A most "catholic" book reviewer
Selected essays reveal the virtue of not specializing
Apart from this Substack and a new work in progress, most of the writing I’ve done since publishing my last book has been for The British Columbia Review (BCR), an online literary journal dedicated to all things British Columbian. A book’s review-worthiness is based on a few factors: a B.C.-related subject, the author’s B.C. upbringing, residence or academic status, or a B.C.-based publisher, for example. Despite this regional focus, BCR is anything but provincial: many of the books it highlights are of pan-Canadian or international interest.
Since I began writing for them three years ago, BCR’s editors have generously indulged my reluctance to specialize in only one or two subject areas. I get to review fiction and non-fiction, covering everything from politics and culture, global affairs, and the environment to gender and sexuality, self help, and my favourite sport. Yes, for this lapsed member of the Roman faith, “catholicity” has always been about variety.
With thanks to the handful of Substack subscribers I carried over from my blog, who used to receive these reviews by e-mail, my first post for 2025 is a selection of my BCR pieces, linked from the titles and arranged in the following subject categories…
The Great Quest (for wisdom or riches)
As Canada’s long-term project of Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples continues, collective awareness of B.C. history has evolved—as has our perception of certain “colourful” characters that have become legendary over time. With their third edition of Slumach’s Gold: In Search of a Legend—and a Curse (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024), co-authors Brian and Rick Antonson and Mary Trainer go far to restore the humanity of Peter Slumach, an elderly member of the Katzie First Nation who was convicted of and hanged for murder by a colonial society that simultaneously demonized his Indigeneity while turning his rumoured connection to a hidden cache into an urban myth that actual gold-seekers have been chasing since his death in 1891.
B.C. is famous for its back-to-the-landers, eccentric new settlers with mysterious backgrounds who arrive in Lotusland seeking to reinvent themselves. One is Dag Aabye, a ruggedly athletic, eighty-four year-old mountain man from Norway and one-time James Bond stuntman who lives in a school bus on a forested hillside near SilverStar outside Vernon—a man who, until about a decade ago, competed as a long-distance runner in the brutal, 125-kilometre Canadian Death Race. In Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2023), Ontario journalist Brett Popplewell uncovers Aabye’s fascinating origin story as a product of Nazi-occupied Norway’s Lebensborn program: the making of perfect Aryan babies for the glory of the Third Reich.
Then there’s the truth-seeking vagabond, the restless spirit who seeks inner peace by wandering into some of the planet’s most remote—and potentially dangerous—locations. Like Christopher McCandless from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Oregon native Justin Alexander Shetler abandoned the material life by going off the grid—and with an equally tragic result. Salt Spring Island native Harley Rustad tells Shetler’s riveting story in Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas (Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada/Knopf Canada, 2022).
Surviving the Family
In Jared Martin, a member of the Heiltsuk and ‘Namgis First Nations, Eden Robinson created an unforgettable character and a shape-shifting world of contemporary magic realism that spawned a trilogy and later a CBC TV series. In Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, and Return of the Trickster (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2017, 2018 and 2021, respectively), Jared inspires our empathy as a typical teenager enduring a tough upbringing in a northern B.C. resource town: awkwardly seeking validation from his elders, succumbing to peer pressure, and struggling to find his place in the world.
Internalized racism and the struggle for self-autonomy play a role in two memoirs in which family becomes a significant barrier to personal liberation.
In Races: The Trials & Triumphs of Canada’s Fastest Family (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2023), Valerie Jerome tells how she and her brother Harry, both Olympic sprinters (Harry a world record holder and once the fastest man on earth), had to endure not only societal racism but the burden of a violently abusive mother whose own victimhood from bigotry had destroyed her emotional and mental health.
In Almost Brown: A Mixed Race Family Memoir (Toronto: Penguin RandomHouse, 2023), Charlotte Gill explores how her self-image and sense of the world were shaped by her family’s experience of multiple immigrations, by the rupture in her parents’ marriage and its consequences, and by growing awareness of her own relative privilege and agency as a half-white settler in Canada.
Women Crossing Borders
Three debut novels by women who are immigrants to Canada—from Tibet, South Korea, and Iran, respectively—tell inspiring stories about the struggle for freedom from the constraints of gender, culture, nationality, and the state.
