Let me explain the Demi-Monde to you. Basically you get plugged into a virtual reality, like in the Matrix, except instead of being in a shitty reproduction of office life, you’re plunged into an urban warfare environment where you basically have to fend for yourself. Oh, and you have no memory of who you were, because that makes it more authentic, see? But it’s all designed to help the US Army train its soldiers in guerrilla tactics. To make things even worse, the creators of the Demi-Monde populated it with incredibly realistic simulacra (“Dupes”) of psychopaths through history.

So, in case you weren’t paying attention to that first explanation, let me recap for you. The Demi-Monde is a virtual training world for the US Army, filled with Dupes of historical figures, including psychopaths like Reinhard Heydrich, who has taken over two fifths of the Demi-Monde. You have to understand that this was a training simulation, right? Except if you die in there, you die in real life (because that’s never been the case before). Did I mention how there are duplicates….

My main issue with The Demi-Monde: Winter, as demonstrated above, is its front-loaded and redundant exposition. Rees spends several chapters laying the groundwork for Ella Thomas to enter the Demi-Monde on her rescue mission, and in those chapters, we hear the same information over and over. This doesn’t really let up once we’re in the Demi-Monde either—if Rees has an opportunity to repeat or reiterate a plot or character point, he takes it. Similarly, there’s a great deal of telling rather than showing when it comes to characters’ feelings for one another—and while that isn’t always a bad thing, combined with the heavy amounts of exposition, it basically grinds the story to a halt.



The Demi-Monde: Winter is just too long and too dull, which is saying something for a mash-up of historical psychopaths. But even that isn’t done in a very interesting way. Props to Rees for choosing Heydrich as a principal Nazi antagonist over a more default choice like Hitler. I can see how much effort Rees has put into replicating axes of oppression within the Demi-Monde’s analogous socioethnic groupings. Nevertheless, it doesn’t quite gel. Would a bunch of “pyschopaths” (if indeed these people all were such a thing) like Crowley and Clement actually team-up with Heydrich? I’m reminded of the TOS episode “The Savage Curtain”, in which a lava/rock life-form forces Kirk to team up with historical “good guys” to do a battle to the death with historical “bad guys” to decide whether good or evil is stronger. All the evil people, historical or future-historical, ripped from the context of their times, become caricatures of themselves. It’s not quite the same here; Rees is trying to provide analogous context. But … I don’t know. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, like with the “nuJus”. It’s not that I want to say that Rees is being disrespectful of Jewish people and the other victims of the actual Holocaust … but it exists within this uncanny valley between analog and allegory and I’m not fully on board with it.

Also, I could have done without all those camelCase terms for everything in the Demi-Monde. Between that affectation and the length I felt like I was in another Neal Stephenson novel, and I did not sign my Stephenson waiver this month.

There are moments when it seems like the book is going to get it, is going to pick up steam and really deliver some thoughtful storytelling. It just never quite gets there for me. As far as the idea of simulating Dupes of people in the real-world goes, it’s intriguing and definitely the kind of philosophy I like in my science fiction. Yet for all his penchant for exposition, Rees frustratingly hints at a few things that might only be explained in later books. Or relies on contrived coincidences, like Heydrich’s daughter looking exactly like the President’s daughter. Yet while Rees acknowledges the existential quandary of the Demi-Monde Dupes if the “real world” shuts down the simulation, we never really tackle that on a substantial level. None of the real-world characters wrestle over the morality of it (Ella comes close, thanks to her thing for Vanka).

Finally, the characterization just feels incredibly inconsistent. I don’t understand what Rees was trying to do with Ella. She vacillates between being calm and collected and very mature for her age, knowing exactly what she needs to do, to being appropriately freaked out considering the whack nature of this whole quest of hers. Ella is not the only character who suffers from odd or out-of-character characterization, and it kept pulling me out of the story.

In short, The Demi-Monde: Winter has a tiny idea swamped by overly ambitious attempts to execute it and turn it into a good story. Sometimes these wild rides are rescued by their ideas, or by the humour, the dialogue, etc. None of that happens here. It’s just an unqualified train wreck.

Sometimes we end up reading an author backwards, like Merlins travelling through literary space-time, always encountering younger, less experienced versions of the writer. I have long enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction, and here I am reading her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. So if I seem underwhelmed by these compared to the praise I’ve sung of her work in the past, it’s probably because her talents have only grown since she wrote these. That, and although I did enjoy these stories, and I think a short story collection was actually the right choice to read at this time, maybe these particular stories weren’t quite what I wanted.

As with most of Lahiri’s work, these stories are very focused looks at the lives of people living in India or members of the Indian diaspora in the US. Beyond these general similarities, there is a great deal of variety. Some of the main characters are poor, marginalized, or reviled. Some are privileged, well-off, educated. Some are immigrants to the States, others were born there and are learning about or ignorant of their heritage. In each case, Lahiri’s portraits sketch out different possibilities for life within these interconnected but different subcultures. As someone who is a complete outsider, it’s fascinating.

Perhaps this is one area in which short story collections outperform novels, despite the latter remaining my One True Literary Love … short stories allow an author to explore so many more “what ifs”. Whenever depicting non-Western cultures in fiction for the consumption of a Western audience, there is the potential to collapse these cultures into neat and tidy microcosms: to represent “Indian culture” instead of one of the many diverse, multivariate Indian cultures. While Lahiri, for reasons of her own heritage or knowledge and familiarity, often returns to fairly similar roots (most of her characters are Bengali, for instance), she nevertheless manages to acknowledge that there is more at work here than a monoculture. Each story takes us on a different journey, provides a different lens—and that’s definitely one of the most powerful things an author can do with a short story collection.

