas to escape from art and they’re still running” – and even today, many “North Americans still tend to identify the Arts with either sin or frivolity. Some artists rise to the bait, and make art simply to provoke the Puritans.”

Ever thoughtful, Fenton’s book concludes with useful “do’s and don’ts” for the collector and viewer, and a list of recommended books, viewings, and websites. “About Pictures” has something for everyone: like a gallery, exhibit, or any good work of art, the viewer is encouraged to browse, linger, consider.

Fenton is based in the Canadian West, including four years as director of Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery as well as other major galleries in Alberta. This is his sixth book.

This book is available at your local bookstore, or visit http://www.skbooks.com

Euphoria

“Euphoria: A Novel”
Written by Connie Gault
Published by Coteau Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$21.00 ISBN 978-1-55050-409-5

It’s no surprise that Connie Gault’s historical novel, “Euphoria: A Novel,” was shortlisted for the 2009 Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards). The Regina writer of stage and radio plays and author of two well-received short story collections is one of those (too rare) writers who takes the time to get each book right, and now, with Coteau’s release of “Euphoria,” Gault’s secured her place as one of Saskatchewan’s most talented.

The structuring of time and place is especially admirable in this novel. The story itself is what’s sometimes referred to as a quiet novel; the focus is on character development rather than a dramatic plot (though the aftermath of the Regina “cyclone” of 1912 does figure prominently). It’s a testament to Gault’s literary finesse that she not only keeps readers interested in the “quiet” lives of these characters who live, work, oversee, and, in the case of Orillia Cooper, convalesce in boarding houses, but that she also successfully shuffles these many lives – forward and back – over decades and disparate locations, without missing a beat.

The author begins with two central characters – Gladdie and Orillia – and as the story progresses and secrets are scraped away, she simultaneously introduces new characters and illumines the lives of those we’ve already met by teasing out the past.

Secrets are at the heart of this story. The initial setting is a Toronto boarding house, and the year is 1891. An illegitimate baby’s born in the house, and immediately after, her teenaged mother “walk[s] off the wharf into Lake Ontario.” Gladdie McConnell, a young employee at the house, is deeply affected by this tragedy, and she’s so concerned with the orphan’s future, she makes it her life’s (other) work to be the child’s surreptitious guardian.

As the story unfolds, we learn much about Gladdie’s own sad life, but to Gault’s credit, the most harrowing bits of this character’s history – between ages 6 and 9 – are suggested rather than detailed. (Sometimes, it’s best to let readers fill in the graphic details; Gault understands this.)

Much of the novel concerns the residents of a Regina boarding house, post-cyclone. Aside from the central figures, there’s Mr. Best, who’s writing a novel about a boarding house; and young Susan, a cyclone survivor found “sitting on the roof of a new Ford automobile …. like a doll who’d been set there, her ringlets still curled, her dress untouched”.

The examination of motherhood, from Mrs. Riley, who “pride[s] herself on having no feelings in regard to children of any age,” including her own; to lonely Hilda, who hopes Susan’s parents will never be located; to the various surrogates, presents a fascinating study. Readers may occasionally feel pity for the book’s hard-working, under-loved women, like Hilda: “On her off days she went to the cemetery and talked to her mother and father in their graves.”

“Euphoria” is a finely researched document about how unmarried women could and did live during a certain period in Canadian history. Gault’s nominations are earned.

Like the Mimosa

“Like the Mimosa”
by Eusebio L. Koh
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Reviewed by Cindy Dean-Morrison
$16.95 CDN ISBN 978-1-894431-22-4

“Like the Mimosa” by Filipino-Canadian author Eusebio L. Koh promises an exotic experience. It does not fail. Koh immediately transports the reader into his beloved Filipino world using brilliant descriptions, memorable characters, occasional Filipino words, and humour. He shares intimate truths via stories, poems and essays.

