Category: Reviews

This is a new novel by the amazing British writer, Penelope Lively.

In “Family Album” we are taken into a big Edwardian house, set in a quarter acre garden, in which a family of six children grow, eventually leave home for fame and fortune, only to return again and again to the spot that made them what they are.

Lively concentrates on Alison, the rather blowsy, pink-cheeked mother, who will tell anyone who will listen that motherhood and home-making and cooking have been her passions and she will pursue them to the end. She does –with usually benign, sometimes disastrous results: both on her taciturn, writer-husband, and six children. There is a mystery in this brood, involving the au pair girl Ingrid, and it hangs over the household until the very end.

Lively takes the story into present day, when the girls all get jobs, don’t go in for full-time mothering and cooking, in fact barely start families at all. It’s a provocative look at everyday life, not only in the U.K.. One son lives in Toronto with a Chinese-Canadian wife, a daughter in Italy, another in Paris.

Lively has won numerous prizes for her twenty books of fiction and non-fiction. Critics praise her subtle understatement, also her “blend of romance and stinging commentary”. Perhaps what endears her most is her compassion toward her characters. That certainly happens in “Family Album”.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a very touching and down-to-earth story of his own family by the famed British dramatist, Alan Bennett.

Known and loved for his work on Beyond the Fringe, numerous stage shows, as well as books including “The Uncommon Reader”, Alan Bennett is completely frank in describing his growing up over a butcher’s shop in the manufacturing city of Leeds, Yorkshire. His father ran the shop. The house had no front hall. It did have great affection between his parents, his brother and himself as well as happy, often hilarious times, with a pair of unconventional aunts.

All this came to an end when the family moved to a small nearby village – “to be in the country”. His mother was stricken with depression and later dementia. His father had to learn to drive a car and made the 50-mile round trip to the hospital every day. Bennett has written the true and heart-breaking story of “care-giving”. He does it without any of the “splother” that his family despises, and it is very affecting and courageous in its frankness.

Not a jolly book for Christmas – but a good one just the same.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a jolting new novel by the young Vancouver writer, Douglas Coupland. It’s the story of five young people in different parts of the world, who get stung by a bee.

This is at a time in the near future when bees are supposed to be extinct. The result is tremendous pressure to isolate this group and try to analyse them. Why were they picked to be stung?

One of them, Diana from North Bay,Ontario,admits that they are “damaged goods – deeply isolated in our own ways”. Coupland probes their isolation in rapid, modern prose. When they all get together,they find a way to get in touch by writing and telling stories. This is the world of cell phones, Blackberries, Ipods – all things that tend to make life faster but not necessarily closer.

Coupland takes an original look at this fast, modern world and the loneliness it may be leading us into – quite unsettling for an older reviewer !! – but energetic and provocative. He has written an international bestseller,”JPod”, and nine novels which have been widely translated and published in most countries around the world.

Review by Anne McDougall

It’s easy to enjoy a Jane Gardam book but hard to review it.

She’s the British writer with a long list of novels and non-fiction, not to mention every literary prize you can think of. Her gift I suppose is her originality, and this, in turn, makes her very funny.

“A Long Way from Verona” came out in l97l and has been reprinted five times since then. This is an attractive paper edition by Abacus.

A little girl of nine is going to school in England during World War ll. She and her teachers go on reading Dickens, Hardy and Shakespeare until interrupted by an air raid on the Junior School. They carry on in British fashion, when one day the heroine, Jessica Vye takes a different route home and stumbles across an escaped prisoner of war. She turns her experience into a poem called “The Maniac”. To her teachers’ consternation this wins a prize in “The Times” .

Up til then, Jessica had been considered unconventional and troublesome in her far-out essays. The book is written from her point of view; it does contain the standards of her broad-minded father,as well as a couple of superior teachers.
It is an intimate look at a writer’s sensibilities, even one as young as nine years old. Unpretentious, it is joyful in its candour and very funny in its anecdotes.

Review by Anne McDougall

Alexander McCall Smith takes you where you want to be…whether in sunny Africa (The No.l Ladies Detective Agency) or misty Edinburgh, with the Isabel Dalhousie series, which he does with this latest book.

The Scots writer has a penetrating pen in describing these neighbourhoods, as well as a canny way of bringing his characters to life. But these people are human,recognizable and likeable – a refreshing change from many of today’s books with their dark, unresolved stories of human relationships gone wrong.

In “The Lost Art of Gratitude” the Edinburgh philosopher, Isabel Dalhousie, is still editing her review on Ethics, and probing into social problems that come her way. But these days she is happy with her fiance Jamie, and their 2-year old son, Charlie and does not get as perturbed as in earlier books. It is a pleasure walking or driving the cobblestone streets of Edinburgh and enjoying the tea and scones, or wild salmon steaks in the dining-rooms she visits.

