I’m a little torn on this one, honestly! I thought it was a bit slow for my tastes, mostly at the beginning, and I would have appreciated a bit more wallowing in emotions, but I also understand this is a book designed in part to ape Victorian conventions and mores, so perhaps I was never going to get the version of this book that would have pleased me best. And what a strange little book it was! This is an alternate history/speculative take on quite […]
Childhood favorite revisited, more than holds up.
I must have read this book dozens of times when I was a kid (I think I had an illustrated version as well, but I can’t find it, nor any record of it online, so far all I know I may have made it up?), but I haven’t read it, oh I don’t know, at least since middle school? I also never read any of L.M. Montgomery’s other books. No idea why I did this. Even as a kid, I was all over sequels, a little […]
Not a cologne, not a songwriter
When trying to find this book on amazon.com to provide the review link, it was remarkably hard. Amazon.com wants me to buy cologne, to buy sheet music, ANYTHING. The first book example I could find was in French. This book won the 2010 Governor’s General Award, surely it couldn’t be that obscure? Poor Can Lit, still neglected by the rest of the world. Cool Water is set in a fictional Saskatchewan farming community, and takes place over the course of about a day. In the […]
One Crowded Hour of Glorious Life Is Worth an Age Without a Name (and a Cannonball)
All her life, Valancy Stirling has lived on a quiet street in an ugly little house in northern Ontario, Canada and never dared to contradict her domineering mother and unforgiving aunt. The deeply squelching kind of small town life L.M. Montgomery describes for Valancy is one that I recognize as Canadian, but of course is universal. To escape her life of quiet desperation, Valancy has created a world apart for herself called “The Blue Castle”. This private realm in which things are beautiful and she […]