In the short story section we are immediately pulled in by “Soap” which deals with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines at the start of WW II. Koh begins, “In times of war, life is as fragile as it gets.” One might expect dark events after that introduction, but Koh tells the story from a precocious boy’s viewpoint who has a great sense of humour and humanity. All the stories read as colourful history, studies in family dynamics, and explorations of cultural mores.

Koh writes exquisitely crafted cinquains, sonnets, and free verse poems. He explores love, nature, war, faith and Saskatchewan prairie spirit. Perhaps common poetic themes, but Koh is anything but common in his approach. In fact, the poems are often surprising. Love, for example, is reflected in the poem “Theorems.” “Theorems are character portraits/ revealing the true nature of things” is a unique look at what form beauty can take and is a tribute to Koh the Regina mathematician. Other poems like “Mea Culpa” exude wry humour. Koh devotes two poignant war poems to “Dubya,” “the man who talks of freedom” but “has shackled shut the chains around my heart.”

Koh’s essays all focus largely on social justice issues. Essays like “A Colonial Mentality” and “Behind the Ethnic Shield” are powerful examinations of discrimination. What sets Koh apart in this common discussion is his pragmatism. He cites blatant examples of how he has experienced discrimination, but cautions people not to cry racism necessarily. “It weakens our case if … we hide behind our ethnicity and claim racism.” Finally, Koh’s history of Filipino independence is thorough and fascinatingly told.

Ultimately this collection is about the integrity of a people who have survived occupations, colonialism and hard-won independence. This is a book of their truths lovingly told.

Shadow Boxing

Shadow Boxing
By Sherie Posesorski
Published by Coteau Books
Reviewed by Shanna Mann
$12.95 ISBN 978-1-55050-406-4

Meet Alice Levitt. She’s a 16-year-old “high functioning depressive” who lives with her egotistical criminal lawyer father. Alice deals with her beloved mother’s death and her disgust of her distant father by working compulsively –she has an A+ average and two part-time jobs. To calm the screams inside her head, Alice cuts herself.

Her only lifeline is her cousin, Chloe, who takes care of her infected cuts and begs her to stop. But Chloe can’t help Alice much when she already has so many problems of her own. In fact, her main value to Alice is to give Alice someone to care for and think about so she won’t have to examine her own questionable behavior.

Like the shadow boxes of the title, Alice’s world is starkly compartmentalized and monochromatic. When events are narrated by Alice, there is a palpable sense of the rage and futility she struggles ceaselessly against. The monocular focus on details like the bag people on the streets, the smell of local Yiddish take-out blended with the acrid stench of the tobacconist’s, and the irrelevant histories of local landmarks demonstrate Alice’s hyper focus on irrelevancies in order to stave off emotional examination.

In this authentically voiced YA novel, Alice bitterly strives to replace her mother in supporting and caring for Chloe, whose own parents are absent. Through the course of the novel, though, she discovers support she never knew was out there, first from strangers, then from people closer to her, and stops isolating herself like a figurine in a shadow box.

My Sweet Curiosity

“My Sweet Curiosity”
By Amanda Hale
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Karen Lawson
$19.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-61-4

Amanda Hale’s third novel is a complex work that combines many different elements and themes. She has taken a variety of threads and woven them into an intricate tapestry that will keep the reader wanting more with every page.

“My Sweet Curiosity” contains several plots and is set not only in different countries but also spans many centuries. The author incorporates historical facts from the sixteenth century with a contemporary story line to create a fast moving saga that contains few boundaries.

The main characters of this novel live in present day Toronto. Talya is a young, energetic, medical student. Dai Ling is a talented cello player. Destiny brings them together and their lives become intertwined. Both young women are the daughters of immigrant parents. This complicates their relationship and adds another layer to the story. Both characters are struggling with their own personal issues and coming to terms with who they are and what their purpose in life is. Talya becomes obsessed not only with Dai Ling, but with a book of anatomical drawings compiled by a doctor by the name of Andreas Vesalius. He was a prominent Italian surgeon who revolutionized the study of medicine and anatomy during the Renaissance period.