McCall Smith shows her growing more tender in her dealings, as her own home becomes ever happier. A woman financier deals Isabel a pretty wicked doube-cross, however, which she proceeds to resolve, with Jamie’s help. You can relate to these people – which is probably McCall Smith’s greatest gift.

He himself is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has served on national and international bodies concernd with bioethics. It is amazing how quickly he turns out these novels. This is another one to enjoy.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is brave and revealing story of a famous Toronto musician who made his name and fame almost despite his famous father.

Dan Hill is a singer-songwriter with a pile of hit records, a Grammy, five Junos as well as gold and platinum albums to his name.His father was Daniel Grafton Hill lll, a well-known Civil Rights Activist in Canada. He had suffered from racism, as a Black man in America, but in Canada he set very high standards of behaviour and achievement, both for himself and his three children. The eldest, the author of this book, bore the brunt of this pressure. Although he met, and exceeded his father’s expectations, this story gives a touchingly frank picture of his battle to the end to please his demanding, charming but bullying father.

The book gives fascinating insights into the world of music – its charm, as well as dangers and intrigue. With this book we get to know the Hill family quite well: Dan’s brother is Lawrence,who wrote “The Book of Negroes” two years ago – now a best-selling novel. On the larger stage, Barack Obama has written his own memoirs, of growing up half-white, half-black in America. It is a world this generation is finally getting to know. This book stands up well.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a dark, moody book about the relationship between a man and wife. What makes it interesting is the brilliant descriptions of the parts of the world they inhabit.

Anne Michaels describes the rescuing of the temples at Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile. It remains a horrifying experience for the thousands of people of Nubia who lost their homes.

In the same way, Michaels brings back the relocation beside our own St. Lawrence Seaway. The novel’s couple, Jean and Avery Escher, are involved in both these undertakings – he as an engineer, she as an avid botanist.

Their own story reflects the intense trials of the work they’re doing which in turn affects their personal lives. Michaels stresses the feeling and need for home. Her book shows what can be saved from the violence of life. Their marriage, though precarious, turns out to be one of these things.

Anne Michaels is a Canadian writer, who lives in Toronto. Her earlier novel, “Fugitive Pieces”, has won literary prizes around the world, and also been made into an acclaimed feature film.

Review by Anne McDougall

John Updike is saying goodbye in this, his most recent collection of short stories. The famous author died in January, 2009, so this is in fact his valedictory book.

It does have a flavour of looking back: to beloved homes in his native Pennsylvania, and later New England suburbia, to exotic locales in trips to Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy and India. He remembers high-school reunions, the mysteries of growing up and falling in love, and an old man’s bedtime routine and the happiness it brings him.

A critic on “The Guardian Weekly” calls Updike the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov. He criticizes this book for leaving in sections where Updike repeats himself, but concludes that his American cast of characters is as witty as they have always been. More importantly, Updike’s creations live and authorial love is what sustains them. That love shows no signs of weakening in this book.

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania,in l932. He is the author of more than sixty books and has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, among many other honors. “My Father’s Tears” is a moving tribute to this fine writer.

Review by Anne McDougall

“Border Songs” not only comes out at a timely moment in Canada-U.S.border talks, it is also a powerful novel about the people living on both sides of this border on the Pacific coast.

Jim Lynch is the author of “The Highest Tide”, a wonderful story about the sea and a group of people living beside it. He has got the same touch in this new book. His hero, Brandon Vanderkool, is a tall (6′ 8″) American,rugged, but also dyslexic – with a special feeling for the earth and sea and all birds living within earshot. He leaves his father’s dairy farm for a job with Border Patrol. To everyone’s amazement he catches one smuggler after another. This is at a time when the U.S. has tightened security, and the Americans and Canadians who once laughed and waved at each other across “the ditch” (as they called the invisible border ) now become suspicious of every move. People who used to garden, now grow cannabis.
Everyone smuggles.

Brandon’s story is of the best of human nature winning out against our inhuman technocratic world. Lynch both laughs at, and deplores this world. His book is full of real characters, quite rough at times, who win through to a convincing ending. Well worth reading.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a fine novel by a prize-winning professor of English in Pennsylvania. But I think you really have to have a love of birds to do it full justice.

Hinnefeld is interested in the relationships between mother, father and daughter and explores their love of ornithology, wild life, music, poetry as well as their love for each other. The conflicts seem to come when one of the arts, or science, gets in the way of expressing their emotions on a personal basis.

The heroine is called Scarlet (after the bird the scarlet tanager) and the book follows her search to understand her highly emotional,artisic mother. The natural world, with wonderful and constant stories of birds who enter the picture, is beautifully described. One reviewer calls Hinnefeld “a wise story-teller” – which makes this a charming book to read this summer.

Review by Anne McDougall