I’ve been intrigued by food science for a while. We have all at one point or another tried some kind of fad, whether it’s a specific diet or overloading on a superfood or something like that, I’m sure. Some of us fall harder than others. The more I tried to research and understand nutrition and food science for myself, the more I realized that a lot of food science is junk science. I wanted to know why, and that led me to the two realities that Marion Nestle confronts in Unsavory Truth. So picking up her book for more details on these issues with food science was a no-brainer!

Nestle takes us through several examples of ways in which food companies skew the science, as the subtitle says. This book is a mixture of topics. She gives us some history lessons on how nutrition and food science departments came about in the United States after food companies shuttered their own research wings. Similarly, she traces the development of important industry lobbyist groups and how these interact with government departments like the Food and Drug Administration. Nestle also tries to point out the accurate science where she can, reminding us that a lot of the science is complex and it’s not so much that we don’t know anything about nutrition (I hope my mention of junk science in the first paragraph didn’t give this impression) but rather, food companies are always interested in simplifying and removing nuances because they care more about marketing than health. Finally, Nestle rigorously explores how we might fund nutritional research if we don’t want to be beholden to industry funds and the biases that accompany them.

From this book and others, I’ve come to understand why food science is difficult even without industry funding bias. Basically, you can’t run the same kinds of clinical trials in food science that you would in other scientific disciplines, because—believe it or not—it’s unethical to do things that might starve or malnourish a human being or potentially cause a disease like cancer. So experiments in food science are very difficult, and as Nestle explains, most of what we know about nutrition comes instead from qualitative observations that are subject to error bars relating to participants’ lifestyles, genetics, etc.

Probably the most useful “truth” that Nestle reminds us of is that it is never about one particular food or nutrient. All those commercials when I was a kid about eating eggs for “omega-3 fatty acids”? All the hype about why it’s fat or sugar or carbs that are bad for you this week? That’s marketing. Really, the best thing we can do for our bodies is to practise moderation. Nestle acknowledges that some substances (like processed sugars) are objectively harmful, but she isn’t here to preach a sugar-less diet. Instead, she just points out that if we are indeed mature, responsible adults, we should be able to balance our food intake accordingly. I kind of wish she had mentioned that this is often a problem for low-income households, where there is probably less of a choice between processed foods and more “natural” products.

So, overall, Nestle does a good job elucidating the essential conflict of interest between food companies and food/nutrition science. Food companies want to sell their product, so naturally they want research that supports recommendations favourable to their product. In contrast, nutrition science is more about building a body of knowledge that allows us to give advice to people about how to ensure they have a healthy body. Given this conflict of interest, Nestle explains that when a food company offers funding for a specific study, that introduces the potential for bias. She spends a lot of time explaining this, adding that many scientists refuse to accept the potential for bias exists, which frankly boggles my mind.

From there, Nestle explores other ways that food companies influence the research. These parts of the book get somewhat technical and are very U.S.-centric. That doesn’t make them irrelevant to other countries—Canada definitely has similar issues, particularly with our dairy lobbyists, and in general the U.S. sets a tone for a lot of the world. However, if you’re not really involved in this sector, some of the details that Nestle recounts will feel extraneous or more than you bargained for. Indeed, my main issue with the way the book is written and edited would be that it feels, in some places, repetitive. I understand wanting to build an exhaustive body of evidence to support your claim, but after a while, all the discussions of arm’s length groups, foundations, checkoff programs, etc., just kind of blurred together in my head.

This was an informative book, and if you are interested more in policy around food and nutrition research, I’d recommend it. If you’re interested more in the science behind food and nutrition, you might not find what you are looking for here.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I pre-ordered this based on how much I enjoyed Camryn Garrett’s first novel, Full Disclosure, and Off the Record didn’t disappoint. From beginning to end, Garrett catapults us into an adventure of racism, sexism, and the price of fame, all from the point of view of a teenager with social anxiety and a way with words.

Josie is a journalist. She’s still in high school, but she has published articles for actual magazines, and now she has won a contest to do a cover profile of up-and-coming actor Marius Canet. Josie is over the moon that she gets to accompany Marius and others on a press tour across the U.S. Like Marius, Josie is Black, but unlike him, she didn’t grow in France and isn’t used to the social atmosphere of a press tour. This is all a little much for her anxiety, not to mention the fact that she finds Marius … um … attractive. So at first, Josie struggles with this assignment—and then she finds out that she might have the opportunity to start a #MeToo moment against the powerful director of Marius’ next film. Josie has to decide: is she the one to write this story? Does she want to put that out in the world? Can she live with herself if she doesn’t? And what will this mean, for her barely-began career as a journalist and for her barely-explored feelings for Marius?

Josie’s voice comes alive in this book and makes it so compelling. She is a smart and talented writer, and she’s dedicated too. I love the family dynamic that Garrett shows us: two loving but strict parents, older sisters who have a kid and are just starting in university, respectfully, a home to 3 generations. From this foundation, Garrett yanks us and Josie out of her comfort zone and into the world of the press junket. She saddles Josie with Alice, and we get a ringside seat to very real-feeling sister drama—Josie feels like Alice has copied her aspirations to go to Spelman College, and while we don’t get access to Alice’s perspective the way we do Josie’s, eventually we do learn more about how Alice feels about their bond and what has changed with Alice away. I admire how Garrett can weave all of these smaller subplots and character moments within the larger story.