In We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada/McClelland & Stewart, 2022), Tsering Yangzom Lama uses the stories of two Tibetan sisters and their odyssey of survival from Nepal to Toronto to explore how colonization and exile have shaped the Tibetan people since the Chinese invasion and occupation of their homeland.
In The Invisible Hotel (Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2024), Yeji Y. Ham uses mesmeric effects blending the beautiful, surreal, and disturbing to explore ghosts of the Korean divide. As the story begins, the young South Korean protagonist—trapped in her boring village and mourning the death of her father—agrees to take an elderly woman on a two-hour drive north toward the border, not realizing that the woman is North Korean and they’re going to a prison to visit a brother she hasn’t seen in 68 years.
And in Zulaikha (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2023), Niloufar-Lily Soltani explores the meaning of love, family loyalty, the struggle for self-expression, and devotion to homeland in times of constant upheaval. It’s a sprawling epic of a tale in which the title character becomes a sort of Everywoman for Iran’s last century.
Forbidden Love and Expression
For someone as well-versed in queer culture as yours truly claims to have been for the past thirty-five years, I was somewhat gobsmacked not to have heard of the 1919 German film Anders als die Andern/Different from the Others (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) when this book came in for review. Thanks to the publisher’s Queer Film Series and UBC professor Ervin Malakaj, we gain fascinating new insight into gay love in Germany at the beginning of the Weimar Republic—a brief window for free expression after World War I when censorship laws were lifted.
One of my favourite reads last year was coexistence (Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2024), Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut collection of short fiction. Among the ten stories, the range in subject matter, richness in detail, and generosity of spirit are impressive. So, too, is the Driftpile Cree Nation author’s fiercely independent queer sensibility, which combines a sharp critical instinct with refreshing candour about sex—whether of the shameful and disappointing or joyfully erotic (and hot) variety.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Harman Burns’s alternative music-inspired debut novel, Yellow Barks Spider (Regina: Radiant Press, 2024), but was impressed by the author’s approach to narrative. In some ways a mini-version of the classic Great Canadian Novel, it is also—by virtue of its transgender perspective—a haunting subversion of that same overdone CanLit subgenre.
It’s Hockey Night Somewhere
When I’m not thinking about serious subjects like the decline of Western democracy and the future of our planet, there’s a good chance I’m thinking about hockey.
Let’s start with my long-tortured fandom of the Vancouver Canucks. Some believe the Canucks, now in their fifty-fifth year of existence without a single Stanley Cup victory to their credit, are cursed. (I wrote about this last year, in a non-review piece for BCR.) Former Vancouver Province sportswriter Ed Willes addresses the curse in his aptly titled Never Boring: The up and down history of the Vancouver Canucks (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024), a fascinating team history that gives credence to the mythology of the Canucks’ historic futility.
Earlier last year, I reviewed The Longest Shot: How Larry Kwong Changed the Face of Hockey (Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 2024), by Chad Soon and George Chiang, with illustrations by Amy Qi. A book for young readers, The Longest Shot tells the up-and-down story of Kwong, the first hockey player of Asian ethnicity to crack the roster, however briefly, of a National Hockey League team. It’s a great resource for schools on fighting racism and promoting hockey’s growth among all ethnic groups.
After I reviewed former Canuck goaltender and broadcaster Corey Hirsch’s memoir, The Save of My Life: My Journey Out of the Dark (HarperCollins Canada, 2022), co-authored by Player’s Tribune editor Patrick Conboy, a HarperCollins publicist complained that I had been insensitive about some of the mental health issues explored in the book. This was disappointing, but I later confirmed that the complaint was the publicist’s and not the authors’. Perhaps my critique about Hirsch dropping the subject of homophobia after only a brief reference, despite its admitted role in his “dark” period, had touched a nerve. It’s still a forbidden subject around the NHL.
Thankfully, the game of hockey is changing and becoming more inclusive. There’s still a ways to go, but Overcoming the Neutral Zone Trap: Hockey’s Agents of Change (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2021), edited by Cheryl A. MacDonald and Jonathon R.J. Edwards, reveals how much progress has been made, particularly in Canada, to make the sport a more welcoming place for non-white players, players with disabilities, queer and trans players, women seeking leadership positions within the sport, and others.