When I started writing reviews ahead of Junction Reads’ events, I did it because I am not very good at it and wanted to get better, but also when I write down my thoughts about a book, the book stays with me longer than it would if I read it on the beach and then left it in a hotel room (I did this once, and completely forgot that I read the book, and bought another copy back in Toronto). I have never been good with remembering faces and names, and because books are an emotionally immersive experience for me—like I live and breathe with the characters and then forget they ever existed—these reviews help. I am not alone with my literary amnesia, and I wish it wasn’t so, especially for the characters I really do want to remember forever. The real reason I write them though is that I want to find a way to tell you to read the book in ways that is more than descriptive.
Heather Birrell, Saad Omar Khan and Teri Vlassopoulos join us Sunday November 2 to chat about writing their books and will share a reading. Here are my attempts at reviews, which I hope will make you want to join us—in person at TYPE Books Junction, or online through the Livestream.
LIVING EXPENSES: Teri Vlassopoulos. Follow @terivlass on Instagram
In Teri Vlassopoulos’ LIVING EXPENSES time passes in seasons three winters, two springs, two summers, two falls, but it also passes in menstrual cycles, in conversations, in text exchanges, emails, blog posts, in twitter messages and in breaths, the deep kind you take when you want to fill your body with hope, with the belief in something that may never happen.
While the novel interrogates the having-a-baby industry, from message boards, Facebook groups, apps, and the ugly capitalistic commodification of motherhood and babyhood, what screamed out to me while I read LIVING EXPENSES was family.
Laura and Claire are sisters who are extremely close, to each other and to their mother. Vlassopoulos exemplifies this with a beautiful scene with the three women sprawled across a bed mostly naked under a ceiling fan, as an “easiness (that) was not actually that common”. If it’s because I have siblings with whom I share this same unrestrained intimacy or a human drive for a connection this deep, the family unit at the heart of Vlassopoulos’ novel reminds me how blessed I am to be this close to my family. So, while the physical and emotional struggle to have a baby is the plot point that propels the novel forward, it is love, and family that holds it all together.
When Laura and Claire meet their mother’s boyfriend for the first time over a video call; when Laura’s husband Joe accidentally dislocates a child’s arm; when Claire offers to freeze eggs for her sister; when their father sends cash; when Laura bonds with her soon-to-be stepsister, and in so many other moments in this tender-hearted novel, what we know of hope is that Laura will be fine regardless of the outcome, because she has family. If she has a baby, it will be icing on the cake. When you read this novel, you’ll know I mean more than metaphorical icing—a baby announcement will mean another delicious cake. The food-making in this novel will have you searching up recipes. This is a gorgeous book on so many levels, I hope you all read it.
DRINKING THE OCEAN: Saad Omar Khan. Follow @s.omar.khan on Instagram.
When Murad sees Sofi for the first time since a chance encounter at a wedding years earlier, his heart opens to reveal the empty place where he had hidden his deep love, where he had tried to hide Sofi away. Seeing her triggers memories of the short but intense time they spent together in London. We’re then given Sofi’s life, her experiences of loss, her brother’s death, of her parents’ divorce, of searching for someone who might take her away from death.
We’re offered both Murad and Sofi’s perspectives on a love destined to be unrequited, if not completely unexplored. With striking, poetic, and deeply spiritual language, Khan gives us a love story, but also a life story, one that considers our deep connection to family, to oneself and to God, a story that asks, how do we continue to move forward? The novel explores mental illness, loneliness and grief with heartbreaking accuracy.
There is an emptiness we all carry, and while many of us try to fill it with love, faith, experiences and more, it is something we all share. Loneliness isn’t found in aloneness, but in the deep losses we each experience at some point in our lives. For Sofi, it is the space she holds for her dead brother, for Murad, it is the space he keeps empty for Sofi and his struggle with depression. Perhaps bigger than the question of how do we move forward, is how do we hold all the emptiness, the spaces that can never be filled and still seek happiness? Reading DRINKING THE OCEAN, I am left feeling optimistic, that with connection to one another or to God, there is hope, and the potential to find peace and happiness for all of us.
BORN: Heather Birrell. Follow @floatandscurry on Instagram
“Who gets to decide what is a good story?”
Elise, a high school English teacher is giving birth in the middle of a lockdown. Anthony’s mind is swarmed by a stabbing fantasy. Shai Anna becomes a capable midwife because she witnessed her aunt, and a dog, giving birth. Faduma watches Shai Anna keenly. Ryan keeps time. Mark guards the door. Thanh sleeps in the corner. Maria, high school counsellor, manages the guilt after calling the lockdown. Sam speaks from the grave and the collective voice of the entire Grade 12 English class worries about what comes next, for them, for the baby, for the world.
BORN is told in sections CRAMP, BLOOD, BREATHE, GUSH, EXPAND, CONTRACT, PUSH, BORN and in the voices of various people trapped in a high school during a lockdown, while the English teacher gives birth. The situation—and just existing as a teenager—is already fraught with so much tension, it made me think about the fragility of human connectedness. How do our stories play out when we consider that each of sees things differently, each of us is living our own pain, so how can we appreciate others’? What do we mean to one another, does human connection mean anything if our stories will be told in different ways? How will we be seen by others in the larger narrative?
While some characters consider “The many ways we find to betray each other, mostly without meaning to.… Of how love morphs, with misunderstanding, with misfiring, into anger.” Or how their mere existence is “inappropriate when it comes to this earthly realm.” What we all want “is to feel understood…That to feel understood is not to BE understood—but the effect?”
BORN is about human connectedness, a gorgeously presented novel centring several characters in a moment of extreme tension, but at a time (in the world, in OUR world) where our connections to one another are a flimsy tether of doubt, failure and an assumed meaninglessness. But Birrell offers us hope, that no matter what, each of us is an integral part of the story. This novel pulls you along with all that hope, because it is a very good story!
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