And what of the #MeToo-inspired plot? I’m going to talk about the ending and then work my way backwards, and I’ll keep it vague to avoid spoilers. But if you get disappointed in the ending, just remember that Garrett foreshadows it all the way back on page 193:

This is the beauty of storytelling, whether film or literature: fiction does not need to hew to realism all the time. Fiction can tell stories that are fantastical. Or it can be more grounded while still offering hope, as Garrett does here. Is it realistic that a 17-year-old girl with only a few articles to her name is the one that an older actor approaches to write this story? Are her conversations with all these other women who claim Roy Lennox groped them, raped them, are they realistic? I submit that’s beside the point; what matters more is that they are aspirational. With Off the Record Garrett is creating the world which she wants to see in our own reality: a world where a young Black woman is making a difference with the power of her words, much as Garrett did in her first novel and is doing again here.

You know, this book probably won’t get as much hype as a book like The Hate U Give, and I want us to consider why. Don’t get me wrong; Angie Thomas is an awesome author, and if you read my review you’ll see my love for that book. But I think we white people have a tendency to get more excited about books about Black people that overtly discuss race and racism because these become “issue” books, and we can seem “woke” to be seen reading and discussing them. Off the Record is as much about race and racism as any book where many of the main characters are Black, and it is technically an “issue” book in the way it springs off the #MeToo movement … yet because the racism, the sexism, the misogynoir are subtler here, I think it would be easy to miss this story’s power. Both Starr and Josie are Black girls asked to bear witness to structural injustice. In Josie’s case, Lennox’s behaviour is structural because, like the real-life Harvey Weinstein and innumerable other predators in Hollywood and board rooms and workplaces all around, Lennox is shielded by the people around him who fear his power and privilege. These women come forward and accuse a powerful person of abuse and assault, and we don’t believe them. We call them liars. Why? Because accepting their truth means acknowledging that the system itself is rotten to the core, and that means we need systemic change, and that is too much for some of us to bear.

The way that Garrett examines these injustices through an intersectional lens gives Off the Record such incisive power. Marius is Black and therefore experiences racism and dismissal (in terms of his acting chops) that a white actor doesn’t. The director of the film Josie is covering claims colour-blindness, doesn’t see what the race of Marius’ character might have to do in a film that is “really” about being gay. Yet Marius also has male privilege, something Josie urges him to use to speak up against Lennox, hoping his voice might be heard and believed even if the women she has interviewed are not. This is just one small example of how Garrett belies the convenient stereotypes we often fall back on when looking at people as well as characters in our literature: oh, she’s Black; he’s gay; they’re in a wheelchair—nobody is ever one thing, one identity, one position on an axis of power/privilege. Off the Record reminds us that our power and privilege are constantly in flux depending on where we are, who’s in the room with us, and what the situation is.

This book is so sneaky. It starts like the puff piece that Josie is supposed to write about Marius. We think, oh, she’s going to have to get over her anxiety, open up to him, maybe they have a little fling and then they have to go their separate ways … it’s like perfect summer rom-com fodder. Then Garrett goes “bam, scandal time” and throws Josie—and by extension, ourselves—into the deep end fast enough to make our heads spin. With sharp dialogue and even sharper storytelling, Off the Record is easily one of my favourite books of the year.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I’m having a pretty good year for epic fantasy! First Beaulieu’s Song of the Shattered Sands, then Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, and now Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun bringing me fantasy stories in worlds not inspired by medieval Europe. In this case, Roanhorse has drawn on pre-Columbian America for her inspiration. As she says in her acknowledgments, she wanted to challenge the idea that pre-Columbian Indigenous cultures lacked civilizations worthy of such epic tales (if you want more info on that, check out my review of 1491). Well, I thinks he has succeeded. Black Sun is a book about apotheosis, about betrayal and revenge, about politics and pragmatism.

There are a couple of sets of main characters, and Roanhorse doesn’t tell the narrative quite in a linear fashion, so you need to pay attention to the chapter headings to keep the timeline straight. Basically, Xiala is a Teek captain aboard a ship sailing for Tova. Already mistrusted because she is Teek and a woman aboard a ship, Xiala faces a challenge getting her crew to make for Tova in the timeframe given by her employer. She is to deliver a mysterious, blind man named Serapio to the city. They need to make it in time for the Convergence, a total eclipse of the sun on the same day as the winter solstice. Serapio is the Crow god reborn, or will be, his body a tool shaped from youth by his mother and her allies. Meanwhile, in the holy city of Tova itself, the Sun Priest Naranpa struggles against all of her enemies. She needs to be savvy to survive, but because she is a “Dry Earther” instead of a member of the elite Sky Made clans, Naranpa has precious few friends among the priesthood.

I want to start with Naranpa, because she’s ridiculously bad at her job. Like, she makes the wrong decision every time and it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. And I think, deep down, she knows how bad she is at the political intrigue behind being the Sun Priest! It’s slightly painful, watching her fumble around trying to figure out how to head off the machinations by those who wish to usurp her.

In the same way, Xiala’s story starts off somewhat hopeful. After a rocky start, it seems like her crew is swaying to her side. Then disaster strikes, and her crew once again lays the blame at her feet. Xiala finds herself outnumbered on her own ship—never good—and making an unlikely ally in Serapio.

Indeed, Roanhorse’s characters are so flawed and usually underdogs, and that makes them more interesting. It’s hard for me to identify the protagonists in this story, because I’m honestly not sure who I want to “win” here. Does Serapio deserve to ascend to the Crow God and murder the entire priesthood? That sounds bad, but the priesthood also doesn’t sound like a bucket of fun either. This might be one of those stories where everyone is bad news, and the best we can do is identify with someone like Xiala, who is trapped in the middle of this epic power struggle and seems to have very little in the way of motivation of her own beyond survival.

