December 7 at TYPE Books Junction with Giles Blunt, Rod Carley and Lisa de Nikolits.

RUFF by Rod Carley

You don’t need to love Shakespeare to love RUFF by Rod Carley. But it will make the reading experience that much greater, if you do. If you love fast paced dialogue stacked with puns, quick jibes, and modernist twists on historic turns of phrases, and you enjoy laughing at smart connections—the ones that either hit immediately or take a second to sink in—you’ll enjoy reading RUFF.

And yes, like Munday, one of the many characters, says, “I read Shakespeare when I need a sedative which guarantees me a good night’s rest,” some readers might worry this is a “Shakespeare Book,” but it’s not (I mean it is, but it isn’t). It uses a particular time in history to punch down some of the most important contemporary issues. Rod Carley has taken a preposterous cast of characters and gathered them on the stage for a story that centre’s the fragility of an artist’s ego, but that also tackles issues of gender identity, censorship, equality and the relevance of art in politically divisive times.

Laugh out loud moments, and others that have you singing Hotel California while a couple of characters are chatting inside the Tower of London. Smart and funny, are the simplest and most accurate words to describe this book. It was like watching a farce unfold on a stage, with a head swivelling number of set changes and cast turnover, but finishing the book, I had the same endorphin rush I’d have after watching a well-produced play in Stratford. Thank you Latitude 46 Publishing for my reading and #bookraffle copies.

BAD JULET by Giles Blunt

Oh the challenge in writing a review of a book that impresses with its particular narrative voice, a first person collection of thoughts and memories (with a memoir within), that for everything told to us by the narrator about another character, might be a book of fact or a complete fiction, a set of lies written to make him (writer, Paul Gascoyne) look better than he is (a self-centred academic who believes he deserves more than he’s worth) or an attempt to judge himself more harshly than he did at the time (40 years earlier).

I love that this novel exists as both the story of a flawed and lost soul, Sarah Ballard (Redmond) who loses everything, including her memory of events, during the sinking of the Lusitania, whose choices reflect badly on every other “true” event of her past. It is the recollection of Paul Gascoyne, who loved her, and a playwright, Jasper Keene, who also loved her. There are stories shared about imperfect fathers (perhaps even morally so); there are other patients/students at a sanitorium in the Adirondacks, and several other typical sorts of the era (1915-1918), but more than all the perfectly flawed characters, the novel is a genuinely voiced story about potentiality and all that is lost when we cannot be true to who we are.

Blunt harnesses a particular style that feels exactly perfect for the story, a Gatsby-esque quality for certain, but where the narrator is front and centre (mainly because he seems the type to not think of anyone but himself). If you’re getting the impression, I don’t like the narrator all that much, it’s okay. Paul Gascoyne is also perfectly exact for the time, and I wouldn’t change a thing about him. Blunt has gone above and beyond my expectations with this novel but skilfully manages the slow unfolding mystery readers have come to appreciate. Thank you Dundurn Press for my reading and #bookraffle copies.

MAD DOG and THE SEA DRAGON Lisa De Nikolits

In a world where “you dance with the devil, you pay the price,” Jessica Wren learns from a young age, the devil is never the scary stranger, but someone more familiar. Jessica, and her sister Glennis, dream their entire lives of being more, of moving up in the world, of having it all, but when the chicken comes home to roost-or the Mad Dragon’s mother- the revelations aren’t surprising to everyone —well except the reader of course.

Lisa de Nikolits masterfully unfolds a noirish, mobster-style, mystery with her usual fun frolicking dialogue and spot on characterization. Jessica is a self-dressed (after finding a trunk full of old clothes in the foster) damsel in distress, who appears to get herself in way over her head. Her sister Glennis is a “potato faced” misery guts who manipulates Jessica into believing she is nothing without her. The two get themselves into a heap of trouble that is as enjoyable to witness as any noir film of the last century.

With a perfectly cast set of characters, de Nikolits delivers a high stakes rollicking novel that is easy to read but won’t be easily forgotten. I particularly love Daisy, the sea dragon one of many little details in this novel that are more important than they appear at first. Thank you Inanna Publications for my reading and #bookraffle copies.

Register for the Livestream through EventBrite. Join us at TYPE Books Junction, 2887 Dundas Street West, Toronto. 6:30pm. Doors open all day. Come in and shop.