WFP Reviews 2017-2019

Here are the reviews I’ve written for the Winnipeg Free Press since the last round-up. Fourteen of them! (Actually I’ve written 16, but one hasn’t been published yet and one actually seems to have disappeared into the ether, so I’m going to look into it later.) This time I thought maybe I’d order them from best to worst (in my own subjective opinion).

I generally don’t choose to accept a review assignment if I don’t have some reason to think the book could be good, but I do take risks with new authors and subject matter, which may or may not pay off and yes, there were a few duds, with the bottom three being particularly weak. But let’s focus on the positive and highlight some of the stand-outs.

I’ve become a fan of Cixin Liu, a literary giant in his native China, but new to the English-reading world, and after the success of the Three-Body series on our side of the pond, American publishers are combing through his back-list to keep the momentum going. I’ve reviewed two titles in translation over the last couple of years and both stuck with me, but I rank Ball Lightning (which I read last fall) much higher than Supernova Era (read this spring but not listed below since the review won’t come out until closer to the novel’s publication in October). Both are rather grim, truth be told, but the former turned it to better literary purpose, perhaps because the latter was written in an earlier stage of Liu’s career.

Starlight is Richard Wagamese’s final, technically unfinished novel (though it falls only a chapter short). Wagamese was one of Canada’s Indigenous literary luminaries, and it’s my first time reading this author who was unfortunately taken too soon.

Cory Doctorow is an old favourite of mine, but while I’ve rarely been disappointed, Radicalized surprised me with its impact and with how politically on-point it is, which is particularly difficult with a collection of four novellas rather than a single, cohesive novel. Four urgent stories about our present moment of crisis. Doctorow, as always, is best read fresh, so don’t leave it on your nightstand too long.

Radicalized

Starlight

Ball Lightning

Seventeen

Beyond Incarceration

Lent

Waste Tide

Red Moon

Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

Head On

Retrograde

Prefecture D

Those Who Walk the Road

Catching Up On More Fiction Reviews

More stuff from the Free Press from this past year, all fiction. It’s been long enough since I’ve done an update I think it’s worth highlighting a couple. In fact, almost all of these titles come from favourite authors of mine (a couple newbies in there as well), but Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy by Cixin Liu (my new favourite foreign-language writer), is a must-read, along with its predecessors. Seriously, one of the all-time best science fiction trilogies, even in translation. You simply cannot skip it.

Also, Kelly Link, if you haven’t read her, do it. She’s so busy as an editor and rarely releases a collection, but she is one of the great short story writers. Get In Trouble meets the high bar set by her earlier work and I very much enjoyed it.

Get In Trouble

Death’s End

Necessity

Last Year

Invisible Planets

The Collapsing Empire

The Last Neanderthal

Origin

Book Review: Second Contacts

So what happens after first contact? Leaving aside War of the Worlds scenarios where one race is completely destroyed, after the initial shock, what’s it like five or fifty years into  a universe where we know we’re not alone? Human history provides several possible outcomes: ranging from genocide to colonization to occupation to friendship and political alliance to the innocuous missionary outposts or even lone, Marco Polo figure.

Each of these come up in Second Contacts at one point of another, but this is a Canadian anthology . . .

Read my full review at AE.

Book Review: Get In Trouble

Link writes magical realism, many-layered tales of complex, fully realized human beings in settings and situations far less constrained to reality than traditional mainstream works. The marriage of literary style and character depth with the surrealist plots and settings traditional to fantasists dates at least as far back as the adjectival German-language writer Franz Kafka.

Read my full review at the Winnipeg Free Press.

Book Review: The Ballad of Danny Wolfe

The Ballad of Danny Wolfe is very much a Prairie story, and understanding Wolfe, IP, and Indigenous street gangs in general means understanding the West, particular Manitoba and Saskatchewan: our small towns, life on “the Rez”, the history of colonialism and residential schools, modern racial tensions, and the unique way these cultural strands all play out in Winnipeg’s core, IP’s birthplace.

Read my full review at the Winnipeg Free Press.

Book Review: The Affinities

Wilson imagines how a series of neurological, psychological and physiological tests might determine a sort of modern-day Zodiac, sorting humankind into “affinities” based on their deepest truest selves. Early on, he makes the point that the families we’re born into might be arbitrary, but he does suggest that being loved because you’re part of the same affinity with someone rather than because of a shared genetic lineage comes with its own problems.

Read the full review at AE.