The world Roanhorse has created is interesting, and there’s so much more to learn about it. While I will always prefer when authors drip-feed us exposition just-in-time instead of front-loading it, I admit there were parts of the world-building reveals that gave me pause. We’re halfway through the book before I learn there are giant creatures (like crows you can ride) in this world. That happens about the same time we meet a new viewpoint character, and it seems rather late in the game to introduce him (but I can understand not wanting to do so if you don’t have a story to tell about him until that point).

One of the things about epic fantasy that makes it epic is an understanding, on the part of the reader, of the scope of the lands in which the story takes place. I wanted to learn more about the various Sky Made clans versus the Dry Earthers, more about the different cities near Tova, more about the Teek. I guess this is why a lot of epic fantasy verges on doorstopper length!

Anyway, Black Sun is an interesting new novel from Roanhorse in the sense that it’s a departure from the thrillers she gave us in Trail of Lightning and its sequel. I always love to see an author grow and pursue new genres, or subgenres in this case, and there is a lot to like about this book. If you liked Roanhorse’s earlier novels, I think you’ll like her writing here. And if something about her post-apocalyptic tales of Dinetah weren’t working for you, maybe check out this epic fantasy instead.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Sometimes I think I’m getting old when I start to complain about the number of characters in a book and how hard it is to keep all the plots in my head! I’m starting here because that’s my major issue with When Jackals Storm the Walls, the fifth book of The Song of the Shattered Sands. For what it’s worth, Bradley P. Beaulieu is starting to bring all these various characters and plots together in preparation for what is hopefully a grand finale. So there’s that. But wow, this fantasy series is stretching my level of commitment….

Çeda has succeeded in freeing the asirim, but she has also lost her patron goddess, Nalamae. The 12 Kings of Sharakhai are dead or fled their city for the desert. These two forces will need to form an unlikely alliance to take on Meryam, who is now ruling Sharakhai and studying the mysterious crystal in the cavern beneath it. Meanwhile, other supernatural forces vie for power and position as the gods descend upon the city for a climactic culmination of their centuries-old plan.

It’s a good plan, too. And the way that different characters learn about it and then try to exploit it for their own ends? That’s neat. One of Beaulieu’s most obvious and useful talents as a writer, I think, is how he isn’t afraid to take his plots off into different directions than the most predictable. That is to say, he doesn’t mind detouring us before getting back on track if that’s going to bring us some more fulfillment. We see this in the subplots involving Hamid and Emre or Davud and Esmeray. As much as I groused in my introduction, if Beaulieu had indeed simplified things to satisfy readers like me, I have no doubt this series would have lost some of its enjoyment. He has succeeded at that lofty goal of creating an entire world out of whole cloth, and that’s why this series has enduring appeal for me.

This book is probably the least Çeda-focused so far, though, so a heads up there. I’ve complimented Beaulieu in the past for how he has been able to remain focused on her story even as he introduces more layers. So I wanted to remark when that changed—Çeda definitely plays an important role in this story, but so too do many of the supporting cast. Indeed, the prologue/epilogue might shore up a claim that When Jackals Storm the Walls is actually Meryam’s book if it’s anyone’s. We get more insight into her character, her backstory, than we have before, and we start to understand the origin of her hunger for power.

Had Beaulieu chosen, I think with a few tweaks the series could have finished with this book. But I believe the next book will indeed be the conclusion, and I am ready for it. I have enjoyed this series a great deal, but it’s also clear when a story is coming to a close. I’m excited to see how Beaulieu finishes off this story and what happens to my favourite (and maybe my not-so-favourite) characters.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

It turns out I like Bill Nye’s writing a lot better when he is marshalling arguments in favour of science rather than sharing his life story. Although there is a lot of personal perspective in Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World, particularly towards the end, this book falls into the former category. Much like its companion Undeniable, this is a polemic. Whereas that book was about evolution, this book is about climate change. Yeah, Bill Nye isn’t fucking around.

This book offers a primer on climate change but is more about stopping the seemingly-unstoppable effects of climate change. Nye doesn’t mix words, and he levels with us about how challenging this will be (and how we are making it more challenging every minute that we continue to burn fossil fuels). However, this book is ultimately optimistic and hopeful—the kind of attitude I adored about Bill Nye the Science Guy and just what I want to read about this subject. Nye acknowledges that people who accept the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is real and threatening us often react with a kind of nihilism. Hence, although he devotes some energy to laying out the basic mechanisms of climate change in the hopes of perhaps explaining it to the curious or the deniers who are on the fence, this book isn’t really here to persuade you climate change is real. Instead, Nye hopes to persuade you that climate change is something we can stop still.

This book expects what I would call a basic, high school level understanding of science, particularly chemistry but a little bit of physics too. You don’t need to have taken a specific chemistry course—some of the language might get a little technical, but you can skim over that without losing what Nye is saying. If you’re not sure what molecules are, if you aren’t up on the difference between carbon, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide, this book might be more difficult. Nye’s audience is definitely adults (and teens) and not kids here, which is fine! I hope this is helpful if you’re considering this as a gift for someone but want to know the difficulty level.

With 35 chapters across 300 pages, another point in favour of this book’s readability is its pacing. Each chapter is short with a clear transition into the next. You could easily pick this up and read a chapter, or two, during a break. You can just as easily read a hundred pages in one sitting if you’re feeling sciencey one afternoon. Overall, this book is easily digestible and that’s something I very much appreciate in a science book like this.

