Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

This book was quite difficult for me, because it is about doctors, and I have a problem with obsessive ruminations specifically about veins. So while I'm cool to get needles, thinking about (or seeing) what needles actually do affects me very strongly. Normally, I wouldn't have finished reading this book, with its graphic - albeit necessary - descriptions of medical procedures, but it was really, really good. So I read it. But I'm warning you, if you're at all squeamish (particularly about blood and body stuff), this will be a difficult read.

It is a great book. It has an interesting format, sort of part novel, part short stories. Each story is an entity in itself, and could probably exist alone, but the stories follow the same characters through the process of getting into medical school, and then their careers as doctors and their relationships with each other. And they are fascinating.

You know when you read a book, and you think, the author must be a doctor since he writes doctors so well? Or he must have had a relationship like this, because he writes it so well? Well I had that reaction to every single part of this book, including the pregnant woman (I'm pretty sure the author has never been pregnant, although who knows) and both sides of the romantic relationship between Fitzgerald and Ming. Lam has a rare gift for clear, personal writing across genders, backgrounds and emotional states. His characters are very real.

I am actually having a hard time putting into words how I feel about this novel. It is very powerful. The stories are frightening in their truthfulness, and their insight into human nature. This is the kind of thing people are talking about when they say "the human condition". That's what this book is about. The human condition, as seen through doctors.

I wish I could do it justice with my review but I'm having a really hard time. Just...read this book. Really, do yourself a favour and read something good. It's this book. Do it.

Five CN Towers out of five.

Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

Now this one is cheating a bit, because it's not actually set in Toronto. There are a couple chapters that happen in the city, to be sure, but if you're looking for novels that capture the essence of Toronto, keep walking. This is not that book. So why review it here? Well, I read it thinking it was going to be set in Toronto (I found it on a list of books that are), so why waste the opportunity to recommend a good book?

And it was good. Truly lovely. There are two stories being told, each with a first person narration. The first is the story of Will, a Cree bush pilot from Moose Factory who spends the story in a coma in a hospital bed. His story is about how he got to that point. The second is Annie, Will's niece, who visits him every day, sitting by his bedside and telling him her story, how she got to where she is. The stories intertwine repeatedly - if not always in the events they describe, then certainly in theme - and revolve around Suzanne, Annie's younger sister who has disappeared "down south" with a troubled boy. The chapters alternate between the two narratives.

Will's story deals mainly with loss. Through his alcoholism and indiscretions Will has lost a lot of things, and a lot of people. He develops a strange friendship with an aging bear. He struggles with the aftermath of Suzanne's disappearance, the implication of biker involvement, and Marius Netmaker - Suzanne's boyfriend's brother - and his accusations that Will is a police informant.

Annie's story follows her to Toronto, where she searches for Suzanne and meets Gordon, a mute man and her protector. I liked that she meets him at Queen and Bathurst - anyone familiar with that corner will find this scene plays out clearly. Annie's search takes her to Montreal, and then New York, and a brief career as a catalogue model, before she returns home with Gordon to Moose Factory.

I can't even explain how evocative the writing is. The sounds of the geese, the snowmobiles, the crackling fire - you will hear them as you read. The vast, empty expanses of land and water fill this book. I've never been up north but I can imagine clearly the James Bay, hunting on Akimiski Island, shopping at the Northern Store. It is beautiful writing that pulls you utterly into that world.

There are a lot of strong themes in the novel: isolation, loyalty, what it means to make your way through the world as a good person. What I took from the book was the message that people are the same all over. Annie tells a story of her grandfather showing her the stars, and saying "They are the same stars you see anywhere you go in the world[...]My own auntie told me that, but I didn't lean it until I travelled far away." I believe some people - like Annie - know that people are the same all over, but they just have to go see it for themselves.

All in all this was a beautiful story. I highly recommend it - even though it's not set in Toronto.

Four CN Towers out of five

Where We Have to Go by Lauren Kirshner

No critic or reviewer can be objective; it stands to reason that every story and experience affects us differently depending on a multitude of factors that encompass who we are and where we come from. But I find some books are harder than others to give a fair review, or at least a review that will help people who are not me decide if they want to read it.

