Off the Page

Our Children's Librarian columnist, Julie Booker, brings us a new view from the stacks every month.

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Celebrate Earth Day with these (mainly nonfiction) picture books. Ties to the Life Sciences curriculum include: Characteristics of Living Things (Grade 1), Growth and Change in Animals (Grade 2), Habitats (Grade 4) and Biodiversity (Grade 6).

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Wanted! Criminals of the Animal Kingdom, written by Heather Tekavec, illustrated by Susan Batori, is a clever way of presenting information. Each “wanted” animal is showcased alongside a rap sheet of aliases, distinguishing features, life span and sightings (location), and most fun—witnesses and previous arrests. There’s lazy Big Bad Mama (aka the common cuckoo), who sneaks her egg into a neighbouring nest, forcing another mother to do all the hatching. When Big Bad Mama’s baby is born, she pushes out the other eggs and moves into the newly vacated dwelling. The witnesses? Hundreds of angry mother birds. Older students could adapt the rap sheet format in order to record their own research findings. Kindergarten-Grade 3.

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Michelle Butler Hallett's latest novel is Constant Nobody, and we've got three copies up for giveaway right now.

Don't miss your chance to win!

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I’m often plagued by self-doubt when writing, when trying to serve a story and give it what it needs, however strange, upsetting, or just plain weird that might be. Sometimes I borrow courage from aesthetic and thematic outliers.

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A Stone Diary, by Pat Lowther

A Stone Diary is such a strong collection, one that takes many risks with subject, themes, and form with confidence and control. Lowther’s often slant perspective is compelling, almost hypnotic—in “Craneflies in Their Season,” for example, and “It Happens Every Day.” Many of the poems examine violence, intimate and state-induced, from “I.D.” to “Chacabuco, The Pit.” Violence is still something of a taboo subject for women writers now, let alone in in the 1970s. I admire how Lowther portrays violence: harrowing, yet never gratuitous, allowing space to acknowledge, consider, and recognize the full truths of being human.

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With Half Life (McClelland & Stewart), Krista Foss has delivered a spectacular sophomore novel, one that entangles complex questions of generational trauma, aging, and resistance with physics, indie music, and Danish mid-century furniture. She’s on The Chat this week to answer questions about her new book.

Madeleine Thien says of Half Life, “Every sentence is alive in this miraculous novel—one in which the listening ear of Niels Bohr bends towards an aspiring physicist, where history walks beside science, and where a world ‘undaunted by paradox’ exists only in theory. What do we believe, and who, and why? How do we continue if denied the love entwined with belief? What if forgiveness itself becomes a lasting injury? Krista Foss has a vast heart. She is a stunning writer.”

Krista Foss is the author of the novels Half Life (2021) and Smoke River (2014) both published by McClelland & Stewart. Her short fiction has appeared in several Canadian journals as well as Granta (UK) and has twice been a finalist for the Journey Prize. Her essay writing has been published in Best Canadian Essays and won the Prism International Creative Non-Fiction prize (2016) and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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Trevor Corkum: Half …

The books I’ve always loved the most are those that are grounded in the real world with fantastical elements—stories that hold space for the more ineffable experiences in life. My debut novel, The Memory Collectors, falls into this category, landing somewhere between contemporary fantasy and literary fiction. Below are some books in that same vein by other great Canadian authors. Each of these is either a favorite of mine or a new release at the top of my reading list. If you crave stories that play with our understanding of reality, that incorporate myth and folklore into everyday existence, or that make you feel as though magic might just be real, these are absolutely worth checking out.

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Empire of Wild, by Cherie Dimaline

From the author of the incredibly powerful book The Marrow Thieves, this is a modern supernatural thriller that plays with traditional Métis stories of the werewolf-like Rogarou. A beautifully written page-turner, it follows the struggles of Joan as she discovers her missing husband at a revival tent in a Walmart parking l …

New books by Camilla Gibb, Marissa Stapley, Wayne Grady, Uzma Jalaluddin, and more! These are some of the novels and short fiction collections we're excited about reading this spring

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Bleeding Light, by Rob Benvie

About the book: A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.

A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer’s son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.

For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmation—through religious, cosmic, chemical and other means—of a world beyond their own. It’s a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age.

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Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett

About the book: The time is 1937. The pla …