So the first 6 chapters are, as mentioned, the basics of climate change with a focus on the physical mechanisms that actual cause warming (and how humans fit into that mix). Then we get into the actual fighting of climate change. First Nye explains some truly out there ideas. I like how he approaches this: he communicates his level of scepticism to us, making it clear that most of these ideas are (at least right now) unworkable or undesirable. These include things like gigantic orbital sunshades. Nye points out that it’s possible we can make breakthroughs that will make some of these ideas feasible. He does this when talking about fusion energy too. In this way, he keeps us grounded while reminding us that our ability to innovate with science is one of the most amazing things about our civilization, and it is going to be key to averting climate disasters.

The bulk of the book focuses on energy: how we generate it, how we store it, and how we use it. He discusses fossil fuels versus renewables and takes you through all the usual explanations of solar, wind, tidal, etc. (Interesting, geothermal energy is omitted—I don’t remember any mention of it in the book, nor is it present in the index.) Again, Nye is realistic with us but also points out the great strides we have made, for example in improving photovoltaic cells (solar panels). Moreover, I learned a lot I didn’t know about things like how rechargeable batteries work!

The final chapters get more personal. Nye chronicles how he has improved his home in southern California. Going to be honest here: I enjoyed and also disliked this portion, and the same feeling triggered this ambivalence. On the one hand, Nye was exciting me, as a homeowner, about all the good things I can do to improve my house’s efficiency. On the other hand, as a single woman living in a house from 1915 on a teacher’s salary, I lament the cost of such upgrading. I am not an engineer like Nye; I don’t have the technical skills to cut holes in my garage like he does or the desire to put a stand thermometer in front of my (non-existent) fireplace to see how much heat it’s throwing off after adding a reflector. I admire Nye’s dedication to walking the walk, and honestly, this book has got me thinking about what improvements I could afford and swing in the near-term (say, 5 years). But it also made me feel a little bad.

That being said, I want to commend Nye for acknowledging that most climate change is not caused by individual decisions. He does remind us towards the end that it can be unwise to throw up our hands and blame giant corporations (or the government) for their inaction on climate change. This, he thinks, is tantamount to defeatism. However, it’s clear from his writing that Nye is not simply advocating for individual solutions. Throughout the book, he is adamant that change must happen on multiple levels of our society, from electricity generation and distribution to urban planning to education. It isn’t quite radical in tone, but it is radical in vision, and I appreciate that.

As I mentioned in my review of Everything All At Once, Nye has lost some of his lustre from childhood. I didn’t enjoy his Netflix show. Nevertheless, I enjoyed and learned from this book, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about climate change and how we can stop it. Now, it was published in 2015, so some things have changed (mostly for the worse, sadly), but I still believe this book is useful and relevant in 2021 and likely beyond.

When I was younger, I might have loved this book. It’s exactly the right mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable narration that would have tickled the still-forming prefrontal cortex of my young university student brain. I might have written an extremely lengthy review, arguing how brilliant Karen Joy Fowler is for this masterpiece of a novel.

When I was younger, I might have hated this book. It’s a nauseating mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable narration that would have annoyed my mature, post-postmodern sensibilities that looked down on anything so trite as the conceits in this book. I might have written an extremely lengthy review, arguing how awful Karen Joy Fowler is for this dumpsterfire of a novel.

Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time. In over a decade, my tastes for literature have changed considerably. They have matured as I have matured from a spritely 19-year-old to a cynical 31-year-old. I’ve gone through my pretentious phase and my counterculture phase and so many other phases, and if you had too much free time you would be welcome to back and read my reviews chronologically to revisit them. I won’t be! So what I mean by the previous paragraphs is that We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is one of those books that, depending on your point of view, is brilliant or trash. It’s smart and sophisticated or it’s an overwrought wreck. But after a while, the brilliant stuff and the trash starts to blend together sometimes. In this review, let’s explore why.

Rosemary is an older woman narrating about her college days. Along the way, she unpacks and confronts uncomfortable memories of her childhood centred on her traumatic separation from her sister, Fern. More details would mean major spoilers, so I won’t go into that here. Suffice it to say there’s more than meets the eye to Fern herself or to the reasons why Rosemary’s older brother, Lowell, skipped out before graduating high school to join the Animal Liberation Front and end up a federal fugitive. All in all, these experiences transformed Rose (as she usually calls herself) from a chatty kid into a laconic one. An unexpected and uneasy friendship with spitfire dramatist Harlow upsets Rose’s equilibrium. When Lowell drops into her university town, Rose receives the final nudge to reflect completely on her childhood memories, and most importantly, to confront the truth that she might have buried in her psyche long ago.

This is a book about memory, regret, and the irrational innocence of children. Rose’s college experience is entirely secondary, virtually a frame story to the true narrative, which exists as a series of vignettes Rose relays to us amidst the college life details. These overlapping, interlocking time periods allow Fowler to assemble Rose’s character in a series of facets, letting us view her from different angles to reveal different aspects of who she is. Ultimately, of course, Fowler wants us to think deeply about what Rose’s story says about who we are. Most of us probably didn’t lose a sister in our youth and then have a brother go on the run. But our very sense of self is built on memories that are actually a wobbly tower of cards, Fowler is telling us: nudge one, and the whole thing might very well topple over.

This interrogation of our unreliable memory of childhood is very fascinating to me. Once I realized this is what Fowler was doing, I gave the novel more slack. I was less harsh in my judgment of the writing style—pretty much entirely narration, with a tiny drink of dialogue doled out to us just when we might otherwise be parched. I appreciate that the narrative style is as much a thematic choice as it is a literary one. Rose’s incessant narration is very much not stream of consciousness, yet it has similar attributes (lots of Stuart McLean-esque tangents, for instance). In this way, Fowler captures the sprawling and disorganized nature that is our memory. We don’t remember our lives as a continuous and coherent story, and so when we go to tell our lives as such, we are manufacturing order from the chaos of our consciousness.