This book is one of those, because I identified so strongly with the protagonist, Lucy Bloom. She is two years older than me, and the story is her growing up in the nineties, dealing with body image issues, longing to be popular, aching to understand the adult world (and then, the more she understands it, longing to be rid of it). The friend that she makes halfway through the book, Erin, is like a composite of the three or four friends I had in junior high and high school who saved me by being so smart and strange. A lot of what happens to Lucy didn't happen to me, but she is such a perfect encapsulation of being a girl of that age, in that time, that it's like reading my own diary.

So that's why I'm not sure how much this review will apply to those who don't fall in the category of "girl born in the early eighties and raised in middle-class (to lower-middle class) Western society", but I imagine you will still like the book. It is absolutely wonderfully written, and as remarkable for the stories left out than those included.

Lucy is eleven when we first meet her. Her parents' relationship is falling apart; her father is a travel agent who has never been anywhere, and is a little too friendly with a woman at his AA meetings, and her mother is a thrift-store shopping, just a little too embarrassingly foreign woman with the classic "Jewish mom" concerns of getting Lucy fed and fixing her up with a nice boy. Lucy takes refuge in watching Alf reruns (remember Alf?) and nurtures compulsions that, if her parents paid attention, are clear early warning signs of the eating disorder she later develops.

The book follows Lucy through about eight years of her life. I loved how major stories that could have taken up the whole book - her parents' divorce, her eating disorder, her relationship with her grandfather - are presented as important, but just one piece each of a whole life. This is not a story about eating disorders or family relationships or death. It is a story about growing up as a girl. It is in some ways painfully 90s, but in other ways perfectly timeless.

I read that Kirshner was mentored by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense to me - this book is like the spiritual successor to Cat's Eye. However, while Kirshner touches on many of Atwood's pet themes - particularly women and girls, and how they act towards and around each other - she has her own very distinct style. The tone is not as dark as in Atwood's work; throughout the story, I always had hope for Lucy, a hope I never have for Atwood's characters. Kirshner is masterful with light humour that doesn't intrude on the momentum of even the sad parts of the story. She is absolutely a gifted writer; I would read more of her work in a heartbeat.

Four CN Towers out of five.

The Heart Does Not Bend by Makeda Silvera

Some books are good because they are difficult. Not difficult to understand, but difficult to come to terms with. The characters in The Heart Does Not Bend are so real and flawed, it is one of those wonderfully written but difficult books.

The novel follows some of the life of Maria Galloway - or Mama as she is universally known - through the eyes of her granddaughter Molly. It starts in Kingston, Jamaica, where Mama is in her element in her house at the end of a dead-end street, raising Molly and baking treats to sell to the local restaurant. Halfway through the novel, Mama decides to go to "foreign" - Toronto, in this case - and she takes Molly with her. The book remarkably covers six generations of women (if you count Maria's mother, Mammy) as they struggle with their relationships with each other and with Mama, the matriarch.

Mama is a remarkable character. Sometimes I sympathized with her: she took in whoever came along, but didn't take any guff from men; she tried very hard to raise Molly well; she was an enterprising and independent woman who built a family and a home over and over. But there are times in the book when she is just so frustrating. Her refusal to accept her son Mikey's homosexuality, and her downright harassment of Molly and her female partner; the way she spoils her great-grandson Vittorio and turns a blind eye to his thieving; her utter stubbornness and refusal to be considerate. 

Mama is lovable, frustrating, generous and backwards. She is written so well, I began to feel like she was my own mother; certainly as the daughter of a strong-willed, loving and obstinate woman I could relate to many of the feelings Molly and her mother, Glory, express. The world of the book is populated with very believable but wonderfully unique characters, but Mama really steals the show. 

There are a lot of interesting themes in the story, most notably the idea of "good men" and what different characteristics of masculinity are valued by people of Mama's generation and upbringing, and how that is starting to change in Molly's time. Mama loves her dear son Freddie, who is an inconsiderate jerk and a woman beater; she relies on Peppie, but rewards his helpfulness and loyalty by taking advantage of his hospitality and acting horribly to his wife; she adores Mikey until she figures out what the situation is with him and his "friend" Frank, then she moves to another country and refuses to write to him. She even briefly takes back her abusive ex-husband. 