My favourite story is the last one: “The Third and Final Continent”. It made me tear up, especially towards the end. It’s about a young man who immigrates to the US immediately following his arranged marriage in India. He has a job at MIT and boards with a persnickety woman who, he eventually discovers, is over 100. There’s just something about the brief intergenerational interactions in this one, and the way it relates to his nascent relationship with his wife, once she joins him in the States, that I find very beautiful. I think, also, the montage towards the end, where they grow older and we glimpse their lives over the decades, is reassuring and comforting to me at a time in my life where some things about the future are a little uncertain.

I also enjoyed “Mrs. Sen’s” even though I saw the ending coming. I think it was the way Lahiri told the story through the child’s eyes, thus removing a lot of the narration from the concerns of the adult world and filtering it down to a child’s recollections and experiences.

The other stories are each moving and thoughtful in their own ways, but they didn’t stand out to me as much as those two.

In the end, Interpreter of Maladies is a strong collection of short stories. It’s what I look for when I read this type of fiction: meaningful characters, slow development, a telling that focuses on the whys and hows rather than the whats and whos. Lahiri’s prose is, even in this first collection, beautiful and on point. While I didn’t enjoy this as much as her later works, I still enjoyed it a good deal.

Every so often, you read a non-fiction book that just speaks to you, that sticks with you because it’s not just informative but because it fits your level of background knowledge and expands your understanding of a topic perfectly. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet is such a book for me. Claire L. Evans traces the development of the modern Internet from its precursors, the earliest mechanical and electronic computers, all the way to the present day—all through the lens of the women who computed, built, designed, programmed, and shepherded us into the Information Age. Evans not only smashes the myth that women don’t like computers or programming; she demolishes the idea that women are a recent addition to the tech world. As Evans demonstrates, women were here first.

Broad Band begins at the beginning. Evans goes all the way back to Ada Lovelace (I’m actually writing this review on Ada Lovelace Day—I should have timed this better so I could publish it today). I took the time to annotate and underline my copy of this book, because Evans just keeps saying it so well:

Women turn up at the beginning of every important wave in technology. We’re not ancillary; we’re central, often hiding in plain sight.

Evans goes on to demonstrate exactly how women were essential with each evolution and revolution of the tech industry. I loved reading about Grace Hopper and other early computer programmers. In particular, Evans notes about Hopper:

Years later, when Grace was an established figure in the new field of computer programming, she’d always assign the hardest jobs to the youngest and least experienced members of her team. She figured they didn’t have the sense to know what was impossible.

As a teacher, I love this. I love that mindset. But I digress—Hopper and the other early programmers did not have it easy like we do today. They were brilliant mathematicians who were then asked to translate their mathematical understanding into algorithms a computer, mechanical or electronic, might understand. Later, they were working with machine code. When I first started programming, I started with HTML and then interpreted languages like PHP and Python—I had it easy. Plus, because I’m a man, no one gave me a hard time. Tall, white, and nerdy, everyone just assumed I was good with computers. But Evans belies that stereotype: not only have women always been “good with computers” (hell, the first computers were literally women), but they come from all walks of life and have a vast diversity of cultural, political, and social backgrounds. Women are not a monolith.

So Evans goes on to name-drop other significant individual women in STEM, even as we see the computer industry emerge from the post-war United States economic boom. She points out how “the professionalization of 'software engineering' marked a sea change in the gender demographics of computing”—i.e., once programming turned into a profession rather than simply a menial job, suddenly it became men’s domain instead of women’s, despite the nature of the task remaining the same.

Evans does not limit herself to the discussion of the “hard” aspects of computer science either. She showcases the pioneering efforts of women in building communities online. I was so entranced by the section on Jake Feinler, who ran the NIC in its early days and was essentially the equivalent of WHOIS and Google all rolled into one. This was a part of the history of the Internet I had literally never heard of before, and here it is, laid bare and told clearly and humorously by Evans and the people she interviewed. Similarly, I had never heard of ECHO or women.com or any of these other early ventures. I had never heard of Microcosm or early adventures into hypertext that pre-date the World Wide Web. Seriously, this book is so dense and rich with information yet so easy to read. And it highlights that how a story and history are told really affects the way people conceptualize our understanding of technology. The idea that “Tim Berners-Lee” “invented” the “World Wide Web” is such a gross oversimplification—and you don’t have to read this book to know that, but Evans provides such a rich context into these events, which were all happening when I was a young’un.

Also, I really appreciate that Evans highlights how the Internet and the World Wide Web did not become the utopian cyberspace dream that many people (of various genders) hoped it would be. She catalogues the seemingly inevitable decline of the frontier of the Web, pointing out that the Web didn’t fix our problems with community—we just brought those problems online with us. This might seem painfully obvious to those of us who spend too much time on places like Twitter these days, but it was not a foregone conclusion in the early days of the Web—and there are still too many people now who think that just one more brilliant technological solution, one more killer app, might somehow fix what is ultimately a social problem—we just love being jerks towards each other.

Similarly, Evans takes some time to acknowledge and include trans women in this discussion. She highlights the difficulties that some trans women encountered: even as the Internet made it possible for them to express their gender identity safely when it might not be possible to do so in their offline lives, if they were out as trans online, they could face exclusion from “women-only” spaces. Evans recounts one particularly difficult moment in the history of ECHO in this record. I wish she had done a little more—she could have mentioned people like Lynn Conway or Danielle Bunten Berry. I realize that perhaps she was limited for space, or perhaps she would prefer to leave that for an #ownvoices author—but trans women are women, and their stories and experiences in the “untold story of the women who made the Internet” are valuable and deserve inclusion. So, kudos to Evans for mentioning this topic, could do better next time.