This depth is what impressed me about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and why a younger me might be tripping over herself to praise it. However, another version of myself wouldn’t be as kind. The narration I just praised can indeed feel overly much at times. Moreover, Rose herself is a bit of a boring character. This is a common pitfall in literary fiction that relies on an unreliable first person narrator: the author is so intent on channelling so much through this character that they themselves become a shell of a person. That’s very much the case here, where Rose’s personality dims in comparison to everyone around her, from Harlow to Ezra to Lowell. They all have lives of their own. Rose? Not so much, at least not until the epilogue. Rose exists as an authorial conduit if not an actual avatar, and that is a burden.

So, most of the sins you can imagine literary novels commit are present throughout these pages. That was enough to make a part of me dislike, even resent, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. “Just tell me a straightforward story,” my inner critic railed as she turned the page and wept to see yet another meandering flashback. I am glad this is a novel I was able to read on the serenity of my deck and not in the grips of cold and unyielding winter.

So there you have it! I think this novel encapsulates how a single reader may, at different times in her life, receive the same text very differently. It was fun to put myself into the shoes of my past selves and wonder how they might parse this. By the way, in case it wasn’t clear, 2021 Kara liked this book but vaguely resents herself for liking it (that’s the counterculture part of me talking). I’m trying to atone for any past reviews where I have lavished too much praise on an overly-literary and overwrought work, but I also want to give this book its due.

Every novel by Holly Bourne breaks me, yet each breaks me in its own unique way. And I never see the devastation coming. I expected The Yearbook to be more about, well, the creation of a school yearbook than anything else. But really this is a book about abuse. Whether it’s under the guise of high school bullying or parental or marital relationships, abuse is a pernicious monster, difficult to name and more difficult still to stop. Paige, our main character, struggles with this on many levels. And, damn you Holly Bourne, so have I, but I didn’t need to be crying in a bathtub over it…. The Yearbook probably isn’t my favourite of Bourne’s novels to date, but it is the one I have most personally identified with.

Trigger warnings for, obviously, bullying and abusive relationships. There are also mentions of transphobic slurs, slut-shaming/other sexism, fatphobia, etc., as Paige chronicles what the mean girls are saying about other students.

Paige Vickers is in Year Eleven, which for those of you reading this in Canada and the US is the same age as Grade 10, but you write national exams and then go off to one of many pre-college/university pathways like A Levels or BTEC or what have you. So Paige is about to be leaving school behind. She is a quiet girl who doesn’t make waves, doesn’t draw attention, and she likes it that way. But her involvement on the school newspaper soon throws her into the company of Grace, Amelia, and Laura, the three most popular and petty girls at her school. Paige reluctantly agrees to work on the Year 11 Leavers’ Yearbook with them, even though it’s obvious from the start that the three mean girls plan to use the yearbook as an opportunity to establish, on paper, their supremacy while rubbing other students’ low points in their faces. But what can Paige do about it? She’s a studious bookworm at heart, obsessed with finding out the identity of a red-pen scribbling pen-pal in the margins of her school library’s most venerable classics. Oh, and she is constantly on high alert when at home, where her dad makes life hell but she and her mom just go along with it like nothing else is wrong, because what else can you do?

There’s so much to unpack here, and I don’t even know where to begin. As I said in my introduction, I feel personal connections to this book far more than I did to any of Bourne’s other books. I have adored Bourne’s fiction from the first book of hers that I read, but the stories of those characters were not my story, my experiences. Now, neither are Paige’s. But there were layers to The Yearbook that resonated with me and left me seen, shaken, but ultimately satisfied with this story.

First, I used to teach in a school like Paige’s! There were some superficial differences—ours was not a religious school—but I was one of those ineffectual teachers of Year Elevens that feature in this book. I was witness to the kind of trauma and bullying that Paige describes, and likely there was a lot that I was oblivious to.

And I know I didn’t do enough.

The longer I am a teacher, the more convinced I become that “high school is hell” is reality, not metaphor. I really do think our education systems—whether we are talking England, Ontario, or the U.S.—are letting down our children, and I don’t just mean in terms of quality of learning. I think we seriously need to address social issues in our schools, particularly bullying. We need to rethink an institution that is so toxic it can drive students to suicide and self-harm and make them so eager to escape it no matter what.

Bourne doesn’t pull her punches here. The bullying in The Yearbook is not simply sly name-calling. It’s full-blown rumours that result in students leaving school, refusing school, switching schools. It’s a form of individualized terrorism visited upon students by those who receive a high off their power, and who want to maintain that power by making sure no one comes for them. We often poke fun at the idea of the mean girls, make comparisons to high school and dominance in the animal kingdom, etc. Bourne avoids such symbolism and instead lays out the plain truth: bullying harms. And no one is doing enough about it.

Paige herself is the consummate bystander. She sees it happening, chronicles it in her journals even, yet does nothing—because to involve herself would be to make herself a target, as is indeed confirmed at one point. Paige’s gradual transformation from bystander to opponent of bullying is one of the three major journeys she undertakes in the book. Bourne portrays all three journeys with intimidating honesty: nothing about what Paige does is easy, and nothing results in magical quick fixes that make everyone feel better again.