“My Sweet Curiosity” flows seamlessly from one time period to another while providing interesting insight into how the physical body is connected to emotions and spirituality. Amanda Hale is a gifted storyteller who has tapped into her own curiosity to create a book that will spark the curiosity in her readers.

Songcatcher

Songcatcher by Aline Perret-Vallée
Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Sharon Adam
$16.95 ISBN 978-894431-32-3

“Songcatcher” falls in a new genre that combines autobiography with poetry and essay. It is the story of an ordinary woman who enjoys her life and shares with her audience the blessings gathered over eight decades. A Saskatchewan girl, Aline tells us her story in a very entertaining and enjoyable format.

She begins with her mother’s family and the story of how they ended up in Duck Lake, where Aline’s mother meets her future husband and they begin their own family. The author shares the respect and joy her home-life provided in times that were hard on the prairies. We glimpse the farm life of a young girl and her brothers and sisters. Aline shares stories and poems of her school years and of leaving home in 1949 to become a nun at the Novitiate in St. Hyacinth, Quebec. She then begins a teaching career that sees her move to various locales, including Prince Albert, Spiritwood, The Pas, Laurier, Debden and Swift Current, ending in Wadena.

We learn of a love story that begins in Prince Albert and eventually ends happily with Aline leaving her vocation as a nun to become the wife of Orian Vallée. Aline’s writing is full of her appreciation of life and recounts all the things that enrich her memories. She tells us of her discovery of Toastmasters and how that organization helped her build confidence and make friends.

Visits to her ancestral homeland of France bring new family members into the story, and travels to Quebec and California add even more family branches to her tree. Now a widow, she lives in Saskatoon where she enjoys her family and friends. “Songcatcher” is an enjoyable read for anyone interested in our past—and the lives of the real people who lived it.

The Smiling Mask

Book Title“The Smiling Mask: Truths About Postpartum Depression and Parenthood”
By Carla O’Reilly, Elita Paterson, Tania Bird, and Peggy Collins
Published by Purpose to Prosperity Publishing
Review by Marie Powell Mendenhall
Price: $ 24.95 CDN ISBN: 978-0-9781341-3-6

“The Smiling Mask” uses the stories of three women who suffered from postpartum depression (PPD) to create awareness of the issues surrounding this disease.

The book begins with forwards written by mental health experts such as Sally Elliott, perinatal nurse/counselor at Regina YMCA. In the preface, clinical psychologist Marlene Harper identifies some of the controversies and complexities surrounding PPD.

Harper identifies degrees of severity in psychiatric symptoms. Postpartum blues, for example, are mild, including mood swings and confusion lasting up to about 10 days. Postpartum depression is similar to clinical depression and may last up to a year. Postpartum psychosis is a severe, rapid mental illness, usually requiring hospitalization. Harper also discusses potential treatment, including medications and counseling.

In the next three chapters, authors Carla O’Reilly, Elita Paterson, and Tania Bird give an earnest and heart-felt account of their journey through PPD. They discuss the “smiling mask” they used to try and hide their illness, and the difficulty of setting it aside to discuss their real feelings and experiences. These women state their nightmares and fears honestly, and talk about the strong support they received from family and friends.

Following that, the book includes a chapter detailing the points-of-view of their husbands, as retold by Peggy Collins. The book concludes with an interview, a chapter of strategies to help cope with the disease, and a section of notes and references.

One dollar from the cost of the book is donated to four charities chosen by the authors, including women’s shelters, Mental Health, the YMCA/YWCA, and NICU/Mother and Baby Units.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

House Beneath

“House Beneath”
Written by Susan Telfer
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95 ISBN 978-1-926710-02-0

The title of Susan Telfer’s first collection of poetry, “House Beneath,” is ripe with metaphorical possibilities. It suggests that readers will be privy to a story beneath the official story, that there is – or was – more going on than meets the public eye.