Overall: for young millennials like myself, that generation born in the late 1980s/early 1990s who were old enough to embrace the Web pre–social media but are too young to appreciate its origins, Broad Band is essential reading. I can’t really comment on what people much older than me (people for whom this is contemporaneous history) or younger than me (the so-called “digital native” generation for whom smartphones have always existed) might make of this. For someone my age, someone with a more-than-passing-interest in the history of technology and computers and how this has shaped our society, Broad Band is just phenomenal. I learned so much from this book; it is so well-written; and it is such a great tribute to the plethora of women who have been erased, overlooked, or under-appreciated for far too long.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City is one of those books I wish didn’t exist but am so grateful it does. Over the past few years, I’ve seen my city come up in the national media from time to time—and often related to Indigenous issues, such as the deaths or inquests of the students in this book. But after the interest in those stories dies down, and the spotlight of the press turns away, life in this city goes on. Nothing really changes. Tanya Talaga, by investigating and piecing together the stories of these seven deaths, and by putting them in the larger context of our colonial history, has created an enduring record that—I hope—is more difficult to ignore.

I’m going to review this book first for a general audience, then I’m going to get into my reaction to it as a settler from Thunder Bay. Trigger warnings, obvs, in this book and review for discussions of suicide, violence (particularly against women and youth), binge drinking, and racial slurs.

Seven Fallen Feathers is not about blame; it is about responsibility. We all have a responsibility towards children, as our future. The government has a responsibility towards Indigenous peoples—it acknowledges this, even if it doesn’t always act on it. Settlers have a responsibility to understand how the actions of our ancestors have resulted in a broken and hostile system of multiple genocides. Talaga pulls no punches in these respects; she has a quotation about cultural genocide right up front from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report.

That’s why this book is so important beyond the boundaries of the city in which it’s set. This is a story of seven deaths in Thunder Bay, yes, but it goes wider than that. It’s a story about the complacency of an entire country, of a whole population, to the plight of Indigenous peoples caused and continued by a settler government that doesn’t care. Seven students attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School died between 2000 and 2011, and the police and city did the utter minimum that they could do to investigate or prevent further tragedies. The jury roll shenanigans, the inquest recommendations—all signs point to a deadly spectrum from apathy to outright racism within our judicial and political system. Talaga puts the pieces together so clearly and decisively that no matter where you live in Canada, no matter how little you’ve tuned into these stories, you’re going to understand the situation.

Context is so important, and that’s what Seven Fallen Feathers provides. Yes, it retells, as best Talaga can piece together, the night of each student’s disappearance or death and the days that followed. More importantly, however, Talaga connects these students’ deaths to the history of this city and this country. DFC, albeit run by an Indigenous education authority, is a response to and inheritor of the colonial system of residential schools that broke apart so many families over the past century. These students were only attending high school in Thunder Bay because their own communities don’t have high schools, for various reasons, all of which are ultimately attributable to the provincial and federal governments refusing to do anything about it. The governments have, through decades of inaction, proved that Indigenous lives (by which I mean their livelihoods, lands, education, culture, language, as well as their bodies) matter less than settler lives. No amount of Trudeau-style speechmaking or name-changing is going to ameliorate this single, sad legacy.

We did this. We meaning not just settlers but entire generations of anyone who calls themselves Canadians. And we are still doing it. When we ignore Indigenous people who are telling us about communities with unsafe drinking water, without proper housing or flushing toilets, when we don’t care about the state of education in these communities—we are complicit. This isn’t about guilt for something that happened twenty, fifty, a hundred years in the past; this is about complicity in what’s happening right now, every single day. It’s happening all across Canada—it’s just more obvious, more brutally explicit, here in Thunder Bay.

Talaga opens the book with a prologue that introduces readers to Thunder Bay. Having grown up here and lived here for almost my entire life, it is strange to see my city described to those who might have no context. But of course, this isn’t Toronto or Vancouver. Talaga needs to give the “average reader” context for what they are going to learn:

Thunder Bay has always been a city of two faces. The Port Arthur side is the white face and the Fort William side is the red face. Port Arthur lies on the north shore. It is built up on the gentle, sloping Canadian Shield. Two-storey brick houses line streets that run up and down the Shield, each with a beautiful view of Lake Superior as far as the Sibley Peninsula, where the stone-cold Sleeping Giant Nanabijou sleeps.

The red side is located down by the Kaministiquia (known locally as the Kam) River, on the Ojibwe’s traditional lands near the base of Mount McKay in the flatlands known as Fort William. Except for one tiny enclave of grand homes near Vickers Park, built by the affluent of another time, the residential streets of Fort William are staunchly working class, small bungalows or two-storey homes in various stages of repair, most with a pickup truck parked out front.

She’s correct, of course. It’s a little strange to see my city described so clinically, to hear her discuss the layout of streets I know so well, to hear Intercity referred to as “the demilitarized zone” or Victoriaville as a “poorly planned shopping mall with a 1970s vibe” (entirely too true), just because it’s the normal backdrop for me. But Thunder Bay really is divided this way, even if some of us residents don’t like to think about it. I sit here, typing this review in a two-storey (albeit non-brick) house that I bought in Port Arthur, and I won’t lie: I principally looked at houses on this side of town because it’s “nicer”. Such are the divisions of class and race made even deeper by colonialism.

Similarly, despite this being my hometown, I have been ignorant of a lot of the ways racism manifests here. In part this is my youth—I was barely 11 in 2000, when DFC opened and the first of the seven students discussed here, Jethro Anderson, went missing and was found dead. And although there were a few Indigenous kids in my classes at school, the truth was that when I was younger, my world was very stratified. I never really interacted a lot with Indigenous people until I started working at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in high school. I didn’t go to powwows or other cultural events (more so because I just … didn’t … go … anywhere, but still).

Now a large proportion of the adults I teach are Indigenous, and I am much more directly connected to what’s happening in this city and in Northern Ontario. The crises affecting these communities reach right into my classroom. I knew about these deaths, about the inquest and its recommendations, about the myriad other issues. I bought Seven Fallen Feathers because I wanted to learn more and then to amplify it. Yet that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that my privilege insulates me from understanding how truly hostile Thunder Bay is to Indigenous people. It insulates me from ever having heard certain slurs tossed around in my company, though I totally believe Talaga when she says it’s commonly heard on our streets. I can read and listen all I like … but I’m never really going to know. Because at the end of the day, I’m safe on these streets. Indigenous people are not. And it’s shameful that it took me working with a large proportion of Indigenous people for me to finally start learning about these issues.