Paige’s second journey involves her relationship with her parents. Her mom and dad were high school sweethearts, but her dad, it turns out, is an abusive jerk. But he isn’t a caricature of abusiveness, because, of course, this is Holly Bourne we’re talking about. His emotional abuse is often subtle to the point of gaslighting, and his physical abuse is usually not something Paige witnesses. Indeed, the fact that we get everything filtered through Paige’s first person perspective adds an uncomfortably real sense of unreliability to her dad’s abuse. People in abusive situations warp their reality as a matter of survival. This becomes obvious in how Paige’s mom responds to the situation, but it is true for Paige herself, even if it takes us and her more time to come to terms with that. It isn’t that Paige is in denial, but rather, she has constructed a narrative of helplessness in which there is nothing she can do to alter the facts of her home life.

As with Paige’s school life, my connection here isn’t with Paige herself but with people around her. I speak from experience when I say that it is hard to watch a close friend endure an abusive relationship. So Paige’s aunt, Polly, was a character who resonated with me. Like me, Polly is a single adult. She’s watching Paige and her sister go through this ordeal. She’s ready to offer support, but there is only so much she can do. This is a trauma of its own kind, and amidst Paige’s experience of child abuse, I appreciate that Bourne acknowledges it in a small way, creating this space for me and my experience in fiction.

Paige’s third journey involves someone else who, like Polly, is at first a witness to her abusive environment but steps in to be an accomplice when she needs it. Paige’s name is no accident, for she finds the most comfort in books. Her relationship with Elijah starts this way, and their conversations are very much the type of conversation I might expect two teenagers to have about life and literature: a tiny amount of pomposity combined with staggeringly acute opinions! I think what works most for me about this relationship is the lack of typical drama you would expect from a romantic subplot. Bourne has previously demonstrated she has no time for that sort of thing but I appreciate that idea of healthy relationships explored here in another way.

Intrigued by the idea of sifting, I sifted The Yearbook for its single most important sentence. Here’s what I came up with:

What did you sift?

The Yearbook is, as I said earlier, a distinct type of devastation from Bourne’s other novels, both adult and YA. And I like it. I like the plot; I like the characters; but most importantly, I recognize and appreciate the themes that Bourne weaves together into a passionate and meaningful story. It’s one thing to bring great themes to one’s book; it’s another thing to turn those themes into a workable story—and this is the lightning that Bourne manages to bottle over and over again. I will not stop recommending her books—to young people, yes, but also to us adults who really need to remind ourselves what young people go through, and maybe who need to address our own past and present traumas as well.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Sisters are so inconvenient, right? We’re always messing with your attempts to run an orderly, oppressive empire hostile to any religion except your own. Best to just ship us off to some quiet, out-of-the-way prison where we can languish until we decide to jump onto a pyre like a good girl. But, of course, there is always the possibility we will instead align ourselves with a plucky maidservant who has nascent powers granted by her culture’s nearly-exterminated religion, and then … well, that would be bad.

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri intrigued me because its description just felt so fresh. This is a fantasy novel about political intrigue and rebellion, but most of the main characters are women. Moreover, it takes place in a fairly limited number of locations, none of which are the capital of the empire. Throughout the story, Suri challenges our expectations of what it means to be revolutionary, and reminds us that the revolution is merely the beginning of any attempt to take back one’s land and culture. I received an e-ARC from NetGalley courtesy of Orbit.

The two principal characters are Malini, a Parijati princess, and Priya, an Ahiranyan maidservant. Malini’s people have conquered several nations and turned them into vassals; Ahiranya itself is ruled by a Parijati regent who is sympathetic, in general, to the Ahiranyans—and he has married an Ahiranyan wife, who is our third main character—yet who nevertheless is willing to do “what’s necessary” to keep order. The entire political situation, as well as aspects of the different cultures, is loosely based on cultures located in what is now India. This departure from Eurocentric inspiration would by itself feel refreshing (not that Suri is unique in this, but it still isn’t common enough to feel common!). But it’s the dynamic between Malini and Priya, and the story that the two of them create together, that makes The Jasmine Throne stand out.

Malini has led a sheltered life, and it shows. Politically savvy, she wants to depose her brother, the Emperor Chandra, and replace him with her other brother, Aditya. Yet she has very little idea of how exigencies in life force people to desperation. This is a lesson she learns from Priya, a maidservant who was once something more, a child in training to be a priestess to the “Deathless Waters” of the Hirana, which just prior to the Parijati occupation were gifting children with powers that could have been, in the right (or wrong) hands, influential in the conflicts to come. This is what Ashok wants—like Priya, he grew up in the Hirana, and he wants to wield the powers of the waters against the occupying empire. But Ashok’s bar for “acceptable violence” is far lower.

There’s a lot that can be unpacked here. In particular, I want to focus on the ways in which each main character thinks change should be achieved. Malini wants to build an overwhelming military force to challenge the sitting emperor. Priya initially has very few ambitions for Ahiranya; she is just trying to survive and only ends up drawn into this conflict as a matter of survival. Somewhere along the way, her spiritual experiences result in a shift of her perspective. But she always opposes the militancy of Ashok, who is nearly uncompromising in his belief that violent uprising is the only way to free Ahiranya, even if it means lots of innocent people will die. Finally, Bhumika is a mixture of the traits of these others. She has more of a taste of power, as the regent’s wife, yet she would also avoid bloodshed if possible. She is far more pragmatic at politics than Priya too. All of these characters are fighting, in one way or another, for liberation. But they also don’t always agree, and that makes for fascinating conversations and plenty of potential for betrayal.