Then of course there is the fascinating phenomenon of what begins to seem like a genetic predisposition to teen pregnancy. Four generations of Galloway women - Mama, her daughter Glory, Molly and her daughter Ciboney - all have babies at fifteen years old. Of course the men are absent, and it seems the mothers are powerless to prevent a repeat of the situation for their own daughters.

I know I'm making it seem heavy, but the book had a lot of fun moments and funny characters. I love the great-aunts, super-religious Ruth and super-fashionable Joyce. I loved some of the stylistic choices the author made: despite all the pregnancies, there is never a description of heterosexual sex, but there are several descriptive paragraphs of Molly and her female lover, Rose, having sex. 

Toronto as a backdrop isn't very distinctive; there were a few place names, but really the "foreign" action could have happened in any North American city. Still, it was nice to read about Jamaican immigrants and about women, after all the white dudes I seem to have been reading lately.

I loved this book, by the way. It was rich and lovely and character-driven. I give it four CN Towers out of five.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

I picked this book up at the library and read it on my commute, and that was the perfect way to do it, I think. The story is set in a future downtown Toronto decimated by poverty and riots, and there is something so totally eerie about reading it while the streetcar you're on rolls down the same streets described in the story, past protesting members of Occupy Bay Street. It hits close to home, for sure.

The story is part dystopian fiction, part supernatural thriller. It deals with a Toronto separated into the dangerous downtown and the safe and prosperous suburbs; in "the Burn", there are no police, no services, and things are run by mob rule. However, an organic community has sprung up, and a barter economy, and I found a lot of parallels between this world and the kind of society the protesters in St. James Park are establishing on a micro level.

The protagonist is a young, single mother of Caribbean descent, named Ti-Jeanne. She lives with her grandmother in the former Riverdale Farm (!) across the street from the Necropolis, which has a prominent part in the story - making me so glad that I was able to tour it during Doors Open Toronto this year! Gros-Jeanne, the grandmother, is a healer and a woman who "serves the spirits"; she is beloved by the community although her relationship with her granddaughter is sometimes strained.

How to describe this plot? In a nutshell, the premier of Ontario requires a human heart (!) and for various reasons the leader of the "posse", Rudy, is commissioned to obtain one. He orders Tony, a former nurse who was fired because of a drug addiction, to basically kill someone and get their heart. Tony is Ti-Jeanne's former lover (and baby daddy) and comes to her and Gros-Jeanne for help escaping the Burn and Rudy's long reach.

From there you need to discover for yourself, but it gets pretty intense! There are spirits and visions and drugs and people get flayed with knives! But it is also great. I like the way it is written. Almost all the characters are Caribbean and speak in that almost musical dialect: he go do this, she nah go do that, etc. The setting is perfect; it both is and isn't Toronto. I love reading about areas that are familiar to me, especially when the author describes how they have changed since the riots - those familiar with downtown Toronto will recognize Dundas subway station, the Don Valley Parkway, Allan Gardens, and especially the CN Tower where the climactic scene unfolds. This is a story that needs - and loves - its setting.

What I loved most about the book was the characterization of the protagonist Ti-Jeanne, and the unapologetic use of female characters throughout. Ti-Jeanne is flawed and roundly drawn - completely three-dimensional. She is feeling the same disbelief as the reader when the spirits first start to appear; we take our cues from her. Her sexuality and sexual desire are portrayed as completely unremarkable. Most of all I loved that the two heroes of this story are women of colour: a single mother and a witch. Amazing amazing.

Hopkinson sticks women in lots of peripheral roles as well that in most stories would probably default to men: the Premier is female, the heart surgeon is female (with a female partner), the lead street urchin (oh you better believe there are street urchins) is female, and on and on.

I have to say I loved reading this. It is a quick read (it only took me five one-way commutes) and totally engaging. It can be dark at times and I really wasn't kidding about people getting flayed with knives, but there are strong themes of hope and redemption and it is brilliantly written.

Four towers out of five.