Of course, this isn’t about me. I don’t mean to centre myself here and make this all about how I feel. I just want to share why it’s so important for fellow settlers of Thunder Bay to read Seven Fallen Feathers and keep an open mind. There is so much defensiveness in this city, on the part of the settler population, to any hint that we might have a problem. It’s gross. But speaking settler-to-settler, I get where that’s coming from, even if the people being defensive don’t: deep down, in your gut, you’re starting to wake up to the fact you’ve been duped. You’ve been able to live in wilful ignorance for so long that the idea you’ve been so blind makes you feel almost comically buffoonish—how could you have missed this? In such moments, often it is easier to succumb to the siren calls of cognitive dissonance and dismiss what’s right in front of your eyes: no, there’s no problem here; these are just tragic accidents, the result of too much drinking, of an education authority that can’t keep its kids under control, why don’t they just all relocate…. It’s easier to believe in the lies of colonialism than in what’s right.

It’s uncomfortable, yeah. But what’s worse—some minor personal discomfort, or more people losing their lives?

Thunder Bay has a racism problem, and it’s one that no amount of “Respect” campaigning is going to fix. Such campaigns are ultimately doomed to failure because they locate racism in individuals’ actions rather than in the systems that surround and support them. Yes, it was a single individual—Brayden Bushby—who threw a trailer hitch at Barbara Kentner, who would ultimately die from those injuries, while reportedly yelling “I got one!” But it was a system of justice long practised at ignoring violence against Indigenous people that resulted in police investigating “if” it was a hate crime and ultimately never upgrading the charges beyond assault. “Respect” campaigning won’t work if the costs of showing disrespect are zero.

Canadians need to read this book. If you live in Thunder Bay, you need to read this and confront the hard truths of our northern city. If you don’t live here, you need to read this and understand what is happening here. I challenge you to read Seven Fallen Feathers, to hear the testimony of the families and teachers and Elders, and not feel your heart break seven times over. But what really matters is what you do after you read this. Will it be just another tragic tale? Or will it be time to act and demand change? If you read this and it changes nothing about your perspectives or actions, you are participating in the colonization of Indigenous tragedy; it becomes a spectacle, something for settlers to consume the way we’ve consumed the land and … well … everything else. You must read this, and then you must act: use your privilege to demand change from your governments, your schools, your organizations, and yourselves.

One year ago I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she remembers the seven Indigenous youths who died far from home while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School here in Thunder Bay. In that heartbreaking and essential work, she links these deaths to a structure of colonialism and white supremacy and an ongoing form of cultural genocide in which the government and the rest of us remain complicit. Now Talaga is back with this year’s CBC Massey Lectures; All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward widens the scope of this discussion to look at the high rate of Indigenous suicides all over the world. Beyond talking just about suicide, though, Talaga wants us to consider how colonialism interferes with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and how this is ultimately the root cause of the suicides and other issues in Indigenous communities. As its subtitle implies, Talaga is not without hope. This book is an outstretched arm, asking everyone—white settler, Indigenous person, person of colour, etc.—to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our institutions and to create real change so we can save real lives.

I love the chapter titles: “We Were Always Here”, “Big Brother’s Hunger”, “The Third Space”, “'I Breathe for Them'”, and “We Are Not Going Anywhere” (yesssss!). These titles alone communicate the arc of Talaga’s talks: first she grounds herself in the history, then she examines the effects of colonialism, before she discusses what so many people within these communities are doing already to try to improve conditions. Finally, Talaga asserts that there is hope, and there are so many viable possibilities out there to prevent youth suicide. What’s really needed is actual commitment to change rather than empty words and promises. As she quotes Mushkegowuk Grand Council Chief Jonathan Solomon saying, “We don’t need another study or inquiry. Everything has been studied and these studies are just collecting dust on a shelf”. The government is very good at promising change; it is much worse at actually delivering change for the better.

Talaga does in this book what a journalist does best: she amplifies the voices of so many people across time and space from these communities, uniting their stories into a bigger picture. We hear the palpable frustration, anger, and sadness from so many individuals; we hear the strident confidence, hope, and determination from some of those same individuals who are even now fighting for change and for lives. Alongside these often personal tales, Talaga grounds us in the history of Canada, Norway, Brazil, and Australia. The conditions that create suicidal thoughts in these communities came from somewhere, and this is where All Our Relations shines.

Talaga demolishes, directly and forcefully, the idea that traumas inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by settler governments should be located and left in the past. She makes it clear that the physical, biological, and cultural genocides of Indigenous peoples have left a lasting, inter-generational mark on these peoples: “Generations of Indigenous children have grown up largely in communities without access to the basic determinants of health…. Children are not in control of their determinants of health. They are born into them.” I mean, this is not hard to grasp, yet it seems like a lot of people in this country are willing to lay the blame for this on the communities themselves rather than the structures in place that prevent them from having the funding, infrastructure, and independence—the security and sovereignty—to guarantee these determinants themselves.

It’s not just a lack of safe drinking water or inadequate access to healthcare, though, that’s at issue. As the title of the book indicates, this is a spiritual issue as well. Suicide rates among Indigenous people are so high because colonialism has harmed not only their physical wellbeing but also their spiritual and emotional connections to the land, to their histories, and to their cultures. Talaga makes this point throughout each and every lecture. In the first chapter she says, “Indigenous people have been trapped in these identity constructions in part because of their near-complete absence from the written narratives of the colonist nations”, arguing that it’s essential Indigenous voices can tell their stories (in their own language as well as that of the colonizers) to pass on Indigenous knowledge and culture. At the end of the last chapter, she says, “All children … need to know who their ancestors are, who their heroes and villains are; they need to know about their family’s traditions and cultures and the community they are a part of”. I mean, when you put it that way … it’s simple, really. This is what we settlers need to realize: Indigenous people have always only ever been asking for the same dignity and respect that we accord each other, the opportunity to live in their ways, pass on their ways, raise their children in their ways. And we have responded, over these past centuries, with the most intense failure mode of empathy a society can experience.