It would be easy to carve up some of these attributes along male/female lines. This book definitely has themes related to smashing the patriarchy—the ending fairly certainly communicates this! Yet this is not as simple as “men = aggressive” and “women = collaborative.” There’s a lot of aggression pent up in Malini and many of the other female characters, whereas some of the men are chill and not all that aggressive. In this way, Suri challenges that patriarchy is about natural differences between how men and women interact. It is indeed a system propped up by cultural and social constructs. We see this even in the cultural differences between Malini and Priya.

One thing I wish we had more time to explore would be the religions and cultures in the book. We get a small amount of exposition around the nameless god, whose followers receive a ritual name that is actual a prophecy for them to fulfill. That’s a very cool concept. But it’s less clear to me what kind of fire deity Chandra worships. In comparison, we learn much more about the yaksa, the Hirana, and other important parts of Ahiranyan spirituality. However, overall I was left wanting more on that level. Priya’s transformations, this idea of “hollowing out,” hints at something larger on a spiritual/moral level. I wanted to understand the deep cultural divides and how they might have shaped someone like Chandra into a tyrant and left such a mark on Malini.

On the other hand, I enjoyed that we never visited the capital except in flashbacks. It’s cool how all this action is taking place on the edges of the empire, rebellion brewing from discontent and malcontents. Suri captures the way that sprawling dominions can be fractious and hard to fully control: even when you sound out representatives, those representatives often have a difficult time enforcing your will.

I’m loath to comment on the romantic subplot given my aromantic tendencies and how much I tend not to pay attention to these things. Basically, you’ve got a lovely women-loving-women love story here, and there is definitely some payoff near the end (but it is not, let me be clear, a happily-ever-after type of romance). If that’s your thing, this book will not disappoint on that level.

My final nitpick? This book felt very long as an ebook. I’m not sure that’s anything Suri has done here; I think long books in general feel longer on e-readers. However, I suspect that this book’s pacing is in general rather slow. Suri takes her time developing each character and bringing them together, and maybe in my impatience I was hoping that would happen faster.

All in all, I’m very glad I picked up The Jasmine Throne. Will I read the sequel? Not sure yet. But I heartily recommend this book for anyone who wants something different in their fantasy, who wants a romance between women, who wants a story that’s a little different.

 Somehow amidst all the well-deserved hype for The Skin We’re In, I missed hearing about its structure! This is Not Your Typical political memoir in that Desmond Cole has chosen a very deliberate structure: each chapter is a month in 2017 (with a coda for January 2018). He uses an event from each month of that year as a launching point for discussing issues of anti-Black racism and social justice in Canada. In this way, Cole stays focused and on-message while also making it very clear that anti-Black racism is not an anomaly in Canada; it’s the rule. Not a month can go by without police officers killing a Black man, immigration officials trying to deport a Black person, or a debate happening about whether or not Black Lives Matter Toronto should be “allowed” a float at the Toronto Pride Parade.

This is the most important thing to know about this book, I think: although Cole discusses his personal experiences, this is a book about structural injustice and inequity. If it seems like so many chapters focus on the police, that’s on purpose. Cole is not here to call out every random racist incident he and Black people experience from white people on the street. He’s here to point out that the systems in our society are designed to prop up white supremacy. And the policing system, as you might know if you’ve read Policing Black Lives or listened to part 1 and part 2 of The Secret Life of Canada’s wonderful educational podcasts on the origins of the Mounties. Policing in Canada has always been about controlling the bodies and curtailing the livelihoods of racialized people.

Now, of course, when you read and listen to those resources, you might think, “But surely that’s in the past? Surely Canada is better now?” This is where The Skin We’re In becomes so crucial. Cole is not discussing historical trends here. He foregrounds things that have happened very recently, many of them in Toronto or its surrounding cities (I’m in Thunder Bay—all of southern Ontario is basically the GTA to me, ok? Don’t @ me), which is one of the most diverse regions of the country. The point is that you might have missed some of these, of course, but if you’ve missed all of them, then you haven’t been watching closely enough. Anti-Black racism exists in Canada, and Cole is here to tell you all about it.

I could talk about every chapter, but then we would be here for a long time when really you should just be reading this book. So let me highlight 2 in particular because they are the intersection of law enforcement and education, and I am a teacher.

In February, “zero tolerance,” Cole writes:

This chapter is about the fallout around a Peel Regional Police officer handcuffing a 6-year-old Black girl at a Peel District School Board school in September 2016. Cole explores how the media covers the investigation and the girl’s mother. He shows us (white people) how our desire to see the police as forces of good often means we need to justify their actions as a matter of course. If the officer handcuffed this girl, she must have done something wrong. He wouldn’t have handcuffed her otherwise. (This whole situation reminds me of how, last year, Vancouver Police responded to a call from Bank of Montreal and handcuffed a Heiltsuk man and his granddaughter because the bank was suspicious about their desire to open a bank account.) And if we do eventually admit that the victim didn’t do anything to deserve this mistreatment, we write it off as a single “bad apple” of a cop.

The reality, Cole argues, is this incident goes deeper than a single police officer making a bad decision. In the same chapter, he chronicles the curious story of Nancy Elgie. Elgie eventually resigned from the York Region District School Board after uttering the N-word in reference to a Black mother who attended a school board meeting. I say eventually, because it took a lot of back-and-forth in the media, with Elgie’s family rallying behind her with an increasingly convoluted series of medical excuses, before Elgie finally resigned. Cole presents this story as a direct contrast to the story of the 6-year-old Black girl. The actions of our state and our media are disproportionately harsh when dealing with racialized people; white people, on the other hand, often get a pass, even when we say and do racist shit. This isn’t merely white supremacy. This is structural white supremacy in action.

