Three New Reviews: “Nora Cummings, Enn pchit fee Michif: A Life and Legacy” by Nora Cummings, with Cheryl Troupe; "On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic” edited by Edward Willett; and "A Friend for Hairy” by Maureen Ulrich

“Nora Cummings, Enn pchit fee Michif: A Life and Legacy”

By Nora Cummings with Cheryl Troupe

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.95  ISBN 9-781779-401540

 

Nora Cummings, Enn pchit fee Michif: A Life and Legacy features this Métis/Michif trailblazer, whose life—from growing up in a road allowance community in “uninsulated shacks” to helping create and leading the Saskatchewan Native Women’s Association and Gabriel Dumont Local 11—demonstrates how one selfless individual can make a tremendous difference in the lives of countless others.  

Cummings and interviewer/co-writer/educator, Cheryl Troupe, deliver an accessible, educational, and highly interesting portrait of Cummings’ traditional Métis upbringing; the teachings and values she learned from family and passed on to her own eight children; and her community activism and politics.

Borne from Troupe’s interviews, the memoir preserves Cummings’ authentic voice and conveys a “kitchen table” vibe, where even sharing photos happens: the author’s included several photographs of extended family, and her grassroots associates who advocated for “a network of services for the urban Indigenous community in Saskatoon,” including SaskNative Housing. Troupe heralds women like Cummings—the “aunties, the Koohkooms (grandmothers), the quiet organizers,” whose “names don’t always appear in textbooks, but their fingerprints are on every movement that brings [them] to justice.”

Cummings’ chapters validate Troupe’s claim that the former’s life has been “politically significant” and “culturally resonant.” Cummings shares her hard-working family’s stories; details what it was like to live on a road allowance (then to be “moved off the land in 1953” due to city expansion); and explains how moving into the city “changed everything” and “[her] people felt discrimination.” She educates others “about the work that [her] people did in building the city of Saskatoon and making it better” for Métis people, and “all Indigenous people in the city.” Initially so shy she couldn’t look job interviewers in the eye, Cummings, who earned a GED, eventually found herself speaking at conferences and running for Saskatoon city council.   

Cummings frequently lauds her mother, grandmother, and other relatives, including uncle Clarence Trotchie, who “helped create the Native Alcohol Council House in Saskatoon.” He instilled the importance of involvement in the Métis movement in 1970; a year later Cummings was working as a fieldworker for the Métis Society of Saskatchewan.

Her grandfather fought at the 1885 Battle of Batoche, and her grandmother “worked with the women, melting down pots, pans, nails—whatever they could find—to make bullets for guns.” Post Rebellion, Métis families “had to pack up, leave their homes, and move to Montana” or be arrested, and they remained there “until the early 1900s,” before returning to Round Prairie (near the Whitecap Dakota First Nation).

Cummings and her siblings attended St. Joseph’s School in Saskatoon, where the nuns were “quick to punish [them] for any reason.” A female cousin had a rib broken, and students were made to “̒bob for apples,’” which meant having their heads held under water “until [they] ran out of breath.”

Enn pchit fee Michif  means “a little Michif girl.” Though she now lives in a seniors’ home, Cummings says “There is still a lot of work to do” …  and this Elder keeps doing it.

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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"On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic”

Edited by Edward Willett

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99  ISBN 9-781998-273720

 

 

 

 “Speculative fiction” is an umbrella term that refers to magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, alternative history, horror, and dystopian fiction … basically any fiction that ventures outside of what’s considered reality. From 1989 until 2025, “On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic” was the most lauded English-language speculative fiction magazine, garnering numerous Aurora awards and nominations.

After “On Spec” metaphorically shuttered, award-winning multi-genre writer and publisher, Edward Willett, picked up the torch and published the anthology On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, bringing more thrills, chills, and imaginative new worlds to fans of speculative fiction. The anthology features twenty-eight original stories of varying length, style, and theme, but each delves into the strange territory of What if?