It’s past time we change that.

I had the privilege of taking my class of adult high school students to a book talk with Talaga ahead of her Massey Lecture here in Thunder Bay tonight. I loved listening to her speak, in response to questions from an interviewer as well as audience questions, about the issues around her books and how they relate to her life, to this land, and to these communities. Her voice as I heard it on stage comes through in these books. Read both of them, and you’ll learn so much history while also understand the vital importance of taking action to change these systems.

Throughout her talk to us today, Talaga emphasized that this is an issue of equity. Talaga asks us to examine who we are and where we come from. She reminds us that this is an important exercise, regardless of our race or background. She reminds us that Indigenous people around the world are looking only for what so many people already have: dignity, respect, the ability to retain their culture and beliefs. These are not difficult things to achieve, if we stop standing in the way. All Our Relations makes a case that shouldn’t need to be made, but Talaga makes it with eloquence and empathy.

OH. MY. GOD. WHY DID NONE OF YOU MAKE ME READ THIS BOOK SOONER???

I’ve previously read two of Jo Walton’s books. The first, Among Others, was a Hugo-nominated, Nebula-winning novel that I enjoyed but didn’t love. The second, Tooth and Claw, was a more straightforward story which was basically “what if Regency England was intelligent dragons” and, as such, was a delightfully clever romp of a book. My Real Children is a slow burn of simmering something else and it blew my mind backwards and forwards across time.

It’s 2015 and Patricia is in a nursing home, suffering from dementia. Her mind alternates between two sets of memories. In one timeline, she marries a man named Mark shortly after finishing her schooling after World War II. She has four children with him and a very unhappy marriage, although along the way she discovers her own ambitions and makes a life for herself. In the other timeline, she doesn’t marry Mark; she travels to Italy, writes popular guidebooks, falls in love with another woman, and they end up raising three children together. Tragedy strikes their lives in a few ways, but they get through it, as a family.

Walton’s use of a parallel universe structure isn’t unique. A very long time ago I read The Post-Birthday World, which does a similar thing, albeit in the present rather than traversing past worldlines. Walton’s use of it is quite divergent; after Patricia decides to marry or not marry Mark, her life changes rapidly. I call it a slow burn because it took me a while to understand what Walton was doing with these parallel lines and where they were going.

At first I was firmly on the anti-Mark train. The guy’s a rapist jerk, and “Tricia” endures an awful first few years of marriage. In contrast, her independence as Pat, the way she develops a career and a wider social circle, definitely looks more attractive. Her love with Bea is easy, even when it gets hard later in life. And there’s the rub: pretty soon, Walton drops the other shoe. Tricia’s life turns around as she carves out more agency for herself and develops independence as well, including meaningful relationships with her adult children. Meanwhile, Pat and Bea have their shares of setbacks, from questions around powers of attorney and agency to Bea’s disability and the state of the world around them. Eventually it’s clear that neither of Patricia’s possible lives is superior to the other. It’s not a question of which life is better but an exploration of the myriad ways in which we encounter happiness and unhappiness as we go through life.

This is a slow burn because it’s character-driven, heavy with narration and description of Patricia’s life and lighter on dialogue or action. It is a meditation on life. Either of Patricia’s lives alone would make for a worthy novel, but it’s their juxtaposition that enhances them into a masterpiece of storytelling. I read this over the weekend after a very draining week. I wanted something cathartic, something meditative—and My Real Children was exactly that. Sometimes, when my own life is feeling small or difficult, reading about the difficulties of other people’s lives is just what I need. I guess it’s a form of recharging my empathy and commiserating with these fictional personalities…. Anyway, there’s something about Walton’s writing, the way she tells Patricia’s stories, that really touched my emotions. I found myself laughing and crying at various junctures over the smallest of life events. As the years turned into decades, I found myself getting to know Trish and Pat intimately; I felt connected to them.

As I mentioned above, both timelines have their shares of ups and downs. This is what Walton is really getting at with My Real Children: she’s reminding us that there is no way to live your life without regrets or setback. Even if you can go back and do it again, there’s no way to “win” at life. You can always have happiness, but you can also always have sadness and regret; that’s just the way it is. What really matters are the relationships you develop with the people in your life. Who do you love, and who loves you? To what lengths will you go to care for those around you when they are ailing, infirm, or upset?

This past year has been somewhat tumultuous for me in terms of caring for others. During this time, I’ve become so very grateful for the support I receive from my own friends. Reading about Patricia’s lives made me think about my own friendships and the people in my life who are so important to me. Yes, my life can be difficult sometimes—but here I am, 29 years old, with a house of my own and friends who text and call me daily, a friend who watches Doctor Who with me every Sunday, friends who check up on me and tell me I’m enough. These are the things that make the darker times easier to bear. These are what add to my pile of good things (my favourite moment of Doctor Who ever).

We could spend a good amount of time discussing the extent to which Patricia’s alternative lives are “real.” It’s possible that her two sets of memories are entirely a result of her dementia, of course (kind of like the doubt inherent in Woman on the Edge of Time). Alternatively, Patricia could indeed be remembering two actual parallel lives among many others. Perhaps that’s what dementia is! And, as she observes in the coda, these memories are interesting because there were so many divergences beyond ones probably caused by her decision to marry/not marry Mark. Both worlds are distinct from this one of ours as well.