By the way, if you’re concerned that Cole might be too polemical based on my presentation of these chapters, don't worry. He comes equipped with evidence, with statistics, and he mentions more than once that everything he is saying has already been studied to death. We do not need more studies, more reports, more surveys. We need action.

That’s why the November chapter, “community policing” grabbed my attention too. Cole discusses how the Toronto District School Board finally, after much campaigning on the part of activists, voted to end the controversial School Resource Officer program that placed a police officer in many TDSB schools. I remember, growing up in Thunder Bay, seeing a police constable occasionally at our school, being all friendly. It never bothered me. But then again, I was white. Something I have learned over the years is that whiteness doesn’t just exempt me from mistreatment; it often isolates me from even seeing that mistreatment being visited upon racialized people. And maybe that means I should do more listening to racialized people instead of assuming their experience must much my own.

This chapter is full of data, but it’s also full of stories. Cole collects experiences of many Black people, youth and adults recalling their treatment by community police officers as youth. There is a common theme, of course: Black youth are treated with suspicion, distrust. They are made to feel like criminals. Police officers intimidate them on purpose. This lays the groundwork for what ends up being a cycle of harassment, including carding, which Cole discusses in another chapter.

When you hear these stories, you have to make a choice. Either you invoke a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance and think that all of these Black people are lying or mistaken … or you accept that your personal experience of the police is not, perhaps, the universal experience.

That’s part of the power of The Skin We’re In. With the passion and integrity of a journalist, Cole dredges up all the reports and statistics you’ll want as “impartial” evidence of injustice. With the devotion and dedication of an activist, he brings to light the stories of people whose voices we don’t hear—or sometimes refuse to hear. This is a book that demands we go into our lives with an awareness of history and context. For me as an educator, that means understanding how the lessons I teach, the jokes I make in my classroom banter, the way I assess my students, might be insensitive or even outright racist—not as a result of anything deliberate on my part, but simply because I didn’t think critically enough about how I am approaching subjects, using resources, or addressing skills with my students. Admitting that you are part of a white supremacist system does not mean that you yourself are a bad person. But it means you have a responsibility to recognize how being steeped in that system means you can sometimes uphold it, even without meaning to do so.

The other powerful aspect to The Skin We’re In is summed up by its subtitle: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. These are vital words. Cole wants us to understand that Black people are fighting against white supremacy, and that the sparse victories he includes in these books are the result of Black activists on the ground, doing the work. Black people mobilized to oppose the School Resource Officer program. Black people mobilized to prevent the deportation of Beverley Braham, of Abdoul Abdi. Change is and will continue to be in the wind.

The question Cole asks us is simple: are we part of this change, or are we, through action or inaction, standing in its way?

All of you should know by now that heist novels are my jam, and a fantasy heist novel? Bring me the fainting couch and smelling salts, for surely, I swoon! Suffice it to say that when I discovered this hidden gem, the highly underrated Six of Crows by unknown author Leigh Bardugo, I was anticipating a good time.

Kaz Brekker runs with the Dregs, a group of street criminals in the slums of Ketterdam. Kaz has a reputation as being tough but fair: if you cross him, he’s going to make you pay, but if you work with him, he will deliver. This has allowed him to rise from street urchin to the leader of a small gang, but it has also drawn the attention of the trading city’s rich and powerful. When one of these contacts Kaz and contracts him to extract a foreign scientist from the world’s most impenetrable fortress … Kaz says yes. For a hefty price.

The elements that you look for in a good heist story are all here. There’s the “assembling the team” part of the story, followed by the plan and walkthrough stage. There are inevitable betrayals—double-crosses, and double-crosses that actually turn out to be triple-crosses! And a fair number of mistakes too, don’t worry. The actual stakes are high enough to make the heist interesting and require Kaz to assemble a crew with a diverse set of skills.

It’s these characters who are the backbone of the story and who will determine how much you love Six of Crows. Kaz himself is not a particularly lovable fellow, or so we are told by others. He has a hardness to him, worn into him by his childhood being stripped away on the streets of Ketterdam. He is not a mischievous rogue or criminal with a heart of gold, and he seldom cracks jokes. I appreciate this choice on Bardugo’s part; it feels like a departure. Sometimes authors are a little too precious with their protagonists, especially when they are criminals. Bardugo is like, “Nope, he’s a bad guy. He’s not sick, evil, or twisted, but he is a bad guy.” I respect that.

The same goes for Inej and the rest. This isn’t a crew steeped in loyalty to the end. It’s a group of people loosely joined together based on self-interest. In Inej’s case, perhaps there is something more—but it’s a dangled hint of a something that Bardugo teases out over the course of the book. The people Kaz surrounds himself with are loyal more to the money and rewards of the job, not Kaz himself, and again, I like this choice.

The magic system is … fine. Having magic users be an oppressed class of people is not particularly original in fantasy. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to hold Bardugo to any kind of false standard of originality at all. But it would have been nice to see any kind of attempt to build on top of this trope rather than play it so straight. As it is, there is an implicit promise baked into this first book of a duology that we will learn more about the drug that amplifies Grisha powers in exchange for killing/addicting them to it. I hope that’s fulfilled. As it is, the presence of magic in this story is a layer that works well with the rest, but on its own didn’t hold a lot of interest for me.

What stopped me from loving Six of Crows was how elements of the plot and how the characters fit into it felt predictable at times. This is particularly true of the ending; I feel like even the most inattentive reader could have seen it coming from a mile away.

But you know what? Bardugo hooked me. I’ll admit it. I really want to read Crooked Kingdom now. I just hope my library has a copy; I don’t think this series has received nearly enough recognition as it deserves….

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.