In My World

I recently re-read Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro and I was reminded why I loved it so much the first time around.    Munro is the queen of the short story.  Her use of words is her gift and her art.  Amongst many acolades over the years, the highlight is winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.   In Lives of Girls and Women I believe she has written several wonderful, bittersweet, thoughtful short stories and blended them to form the perfect novel about a girl learning about life, love, pain, and death while growing up in small town Ontario during the 1940s. Read it!  You know you must.

Miriam Toews has written five books so far. I've already read two of them, A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows. This is the story of two sisters who are as different as two sisters could ever be but with a strong and enduring love for each other. Their characters are flawed and real and complex. You will feel an emotional attachment to them. You just won't be able to help it. Yoli (Yolanda) is a writer, a single mom, divorced and still looking for love in all the wrong men. Elf (Elfreida) is a well-known pianist, happily married, and wealthy and she wants to die. This book kept me up at night.  I needed to keep reading.  This is definitely a must read!

I cannot believe I've never posted about this book.  I loved it.  More twists and turns than a mountain road.   Alias Grace is a historical fiction based on the true life case of Grace Marks, a young maid who murdered her employer and possibly the housekeeper.  Atwood fleshes out the story and takes the reader on quite the ride while trying to decide on Grace's guilt or innocence.  Grace's life including her time in an asylum and prison is well told.   I recommend this book highly. The book was made into a mini series in 2017.

The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name. Have you read this book yet? It still stands in the list of my favourites of all time. Based on a true story, at the age of 11, Aminata Diallo is kidnapped from her African village and brought to South Carolina to work as a slave. She eventually wins her freedom and becomes a force in the abolitionist movement in Britain, but only after decades of struggle and adversity. Hill's novel is a joy and a heartbreak to read. Here is a small excerpt from the book: "I have escaped violent endings even as they have surrounded me. But I never had the privilege of holding onto my children, living with them, raising them the way my own parents raised me for ten or eleven years, until all of our lives were torn asunder. I never managed to keep my own children long, which explains why they are...