Lost Between the Edges by Eldon Garnet

Well, you all should know by now how much I hate it when authors use real people as characters in fictional stories. I'm not sure if this could be categorized as a straight up fictional story - it's sort of more of a polemic - but it does involve a narrative of events that didn't happen, and other (probably) fictional characters, so I'm not super into it. The real person in question is Ernst Zundel, who is still living, so I'm surprised this publisher wasn't sued (and maybe they were, who knows).

The story follows X, a university student working frantically on his thesis on antisemitism and persecution of the Jews. He is a member of the Anti-Racist Alliance, and with the other members of the ARA, cooks up a plan to infiltrate the "bunker" of known neo-Nazi/Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and get video footage of both the inside of the bunker, and of Zundel saying something incriminatingly racist. The group poses as a CBC film crew doing a feature on free speech issues (Zundel had a case before the courts on the issue at the time), and as a supplementary crew of documentary filmmakers filming the filming of the feature (why??).

They are allowed into the bunker, but X is frustrated with their lack of progress on bringing Zundel down, and ends up setting fire to the bunker in the middle of the night (something that did happen in 1995, and for which the Jewish Armed Resistance Movement claimed credit, but no charges were ever filed). This poking of the hornets' nest sets into motion a dangerous conflict between the neo-Nazis and the ARA, leading to a huge post-baseball brawl in Christie Pits Park, obviously and clumsily meant as an homage to the historic 1933 riot in that same park.

The story is interspersed with sometimes lengthy documents - court transcripts, excerpts from Zundel's published works, etc. - showing the arguments against the Holocaust having happened. One excerpt from The Turner Diaries describing the bombing of an FBI building is supposed to, I suppose, draw an equivalence in violence between the fascists and anti-fascists? Towards the end of the book the documents turn around and refute the findings of the Holocaust deniers. I have to say, I didn't fully understand the point of these interjections and found them a rather tedious addition.

I didn't like this book. The story was compelling enough but the writing style was awful; every sentence was punctuated with an abundance of colons, and thoughts and speech were indicated in quotation marks, so it was hard to tell if someone was thinking or if they had spoken the words aloud. X was a poorly drawn character who, besides his anti-racist views, I found it hard to sympathize with or connect to in any way.

The book does use Toronto well and name checks many places (the bunker on Carlton Street and Christie Pits Park, as well as Cafe Diplomatico on College Street spring to mind). But as realistic as the city is, the characters are ridiculous - they make poor choices, have seemingly no real goal behind their actions, and no actual characteristics besides "fascist" and "anti-fascist". I would not recommend this book.

One CN Tower out of five.

The Unlikely Victims by Alvin Abram

You must know by now that I have a soft spot for mysteries. A classic whodunnit - most easily captured in a short story - is my very favourite, but I also enjoy a more methodical police procedural. In this book Abram puts a little bit of an odd couple/buddy cop flavour into the mix as well.

The Unlikely Victims is actually a series of mysteries, in chronological order, investigated by our narrator, Detective Gabe Garshowitz, and his partner Detective Iris Forester. It's not quite one cohesive story, but neither is it a series of short stories - it's sort of a novel divided into small vignettes. Gabe is an old cop, close to retirement, who has a lot of personal demons. He believes overwork and neglect on his part drove his wife to suicide, which in turn caused a big rift between him and his daughter. He is lonely, has bad knees, and gets into conflicts with some asshole he works with. Then he gets assigned to partner with/mentor Iris, who is a younger woman just getting started as a detective.

I liked Iris because she doesn't take any shit, and she has the kind of attitude I would imagine you would have to develop as a female cop. The two work well together as main characters and I liked their dynamic.

Each mystery leads to a little bit more development of the bond between them, and of self-discovery for Gabe, until the last one which effects him very personally and draws the book full circle.

Toronto is more of a vibe than a setting, and Jewish Toronto is well represented, which is a nice change of pace. The book is well written and well paced; I liked some of the choices Abram made, like starting each case with a partial description of events so that the reader knows a little more than the detectives, but not everything. There were a lot of typographical errors though, and some really baffling changes in viewpoint, sometimes mid-paragraph.

All in all I liked it. It was pretty good and kept me reading. I'm not sure if I would go back to this author as there is certainly better mystery fiction out there, but it was a good diversion and I do recommend it.

Three 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 Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke by Steven Hayward

The first time I visited Toronto as an adult, without my parents, was about four years ago. My good friend Matt was living here at the time, in a house on the edge of Christie Pits. He met me and the friend I was traveling with at Christie Station and we walked through the park, down into the pit and up the other side. It was February then and so it was difficult to get an idea of the park, but Matt pointed out where everything would be when the snow cleared: the playground, the community garden, the baseball diamond. He told us about the riot on the baseball field that had happened in the summer of 1933; anti-Semitic rabble rousers had showed up to a baseball game with a Swastika flag, and the largely Jewish audience and roster confronted them, the fight spilling out on to Bloor Street.

I already felt a sort of personal connection then, however distant, with this book when I picked it up, because it deals with that same riot, building a large and detailed history around it so that the baseball game itself doesn't start until about 20 pages before the end of the book. The story itself follows a few of the key players through a few days in their ordinary lives in Toronto, 1933. Ruthie the Commie, an amazing and impressively written character, who knows that her looks keep her in employment at the fur store and struggles with the ethical dilemma of living as someone who benefits immensely from capitalism and the beauty standard, while trying to organize a walk-out among the wage slaves of the Spadina sweatshops. Lucio Burke, a not-quite-Italian, not-quite-anything-else teenager who is in love with Ruthie, and whose longing to belong somewhere is maybe the most pervasive unarticulated theme of any novel I've read. Dubie Diamond, obsessed with Darwin, who cuts off his own finger to speed up his evolution.

Obviously this is a character-driven story, and sometimes I found it a bit difficult to keep up; most of the time the author deals with three generations of each family, and there are lots of backstories and histories interspersed throughout the narrative, so at some points I kind of lost track of who was related to whom. I should have made myself a chart.

What I loved so much about this novel was the way Hayward covers so many issues without even mentioning most of them. This book deals with themes of race, war, politics, power, democracy, adolescence, belonging, family, religion, faith, immigration, mortality and multiculturalism, but I didn't actually realize it until I had put it down. I have never read an author who can so expertly grapple with heavy subjects without letting the story slip away from him. I wasn't spellbound throughout, but I was never bored, and I never felt preached to.

This is another book that puts Toronto front and centre - it literally could not have been set anywhere else. I was glad to read it now because the Toronto of the 1930s is not something I am familiar with at all, and it was cool to read about the garment workers of Spadina, the knife salesmen in the St. Lawrence Market, and the old College streetcar. Most of the characters live on Beverly Street (one of them buys a house there for $500 cash!) and a couple live on Clinton Street at College (Little Italy seems to be a popular place to set Toronto stories). Of course Christie Pits plays a big role, especially near the end, and there is a big baseball scene set at Withrow Park - which I read on the streetcar just as the robotic voice announced: "Next stop, Withrow Avenue.". The story definitely has a very Toronto flavour, and it was fascinating to see the struggles of early multiculturalism, as well as many burgeoning movements like Communism and (I think I saw it!) feminism.

In case it isn't clear, I adored this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good story, but especially to those interested in the everyday life of Jewish and Italian immigrants in 1930s Toronto. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Four CN Towers out of five.