Category: Reviews

This is an unusual memoir by a writer about a writer. Adam Gopnik tells us all about himself, his blessed marriage, and his hugely successful career in New York City where he is famous as an essayist and a novelist.

At the Stranger’s Gate covers the 1980s when Gopnik and his bride left a secure spot in their hometown of Montreal and decided to go for the bigger challenges that New York offered. Gopnik had a fellowship in art history and planned to get writing jobs on the side. He was soon working at the Frick Art Reference Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and sending essays to the The New Yorker which quickly earned him a permanent spot.

He and Martha could only afford a basement studio which measured 9 x 11 feet and was situated on the Upper East Side. They called it their Blue Room, after a popular song of the day and were apparently happy for three years. They explored the whole of Manhattan, often by walking, and the book’s title refers to a distant corner of Central Park which they loved.

Adam’s writing career continued to flourish, thanks to his funny and frank way of expressing himself. There were also some terrible moments, however, as when his brand new suit trousers fell out of the garment bag on the way home and he never did find them. In the 80s, New York was becoming a city of greed where its beauty (like art and music) and its necessities (food and real estate) went to the highest bidder. This book gives an excellent picture of how one family persevered in making it a successful home.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is the up-close story of a number of Indigenous girls and women living in a northern Canadian town and suffering some form of hurt and disaster for which they have not been helped. We hear about these women as a group, but this book shows what they suffer individually.

It begins with a possible incident on The Break, the name given a strip of barren land that runs through a poorer part of town. Stella, a young Metis mother, looks out and sees a body knocked down and blood on the ground. When the police come, they don’t believe her story. The rest of the book introduces a number of other girls and women from First Nations who have their own tragedies. They all turn to each other for comfort, and usually have a wise and kind grandmother, called Kookom who helps them through. There is also Officer Scott, a Metis policeman, who feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city.

This is Katherena Vermette’s first book of fiction (she has published North End Love Songs, a book of poetry). She does a fine job of showing the resiliency of Indigenous women and the power of family love and also helps the rest of us try to understand how to help them.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

There have been many books written on Glenn Gould but this one, by the music critic of The Toronto Star and author of a number of musical biographies, brings new light to this complicated genius.

Born in the northern edge of the Beaches neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, Gould happened to live next door to the leading print journalist, Robert Fulford. Fulford watched Gould’s talent bursting forth but also noted the relentless pressure from his mother. Fulford and Gould formed the New Music Associates, a concert series that didn’t last long, unlike Gould’s piano-playing career which took off and had Gould playing in Russia in 1957, all over Europe in 1958 and in a U.S. TV debut in 1960 with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein.

In 1955 Gould made his first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and this has become one of the greatest recordings in music history. While Gould’s musical career was flourishing, his personal life was not. He lived at home into his thirties, had few friends and one short-lived love affair with a married woman. Goddard notes his loneliness, and difficulty in making and keeping friends. He had many eccentricities in playing, and insisted on using a particular chair with cut-off legs. By 1964 he gave his last public performance in Los Angeles and from then on made recordings only.

They are famous recordings, however. A recent BBC documentary on Gould suggests he may have suffered from Asperger syndrome, or autistic spectrum disorder. This would explain his need to have control of things as well as his intense concentration on what he was doing. Gould died aged 50. He has left the rest of us a wonderful musical legacy.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is another novel by Helen Dunmore, the American writer who has become famous for some fifteen books in which she uses huge canvases of actual history as backdrops to up-close human tragedies. Birdcage Walk is not only her latest book, it is also her last. Dunmore died in the spring of 2017.

Birdcage Walk takes place as the French Revolution is boiling up. It is set, however, in the UK, in the town of Bristol. Here, as elsewhere, England is at the height of the Romantic era and British radicalism. A young bride, Lizzie Fawkes, has grown up in radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. She is married to John Diner Tredevant, however, who is a property developer and heavily invested in Bristol’s property boom. He is looking for money to finance a particularly fine terrace overlooking the city’s two-hundred-foot drop of the Gorge. As the Revolution in France sharpens, the investors are dropping away. John is angry that his wife continues to express her radical views and does not put his business interests first.

This is the story of a marriage and how it struggles to survive against forces far away that it can’t control. Dunmore is highly praised for writing that is both elegant and revealing.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is a passionate love letter to the city of New York inspired by the life of an American woman who lived there in the 30’s and became the highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world

The woman was called Margaret Fishback, and the author of this book bases Lillian Boxfish on her life, but apart from that writes an entirely new novel. Lilian was born in 1926 to a comfortable family living in Washington. She found she could write, and was determined to get to New York and earn her own living that way. Her family helped her initially, and insisted she live in the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown, until she could afford her own apartment. It didn’t take very long before Lilian landed a job at R.H. Macy’s writing advertising copy. She was original and witty and very soon earning a top salary. She also wrote poems, funny and charming. Her first book Oh, Do not ask for Promises was a smash hit and sold out, as did all her others up to the last Nobody’s Darling.