This book is vanilla enough in its presentation and marketing that it might actually escape the speculative fiction ghetto in some places and attract a wider audience. I think people should give science fiction a try more in general, but if they pick up My Real Children not really knowing what it’s about, I don’t mind that either. This is the first book I’ve read in a while that I think almost everyone might want to read at some point. It’s moving and heartfelt and beautiful. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read all year—one of those books, like some of Ursula K. Le Guin’s work, that are just so beautiful they hurt.

Space is big. Hugely, mind-bogglingly big. Travelling across the vast distances of space is daunting, especially if faster-than-light travel proves impossible. In Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross rejects the luxuries of hyperdrive or warp speed in favour of good, old-fashioned laser-based transmissions of data—and people, who are just another type of data, after all. In such a universe, debt and the tracking of it is of great importance.

Krina Alizond-114 has travelled to the Dojima System to meet up with her sib, Ana. She tries to get to the water world of Shin-Tethys, but her journey is fraught with sidesteps and misadventures. Even when she arrives on Shin-Tethys, tracking down Ana proves more difficult and dangerous than she would like. Krina isn’t a spy or a secret agent; she’s a forensic accountant who delights in unravelling the history of “FTL scams.” But she and Ana have stumbled on something quite naughty, and it seems several parties are after them as a result. What Krina and Ana find could undermine the entire interstellar economy. They could get very, very rich, or they could get very, very dead.

Although nominally set in the same universe as Saturn’s Children, Neptune’s Brood inherits the continuity of its setting but, at several centuries’ remove, not so much plot or characters—it’s much more of a standalone book than a sequel. I read Saturn’s Children 5 years ago and remember nothing about it, and that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book at all.

Like many of Stross’ books, Neptune’s Brood features a first-person protagonist who spends a significant amount of time expositioning at the reader. Fans of his Laundry Files series will recognize echoes of Bob’s narration in here, as Krina explains to us the arcane and complicated financial instruments that underpin galactic colonization. Along the way, we’re also treated to some ideas about what the future of “humanity” will be in an era where “Fragile” baseline humans are all but extinct and posthuman “metahumans” are the order of the day. When your soul can be dumped and forked and your bodyplan altered at will, what exactly is your identity anymore?

The idea of lineages (which was explored somewhat in Saturn’s Children, if I recall correctly, but which I don’t remember) is interesting. Instead of sexual reproduction, metahumans in Neptune’s Brood reproduce by forking their personalities, making little alterations here and there, then instantiating them in new bodies. Depending on your lineage, you’re generally expected to work off the debt created by your instantiation—a kind of indentured neoteny. Then you’re free to strike off on your own, as Krina’s lineage mater, Sondra, did so many centuries ago. You can beam yourself to another solar system via the laser beacons that communicate across the vast interstellar gulfs. And then you can wake up in a new body and find a new purpose in life.

As Stross explains how the interstellar economy is built on a Ponzi scheme of expensive colonization journeys, he explains that every colony goes deep into debt upon its founding. It solicits immigrants via its brand new beacon. It’s not quite clear to me how, in a world where personalities seem copyable, why individual people might be valuable resources—surely you can just buy a pirated copy of a group of personalities with the skills your colony needs? Stross dangles tantalizing ideas about how life as a metahuman opens up new possibilities for memory and identity; nevertheless, there are avenues unexplored in this book that leave me with so many questions.

As far as the plot goes, it’s serviceable. Krina is looking for her lost sib, and she’s willing to go to extreme lengths to do so. Along the way, we meet some volatile and interesting characters, and we’re treated to a few different, imaginative types of environments for metahuman life.

My chief problem with Neptune’s Brood is Krina herself. She’s just a very bland protagonist, spending so much time reacting rather than acting. Largely she spends her time in others’ power, and that’s just not as interesting to experience. This is particularly evident towards the end of the book, where she gets kidnapped and then spends a chapter swimming through the depths of Shin-Tethys towards a meeting where all will be explained—no choice in the matter there, really. Even towards the end, where she does have a modicum of say in what happens, her options are so Byzantine to the reader’s understanding that it’s still not much fun.

Stross himself admits in his crib sheet for the novel that the ending is inadequate, and I fully agree. It’s abrupt and underwhelming compared to the rest of the novel. Just as it’s getting “good” in the sense that we know who the enemies actually are and Krina is in a position to begin flexing her agency … we’re done.

You might get the impression from this review that I didn’t like Neptune’s Brood. That’s not entirely accurate. It’s a really thoughtful and interesting space opera, but like a lot of science fiction, ideas at the expense of story usually aren’t enough for me. I enjoyed reading it, but I can’t say I’m excited by it.

It occurs to me that, with the exception of The Prague Cemetery, since I bought that when it was released, I have basically been reading Umberto Eco’s books in publication order. This is entirely unintentional, and now I only have one more to go … but on the bright side, that sounds like an excuse, after I finish that one, to wrap around and start re-reading them all, in order again!

But I don’t think I’ll be eager to return to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This is, by far, my least favourite Eco book I’ve read. As usual, I love the insistent intertextuality and the depth of Eco’s writing. As always, he has produced a masterpiece of literature. As sometimes happens with masterpieces of literature, however, the story itself falls flat—and, dear review reader, you know that for me, story is the ultimate drug here. With previous Eco experiences, he always managed to blow my mind while telling an intricate, fascinating tale. With this book, it’s more like he’s reflecting on a number of other tales, many of which I’m not familiar with.

Let’s get into it.

Yambo, as he styled himself before the incident, has amnesia (from a stroke, apparently). He wakes up in a hospital, is reacquainted with his wife and his profession as an antiquarian book dealer. Eventually he ends up in his family country home in Solara, where it’s hoped that spending most of the summer there will jog his lost episodic memory. Although that doesn’t seem to happen—at least not as dramatically as he might like—he does end up kind of “recreating” a generic type of childhood experience by organizing and reviewing the documents and music that he finds there. He listens to “radio” from the 1940s while poring over old comics, magazines, and newspapers, and he ponders growing up as a boy under fascism in Italy.

