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Review: The You I’ve Never Known
Summary from Goodreads: “How do you live your life if your past is based on a lie? A new novel in both verse and prose from #1 New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Hopkins.” For as long as she can remember, it’s been just Ariel and Dad. Ariel’s mom disappeared when she was a baby. Dad says home is wherever the two of them are, but Ariel is now seventeen and after years of new apartments, new schools, and new faces, all she wants is to put down some roots. Complicating things are Monica and Gabe, both of whom have stirred a different kind of desire. Maya’s a teenager who’s…
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Review: The Wonder
Summary from Goodreads: “An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, The Wonder—inspired by numerous European and North American cases of “fasting girls” between the sixteenth century and the twentieth—is a psychological thriller about a child’s murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.“ Thoughts: Before I rave about this book, let it be known that I have…
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How to Read 30 Books in a Year: A New Year’s Resolution
Late December is the time that people start thinking of their resolutions or their goals for the next year, and among the usual suspects of “lose weight” and “eat better” is the ever-present “read more.” But how do you do that? It’s fine to say, to want it, but how do you actually go about reading more than a book or two a year? I’m here to help you. I finished university in April of 2014. I spent four years in courses pertaining to my degree — English Literature. That means that I was either writing essays or reading books. In third year I had five English courses and had…
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“A writer, in some ways, lives and dies with the characters”: An Interview with Madeleine Thien
Says Madeleine Thien, author of the award-winning novel, Do No Say We Have Nothing. I often judge a book by its cover. But when it came to Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (the book also received the Governor General’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), history was not bound to repeat itself. I met Thien during a session organized by Pivot Reading Series late November. As I mustered up the courage to speak to the author, I was soon pleasantly surprised by her honesty and genuine interest. When asked how the people closest to her shaped her into the…
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Of Pirates, Parrots, and Persecution: An Interview with Gary Barwin
Ever heard of a talking parrot? I am assuming you have. Now what about the 500-year-old immortal, gay, and Yiddish-speaking parrot, who has set the literary world abuzz? Oh! Did we mention the parrot is also the narrator of a tale brimming with pirates, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, and the tragic Spanish inquisition from the 12th and 19th centuries? If that just made your head spin, let us direct you to the source—Gary Barwin, a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and books. In his first adult fiction, Yiddish for Pirates, the 52-year-old pulled out all the stops in creating a literary piece…
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Book Review: “Who’s that Girl?” by Mhairi McFarlane
Summary from Goodreads: When Edie is caught in a compromising position at her colleagues wedding, all the blame falls on her – turns out that personal popularity in the office is not that different from your schooldays. Shamed online and ostracised by everyone she knows, Edie’s forced to take an extended sabbatical – ghostwriting an autobiography for hot new acting talent, Elliot Owen. Easy, right? Wrong. Banished back to her hometown of Nottingham, Edie is not only dealing with a man who probably hasn’t heard the word ‘no’ in a decade, but also suffering an excruciating regression to her teenage years as she moves back in with her widowed father…
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5 Places You Can Go to Escape Your Cellphone
In this day and age, we live by the internet and especially through social media. We eat with it, we sleep with it, and we even walk our dogs with it. For many, it takes as much as the inability to connect—being physically unable to access social media—to make us log offline. Below is a list of places and events in Toronto that either do not allow for the use of cellphones or simply do not have WiFi or connection signals, giving you the ability to escape from your cellphone, even for just a few minutes (or hours). The Subway For just $3.00, you can travel underground on Toronto’s subway…
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Book Review: Six of Crows
We’ve all got secrets, we all carry shame, and there are things each of us desperately wants, especially things that are wrong for us. Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows isn’t just a fast-paced, frantically page-turning heist story; it speaks to the complexities of each person, how we’re made of contradictions. Six of Crows is set in the fantasy city of Ketterdam (similar to Holland), where thugs and thieves run the streets and Kaz Brekker is their crippled, trickster king. Multiple viewpoints bring to life the diversity of characters who are all coming together to pull off the impossible: breaking into one of the most notoriously guarded prisons in the world…
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Book vs. Movie: The Descendants
This Best Picture nominee puts forward an honest view of the complexities of grief, loss, and love.