If you can’t us tomorrow at TYPE Books Junction, I hope you’ll join the livestream.
Sunday May 3: The event kicks off at 6:30pm ET at 2887 Dundas Street West. It is the penultimate in-person event of the season, so I hope you’ll come out and say hi, and listen to some readings and writerly conversation with Kerry Clare, Alice Fitzpatrick and Liz Johnston.
Definitely Thriving by Kerry Clare, published by House of Anansi Press.
Clemence is trying to figure out how to exist where she is, to start from nothing and see what she’ll become, to stop searching for happiness and see if she can find it right in front of her. This choice frustrates friends, confuses sisters, and has everyone around her questioning her motives. Strangers accuse her of trying on “spinsterdom like a costume” without respecting every other woman’s choice to be single.
I’m not sure the point of Clemence’s choices is even clear to her, until she gets sick, until she realizes that all she needs is to be seen, not wanted, not married, not employed in a predictable job, but seen for who she is, how she is, right now.
What I love most about Definitely Thriving by Kerry Clare is that I’m forced to think for myself why Clemence’s choices are so jarring – why when she’s banging on the door of a closed boulangerie asking for a baguette (that is going to be thrown out anyway), I think, this person isn’t someone I could be friends with; why when she makes out with a character in a bookstore, I worry for him, that he’s being lured into a relationship with someone who will take from him, but who may not be appreciated for his strange perfection, and why as a wife, friend, sister and daughter, I am constantly asking, what does anyone get out of a relationship with Clemence? But I also I don’t think any woman should do what is expected, should behave in a manner that is approving or acceptable to a random reader, or any other judgmental person out there. Clemence exists for herself, for the moment, or is trying to anyway, and in the end, she discovers that her new community of strange characters means more than she ever thought possible.
I read Definitely Thriving without stopping because it was a fun, alluring, introspective tour through a Toronto neighbourhood with a woman who’s trying her best to find some kind of happiness, some kind of definition of thriving, whatever that means in this world where women are expected to be so much, but within limits – we just don’t know the limits until friends, family, and internet strangers tell us we’ve exceeded them.
The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston. Published by Book*hug Press.
Reading The Fall-Down Effect as a mother, as a sibling, as an individual who does my best (but not nearly enough) for the climate, I am sitting in so many thoughts.
First, I love books that examine the objectification of women. Unlike men, who are defined by what they do, women are still (in 2026!) defined by whether they are, or are not, a mother. I had a lot of feelings about Lynn but understanding that she didn’t really want to be a mother, I had to ask myself, what does a woman do with her own subjectivity (queer climate activist), when to the world she is first (and only) a mother. The Fall-Down Effect had me thinking a lot about this. If you do choose to become a mother (as a free-thinking, autonomous individual) what do you owe the children you brought into the world? At which point do they become individuals responsible for their own care, their own actions?
As a sibling, I was emotionally engaged with the dynamic among Sylvia, Fern and River, kids brought into the world by climate activist parents (surprising yes), who try their best to survive their mother’s abandonment, but what do you do when one sibling decides to throw everything into climate activism, causing actual and emotional harm. Johnston does an amazing job with the structure, set-up as a fluid and easy multi-voiced narrative that gives us everyone’s perspective, I think every reader will feel more connected to one or the other. It’s Fern for me – even though she makes some uneasy decisions.
As someone who cares about the planet, it’s obvious I am not doing enough. The Fall-Down Effect has me asking myself, what exactly am I willing to do to flip the current script? The world is full of indifference and denial, what difference does protest make? Reading this, I am left knowing I can do more and am determined to do so.
I hope everyone reads this book.
A Dark Death by Alice Fitzpatrick. Published by Stonehouse Books.
If you want to understand what it means when they say, cosy mystery, A Dark Death is definitively this: a book that you could read by a fire in a little stone cottage (or in my case, under a duvet, while the rain pelts the windows).
Kate Galway is a prefect middle-aged meddler, an historical fiction writer, who knows a thing or two about human behaviour.
In A Dark Death, the second in the Meredith Island Mysteries, a fraudster psychic is murdered and laid naked in an archaeological dig (a fake one) where students and academics have been gathering to examine their findings.
Griffin Blackstock isn’t the only person murdered, and while we’re taken on a murder mystery adventure with Kate and her friend Siobhan, we meet a slew of other characters, who are all in some manner or another carrying around a burdensome past.
Alice Fitzpatrick does a great job of giving us a literary version of one of those amazing little mysteries on the BBC and in fact Kate Galway could do with her own television show because the scenery and little town setting really comes alive in the writing and all the characters enhance the mixed feelings of island living where you’re either confined by it or protected by its smallness.
Register to get access to the livestream via Zoom, or join us in person at TYPE and PWYC at the door.
Junction Reads 
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