Lilian lived in six apartments altogether. She also fell deeply in love with a manager of a department at Macy’s, married and had one son whom she adored always. What distinguished her from other successful New Yorkers was her passion for the city, the actual streets. She walked every day, usually about five miles, on the way to work, at lunch time and in the evening to parties. She felt the street was the source of the latest things humans have invented and she looked for these all the time. She never ran into danger in her walking.

It’s a very original book and a new look at a city many have tried to describe before.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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With Canada on the brink of having its first female astronaut Governor General, it seems a good time to review the new book by Alexander McCall Smith in his beloved Isabel Dalhousie series.

Called A Distant View of Everything, this novel watches Isabel’s struggle with a match-making problem while simultaneously trying to coax her first-born to accept his newborn baby brother and attempting to edit her own publication on philosophical questions – her area of expertise. She does manage thanks to her own kindness and common sense, and the help of her adoring husband, a young musician.

Alexander McCall Smith has built up a number of series of books starting with the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, as well as stand-alone books. They have been translated into more than forty languages and are best-sellers world-wide.  He makes his home in Edinburgh.

Entertainment Weekly calls him genial and wise. You put down his books feeling not only entertained, but reassured and content. This one is no exception.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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In her debut collection of poetry, Marilyn Sargeant, a contemplative and introspective writer, as well as light-hearted and playful in her verses, presents her readers with both narrative and lyrical poetry that is innocent and explorative, as well as dark and brooding—touching upon topics which have stood the test of time in their truth and importance for contemporary audiences.  Her narrator observes all that is around her, often in wonderment.  Her gaze at the universe as she experiences it translates directly to her pen as though her eyes were an all-seeing lens—taking everything in.

Life experiences, real or imagined, blend seamlessly with Marilyn Sargeant’s observations and more troubling accounts of society gone awry.  Ms. Sargeant asks us to question our own behaviours, beliefs, and our treatment of the environment—particularly our natural world, which she reveres in a way that is akin to some of the great Romantics.

Venturing deeper into human experience, the poet explores themes such as mortality and inner conflict, speaking plainly and simply, yet without sacrificing depth.  She asks us to look beyond the surface and to examine the layers of our understanding(s) of the way things are, and perhaps the way they could be.

Further, Ms. Sargeant’s metaphor of rooms is threaded throughout her collection.  She likens a waiting room to society’s shifts and changes—not always for the better, mind you—the rooms representing a glimpse of modern life.  She reminds us that life is an aggregation of moments, beautiful and painful, all of which make up our “rooms.”  The nostalgia of past seasons, the familiar landscapes and soft breezes of our youth, the cages in which we are trapped in our dark hours—these “rooms” are explored elegantly by Ms. Sargeant’s nimble and clever narrator.  And, there is just enough spice to keep the reader on his or her toes.

Throughout her collection, Ms. Sargeant articulates what it means to investigate our external and internal worlds—our waiting rooms.  She has created a volume of finely crafted poetry which speaks to all of us, and which extends her (his) stories into our own.  We can relate since, in so many ways, we share the same room.  Visitors may come and go, but our room remains ours to tend to, to care for, and to appreciate in all its beauty and simplicity.

Reviewed by Anna Grace, B.A.H. Eng. Lit., M.Ed.

This is the intriguing story of two young British women who set up the first marriage bureau in the country, and made a resounding success of it.

There were the days in the 1930’s in England where there was no such thing as looking for a mate “online” – the system had not yet been invented. The result was many lonely people without means of meeting people. In this book, one young woman, a farmer’s daughter in England, visited her uncle in India where he ran a tea plantation and employed a number of young men from England to help him. The daughter was attracted to one of these men but in the end did not marry him. She saw first hand, however, how these men and hundreds like them in Britain’s other colonies, got very lonely because there were no women for them to marry. The visiting niece listened to her uncle’s suggestion that she set up an office in London where these men could meet a wife while on leave.

She knew another girl, also living in London, who was prepared to help her. They cleared the idea with legal authorities and the rest of the book tells the touching story of London in 1939, some few months before heading into World War II. Many men and women were longing to find a happy marriage.

The author, Penrose Halston, had used the Marriage Bureau herself and made a happy marriage. Later in 1986, she became the owner of a new bureau which had in fact merged with the original one. Halston had worked as a teacher and writer and handles these cases with sensitivity. They make for amusing as well as optimistic reading. In ten years the girls who ran the original Bureau created over three thousand marriages and only heard of two that ended in divorce.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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