In one sense, it seems like this whole book exists so Eco can mention and sometimes provide commentary on various forms of pulp fiction, both imported and Italian, in the 1940s. And let me be clear: I’m here for it. I really enjoyed this exploration, because it’s fascinating, from a literary perspective. I know very little about Italy’s literature (from any period), and most of the foreign stories Eco mentions are not familiar to me either. Oh, I’m aware of Flash Gordon and Mickey Mouse (although the stuff Yambo was reading is obviously much older Mickey than I would be used to). And I’ve read The Count of Monte Cristo, which comes up from time to time in this book. Nevertheless, for the most part, I was in the dark about a lot of this—and that’s OK. I never felt like that hindered my ability to enjoy Yambo’s ramble through his past.

On another level, this rambling journey is commentary on growing up under fascism, something Eco has in common with Yambo. Our main character constantly considers how the literature he examines would be received during a time when censorship and doublespeak was rife. He thinks about how growing up around his dissident grandfather might have influenced him. And, of course, he filters everything through his antiquarian book dealer’s mindset—since these skills, unlike his autobiographical memories, have not fled him.

Many of the stories Eco features involve the struggles of heroes or rogues against fascist-like dictators. From Flash Gordon to Sandokan, Yambo remembers growing up on stories of struggle. Eco reminds us that reading a comic where Flash Gordon takes on Ming the Merciless would be a very different experience in Mussolini’s Italy than it would for me here today in Canada. (I guess this is my attempt at syncretizing New Historicism and Reader Response theory?) So from this intertextual perspective, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana has a lot I can appreciate.

Unfortunately, as far as the story goes, it’s fairly lacklustre. Certainly nothing like some of Eco’s other novels that I’ve loved. The majority of the book takes place in or around Yambo’s family summer home. Towards the end, he finally begins to relive some of the memories of his youth, which are also mostly in the same area. Without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the last part of the book is kind of a fugue of memories and can occasionally feel incoherent. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t skim a couple of places where I was getting bogged down. When that happens, I know a book has really lost me.

Sometimes this happens with difficult books—but that’s just the thing. This is not a difficult book. I don’t think the level of philosophical depth here is anywhere near the level of The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum. (On the other hand, please don’t interpret that remark as a charge that there is zero depth here. As mentioned above, Eco always has intensely fascinating things to say—but this book is far less inscrutable than some of his others.)

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana has long been on my to-read list in my quest to read all of Eco’s novels. I picked up this used copy from a bookstore in Montreal, so I’ll always fondly remember that. The story herein? Probably not so much.

Although To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was on my radar for a while, thanks to Twitter hype, I actually watched the movie first, and it definitely motivated me to read the book. I adore the movie. I think it’s so well shot that it’s nearly frame perfect. While I don’t think this is one of those cases of “the movie is better than the book”, I do think it’s a case where the movie and book are equally good for different reasons. In whatever format, though, one thing is clear: Jenny Han’s story of Lara Jean and the letters that were never meant to be sent is a lot of fun even as you fight back some tears.

Lara Jean Song Covey is a high school junior (Grade 11 for us Canadians) who mostly seems to keep to herself at school, at least at first. Her sister Margot broke up with her boyfriend just before leaving to college. That boyfriend? None other than their next-door neighbour, Josh. Lara’s childhood crush on Josh has flared up again as a result, and even as she tries to figure out a “new normal” to their suddenly Margot-less friendship, disaster strikes: somehow the letters she wrote and addressed but deliberately never sent to the five boys she has crushed on get mailed! And so, like you do, Lara Jean has no choice but to start up a fake romantic relationship with one of those boys, Peter, to throw Josh off the trail. Of course, nothing is that simple, and it isn’t long before the lines between fake love and real love are too blurry for comfort.

Man, when I try to describe the plot of this book, it sounds terribly hokey. Let me assure you that it’s anything but. Indeed, that’s the miracle of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: Han’s writing, her characterization, is deft enough to avoid making this incredibly contrived situation seem all that contrived. It really helps that, although the core plot involves Lara Jean’s fake relationship, there’s actually so much more happening in this book. There’s Peter working through his feelings about Jen, Josh and Margot working through their feelings about each other, a whole family dynamic among the Song sisters and their father … this is a very rich story, and it’s the kind you can luxuriate in while you soak in a bathtub without worrying about getting lost or bogged down in details.

I’m not going to fall down the rabbithole of comparing the book to the movie and noting all the differences. However, I think one interesting change is how the movie makes it apparent from the start that Kitty is responsible for mailing the letters, whereas the book, to my knowledge, withholds this information from us until the end. (This is what happens with a first person narrator.) The audience’s awareness of the culprit, to me, really heightens the tension—Kitty, by the way, is the best character, and if you disagree, you are wrong.

Also, obviously, the endings are totally different too—again, not really here to contrast them directly, but it’s clear the movie wanted to wrap up everything neatly within the romantic comedy tropes, while the book is more honest in the sense that it leaves a lot up in the air. (I enjoyed both endings.) However, what I really like about both stories is that they are examples of subverting the trope of the male love interest screwing up with the female love interest and having to make an eleventh hour hail Mary to win her back. In this case, Lara Jean is the one who makes mistakes and has to apologize to Peter.

The book also touches more directly in places on Lara Jean’s racial background, her family, and how this influences her experiences. It’s not a huge part of the plot, but this is another example of how movies, for the purposes of time, often have to flatten characterization that is more deeply depicted in the pages of a book.

To return to reviewing the actual book, though: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has layers! The romance that drives the central narrative is important, of course, but you know I’m not all about the romance. Really I’m here for the friendship. I love the depiction of Lara Jean and Chris’ friendship. I also love the complex dynamics among the Song sisters, particularly the ways in which, as family, they fight and forgive and make up—because that’s what sisters do. Han isn’t just telling a story about a teenager who fakes having a boyfriend for a few months; this is a carefully layered story about a person who tries to hide one crush by faking another—and, predictably it turns out, this is not a great plan.