The book begins, uniquely, with a photograph of the poet’s parents circa 1964. An attractive, healthy and happy-looking pair, they “smile with their teeth.” But the book’s darker undertones are expressed in the opening poem’s final lines: “He was already learning to mix rye and soda. She was\reading in Dr. Spock to let me cry.”

In my reading, I’ve noticed that first books almost constitute a sub-genre within poetry. Often poets air childhood demons in these books; or recount adolescence; first loves and early mistakes; and, quite commonly, their relationship with their parents. The latter is the focus of Telfer’s collection. With both now deceased, she peels back the layers of family, showing us that her “famous” father – “your picture still on boardroom walls,\only man in town with a tie,\first to buy a computer,\ first house with a microwave” – became the source of much anguish as he regressed into a man who “became famous\among dealers, users and drunks,\for throwing it all away, yes,\infamous father, even your daughters,\your daughters.”

Being orphaned is a subject Telfer explores in numerous poems, but as she also demonstrates, for all intents and purposes she became “Fatherless,” long before her dad actually died. Already a mother herself, she writes: “I’m weak from chasing toddlers, my hips\still wobbly from childbirth. I can’t carry you.” The poet’s mother suffered with ALS, and we learn, in a poem simply titled “ALS,” that the woman “almost calcified into\the rock [she] wished to be.”

Pieces about the stunning west-coast setting in which she lives, the births of her children, and desire also populate this smartly-dressed collection. Telfer lives in Gibsons and teaches high school in Sechelt, BC. I adore her short poem, “Crows,” which begins: “One dark rain-sopped afternoon,\our lawn is scorched black with crows—\a smoky blanket of shine and flap.\The bare oak trees, too fool-full of hundreds\of crows. I have set my plans on fire.” Highly imagistic and original, and the poet is really paying attention to sound, as well.

Another dandy is “Fecund,” which opens (brilliantly!) with “Let the butter puddle on the blue plate:\my daughter is three days old.”

Finally, a few words about desire. It’s difficult to write about without overdoing it, and often less is more. “We had forgotten how easy joy is,” Telfer writes in “Chapman Creek,” and in “Ovulation Song”: “Follow me to the end of the deep dock,\hand in hand and hot wind, full moon over\Penticton shining its wide watery\path to us, then kiss me deep, no\Presbyterian kiss, a kiss echoing\like a long-held choir note, my cheeks humming.” Ah, good stuff.

“House Beneath” is published by Hagios Press. The book’s an interesting read for anyone who harbours ghosts in their past, and don’t we one and all?

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Duty to Consult

“The Duty to Consult: New Relationships with Aboriginal Peoples”
By Dwight G. Newman
Published by Purich Publishing
Review by Shanna Mann
$30 ISBN 978-1895830-378

While this is, first and foremost, a scholarly work, the author makes an earnest attempt to present the information in a clear manner. There is no doubt that a layperson would likely benefit from a point-by-point chapter summary, but the absence of Latin terminology and self-referential citations makes it understandable—though it will never be a beach read.

The book explores the legal ramifications and implicit necessities of the so-called “duty to consult,” the duty of the crown to notify, consult, or if necessary include First Nations people in any licensing, sale, or use of land or waters that may affect the rights of Aboriginals.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past decade of Aboriginal rights litigation, many of the cited court cases will be familiar to you—Taku River Tlingit First Nation v. British Columbia, Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada, and so on.

It explores the ramifications for First Nation’s bands and organizations as well as for the crown and interested third parties. It notes that many First Nations bands lack resources to properly examine and decide upon their rights in a “consultation situation” and further notes that, in keeping with upholding the honour of the crown, several provinces, including Saskatchewan, have made funds available to bands in order to assist them in the consultation process.

Anticipating further noteworthy changes to Aboriginal case law, the author has stated that “updates on important developments on the duty to consult” will be posted on the publisher’s website.

This book is a readable, understandable, reasonably exhaustive exploration into the rights and implications of the crown’s “New Relationship” with First Nations people.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM