Season 12 Launch: Book Reviews

Look who’s coming to Junction Reads? Sunday October 5 at 6:30pm

TYPE Books Junction, 2887 Dundas Street W. (Open all day).

Catherine Bush, Caitlin Galway and Michelle Winters. Check out our book reviews. Link to register for the livestream is at the bottom. PWYC in person or on the registration page. All proceeds support the authors this season.

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HAIR FOR MEN by Michelle Winters

Can people really change?

Inspired by bell hooks The Will to Change, Constance, a character in Michelle Winters’ novel opens a private hair salon (HAIR FOR MEN) that services men in what appears to be a—too good to be true—space that doesn’t include any extra services.

A grieving Louise is cutting hair at a franchise-style budget salon carrying the burden of an assault in the 10^th grade, when Constance finds her and hires her to work at her special salon in an industrial park in Mississauga. The fantasies that flicker in Louise’s mind sustain her and distract her perhaps from the grief of losing her parents. As she imagines the violent deaths of the two boys in high school who ruined her to touch, who ruined her to trust men, until one day one of those tormentors walks into Hair for Men. It is an opportunity to enact revenge, but things turn out surprisingly different. It can’t be this easy.

Michelle Winters has written a uniquely gorgeous, intimate and emotional exploration of female rage. Nothing is what it seems to be, and everything is what you’d expect, but nothing is ever easy. There is a particularly great character in Grace, who sells a special talent on an Only Fans-type site, and who offers the reader a bit of hope. What men define as “messing around” is a violence women carry in their bodies for their entire lives—like a dead body zipped into a duffel bag. And Winters asks, what are women to do with this burden? We live in a world that still teaches women how to take care of themselves in a “man’s world” when we should be focusing on teaching men how to be better people? There are lessons to be learned in HAIR FOR MEN, not the least of which is how to write great characters!

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A SONG FOR WILDCATS by Caitlin Galway

With gorgeous illustrative prose and an obvious emotional devotion to her characters, Caitlin Galway gives us five short stories that each leave a lingering attachment to the people and places we visit in A SONG FOR WILDCATS. Despite the uniquely drawn characters living in different time periods, each story feels like a vital part of the whole. It is in a “vast sea” of love, grief, pain and loss where we find these people struggling to stay afloat, where the ecstasy of feeling, experiencing, of living pulls them into the depths.

In France during the Viet Nam war, Alfie falls in love with Felix but cannot free himself from the memory of harm and liberate love from pain. On July 5, 1982, Fiona wakes in a motel room with no memory of how she got there, except a certain knowledge that she lives in a reality “that never should have been”. In Northern Ireland during the troubles, a woman discovers her eleven-years-dead sister’s child in an orphanage and puts her life on hold to manage him and the phantoms of war appearing at the beach. A woman—known by people in her hometown in New York to be a mad child—returns home to find the truth about her best friend Sabrina’s suspicious death. And in the final story, we’re in Australia after World War II, with Annabelle and Elizabeth enveloping each other in the madness of their obsessive relationship.

The stories in A SONG FOR WILDCATS are as discomfiting as a crow pecking at the window but as visually soothing as a soaring flock of birds. They are the “rage and loss that tie a spirit to the earth.” The stories exist in the murky surrealism of lives fractured by violence and grief, and they are the shame and pain we burrow deep inside ourselves when the burden of damaged childhoods becomes too heavy to carry.

Galway has given us a remarkable and exemplary collection of fiction filled with so many stunning sentences, I filled three notebook pages with quotes.

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SKIN by Catherine Bush

The longest of the stories in Catherine Bush’s collection, SKIN, opens with a piece of paper found in the pages of Barthes, containing the handwriting of a former beloved, a once promising person who suddenly vanishes from the narrator’s life. I felt, in reading BENEVOLENCE: A Lower East Side Story, that I am not the only one to wonder, dreamingly, about the people who get away from us. The friends and acquaintances who once existed in the stormy moments of our lives but get washed away somehow, the people we still feel in our skin. When their memory resurfaces, we’re sent on social media searches and to the depths of page 12 in an Internet search query. It’s jarring, and this is my favourite of the collection (I think!).

The title story, SKIN, is a flash of life as told by the adult child of a woman who leaves a Christian Evangelical church to dedicate herself to attending to people’s feet. It reminds us of the power of human connection. And then we experience the emotional loss—found abandoned in the cargo hull of a plane—of a beloved dog. A woman who suffers headaches ends up in a hotel room with a stranger. The night before lockdown, a narrator loses their keys in a movie theatre. A bisexual screenwriter, hiding his sexual identity, and struggling to be loved, winds up in a Honeymoon suite with a man who might change everything (also a favourite). A letter from Roxanne that offers an alternative to the fabled story of Cyrano de Bergerac (Oh, no, is this my favourite?). A woman runs over an angel. A polar bear researcher lives in the stormy aftermath of an assault. A woman communes with a glacier. These stories!

A collection of unimaginable losses concentrated in a collection of thirteen powerful and expressive stories, that in some cases are mere moments in the lives of incredibly memorable characters. SKIN reminds us that we are not all that we’ve lost in life, the breakages, the wounds, the scars, but in the “persistent presence of the past” we are reminded, despite everything, to live and to love, and to appreciate the beauty of life, the awful beauty in our “slow decay.”

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