I would have liked to learn a little more about Josh’s deal, in general. Other than his tumultuous family life, we don’t get much of a sense of what he’s all about. Where does he want to go to college? What did he see in Margot in the first place? How is he dealing, really, with this break up? This whole aspect of the story is fairly one-sided: Josh is essentially a 2D love interest for Lara Jean to reject by the end of the book. (I love how the movie lampshades this so overtly with Lara Jean’s head!Josh.)

I also love that Peter turns out to be a decent dude after our initial introduction to him as a popular kid dating the popular girl. As with Lara Jean having to make amends above, this is an example of subverting common romantic comedy tropes. There’s a depth to Peter, explored in both the book and the movie, in overt and subtle ways, that makes him a very credible love interest for Lara Jean.

Does To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before deserve the massive hype it receives? No idea. Don’t really care. I read it. I liked it. Maybe I’ll read the sequel. I definitely watched the movie again between reading this book and writing this review (I needed a “feel good” story), and boy howdy is it an amazing movie. Although I stand by my sentiments in the first paragraph, I think I will say that in my case, the movie is a story I want to return to time and again, whereas this book was a great experience, but I’m not sure if I will re-read it any time soon. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth a first reading if it sounds like the type of story you want to read, whether or not you’ve seen the film.

It is with no small amount of regret that I announce I have never been mistaken for a fearsome space pirate. On the other hand, that’s probably for the best. I’m not going to be sent to space army school like Ia Cōcha in Ignite the Stars. The result is an intense story from Maura Milan about divided loyalties and the necessity of questioning authority in the face of injustice.

Ia is seventeen years old but is already infamous in the Olympus Commonwealth as a criminal, a rogue, a pirate—and a killer. Ia sees herself as a bit of a freedom fighter, thumbing the nose of the Commonwealth and standing up for the little people on the liminal spaces of the Commonwealth’s Fringe. When the Commonwealth finally captures Ia, they force her to attend their space force training academy, as a symbol of their strength: look, our worst enemy turns out to be a teenager we’re press-ganging into service! Meanwhile, the Commonwealth enjoys fostering resentment of refugees, particularly the Tawnies. Brinn is a Tawny (but she doesn’t like showing it) who has just started her first year at the academy. Guess who her roommate is….

Stellar worldbuilding (pun intended) from Milan here. With a dearth of exposition (albeit a reliance on typical tropes, like an evil federation/empire, etc.) she nevertheless unfolds an entire universe for us. It doesn’t take long to inhabit the Olympus Commonwealth and its political intrigue, even as we end up at a type of space Hogwarts complete with well-intentioned but mathematically befuddled space Dumbledore. Combine this with the odd couple pairing of rule-breaking Ia and rule-obsessed Brinn, and we have ourselves a recipe for a pretty good story.

The friendships in this book are, for me, the best parts. Brinn and Ia’s comes to dominate, of course, and it’s fun watching it develop. When Brinn first meets Ia, she is understandably intimidated to the point of locking herself in their room’s bathroom for the first several nights. Eventually, the two come to an understanding—thanks to some blackmail—but it takes a long time for a hint of true friendship to develop. I appreciate that Milan doesn’t rush this, that for a while it seems like Ia is truly intent only on escape, no matter the price.

Honourable mention, though, to Brinn and Angie’s relationship. When Milan first introduces Angie, I uncharitably assumed she was a stock antagonist—and a petty, unimportant one at that. Boy was I wrong! Angie’s character acquires more depth as the story continues, reminding us that, although it’s probably rarer than we’d like, people do change, grow, and learn. The way Brinn and Angie’s detente evolves into friendship is really nice to see.

I haven’t mentioned Knives at all yet, and that’s on purpose. Honestly, I don’t mind Knives himself as a character. I get he has daddy issues. But I hate the implicit romantic tension between Knives and Ia—ugh, just so predictable; it does nothing for me. If it gets you going, great; you are welcome to it!

Knives is just a specific case of a broader issue with Ignite the Stars, in my opinion: the characterization is uneven and sometimes quite unoriginal. Brilliant young flight instructor whose daddy is a top-ranking general, and they don’t see eye-to-eye? Yawn. Bigotry against a particular ethnicity while at a military academy? Also seen that. And, on a related note, I could have done with a bit more exposition when it comes to the Tawnies. They seem to be a sub-species, offshoot, or genetic variant of humanity? Because their differences aren’t just cosmetic, since they have enhanced cognitive capabilities.

Huge kudos to Milan, though, for the reveal regarding the Tawnies and how the Big Bad was using them towards the end there … no spoilers, but I was literally thinking that such a thing made the most logical sense, in this universe, given what they were trying to accomplish. So I’m really happy that Milan agreed with me on that point and lifted the curtain enough to give us a glimpse of that.

Other points of confusion: how do ships get around? We hear a lot of talk of “gates”, which I assume are wormhole/hyperspace contraptions, but it’s never clear to me if these gates exist only in-atmosphere or if some are spaceborne. There’s a lot of references to “planes”, which implies sub-orbital capability only to me, so I’m not sure if this universe actually has any true spaceships—or are “planes” capable of both atmospheric and spaceflight? Questions, questions….

I think I’m a little disappointed because I just really wanted there to be more to this story. Ia herself is an interesting protagonist. But we know so little about her backstory, beyond the general idea that she’s a crusader for justice against the big bad evil space empire. The same goes for the other characters. Milan assembles these tropes into a serviceable narrative, and I like the theme, and I certainly enjoyed reading the book and gobbling up the action scenes … but nothing jumped out at me that felt particularly fresh. I like my stories to surprise me once in a while, and so while Ignite the Stars has a lot of fuel, it never really caught fire for me.