Fiona Moore’s story, “Web We Weave,” examines AI going out of control (not too hard to imagine, after all). “Bespoke spider-bots, web crawlers that tracked methodically through all the websites on the Internet, could find out anything you wanted and send the data back to any site you pleased.” A thwarted lover creates a system called “ArgoSearch” that can determine if “your partner [is] cheating on you,” or help you get “the dirt on your neighbours or co-workers,” and “provide evidence in minutes and send it to whoever you want.” 

In the excellent piece “Scorch,” by Noah Chinn, an autistic child’s father is involved in creating a “new world” where “there would be only perfection. Designed cultivated, deliberate perfection.” But his daughter is not perfect. And he loves this only child—she reads everything, and discovers that “One day, the words changed.” These five horrifying words begin this emotional story.

In Rebecca Bennett’s “Written in the Bones,” Anna, a pioneer-era archaeologist, is trying to recover a stolen fossil from “Mama Pepper,” a witchy woman who “smacks of P.T. Barnum tomfoolery.” The charlatan has sold the bones and “there’s spellwork in the air.”

My favourite piece is Marcelle Dubé’s creepy-forest story, “The Gloaming,” which I felt viscerally. The real-world rootedness (it’s set north of Whitehorse); the First Person narration (by a woman whose husband and dog had gone missing during their “walk in the gloaming”); and the descriptive details of the setting, weather, and the narrator’s terror gave me the chills. There’s also a neighbour who insists that the husband is dead, and warns that “̒It comes down off the mountains every twenty years.’” As with any good horror story, the protagonist decides to head up the mountain to search. “The trail was littered with broken twigs and freshly fallen needles on top of the six-inch accumulation of snow. Once, I saw a clump of fur caught on the bark of a black spruce, about six feet up.” Oh, oh. I can hear the cawing raven and the “late-nesting squirrel [flinging] bits of bark” in this superb piece.

Whatever gives you the willies—vampires, the undead, gigantic insects, or discovering that we’re all living in a simulation—you’re sure to find something in this book that will pleasantly unnerve you.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“A Friend for Hairy”

Written by Maureen Ulrich

Illustrated by Brenda Blackburn

Published by Flatlands Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99 ISBN 978-1-0691135-6-6

 

 

 

I’m so glad that Maureen Ulrich was not finished with the antics of her orange-furred, white-pawed character, Hairy, after she released A Home for Hairy last year. Ulrich, who lives near Lampman in southeastern Saskatchewan and is also known for her novels for young readers, has again teamed with illustrator Brenda Blackburn to bring us more of the endearing cat in a new softcover sequel, A Friend for Hairy.

 One thing that’s unique—and something I particularly liked about both of these picture books—is that Ulrich features an adult—busy nurse Alison—rather than a child in her tender story. Fearing that “She was too busy working and studying” to spend enough time adventuring with her rescue cat, Hairy, Alison brings home a “hissing and yowling” surprise in her knapsack. “A grey blur leaped out” and a new kitten, feisty Ella, “bounded towards Hairy, and swatted him on the nose.” Alison hopes that the new cat, another rescue, can “keep [Hairy] company when [she’s] busy.”  

Much of the humour here is delivered by the book’s illustrator, Brenda Blackburn. Blackburn lives rurally near Estevan, and, like the author, is also a cat lover. She knows that like kids, cat’s get up to the darnedest things. She ably shows yellow-eyed Ella ripping curtains and looking doleful after destroying potted flowers, and there’s even a panel of little Ella lapping up food inside Alison’s fridge.

Well-behaved and responsible Hairy is rather distraught over the chaos, ie: he “watched in horror” after Ella knocked medical manuals off the bookshelf and “shredded the pages.” The closer one examines the full-colour, full-bleed illustrations, the more one finds the light humour, ie: Hairy, who’s perfectly content to look out the window “at the busy street below or [pad] around their apartment,” sees faceless humans outside a theatre showing a movie called “That Darn Cat.” Among the medical texts on the bookshelf is a book simply titled Cats.

Before long, mischievous Ella finds herself trapped inside the washing machine (not in use) after Alison’s left for the day, and, Hairy being Hairy, he quickly comes up with a solution that bonds the two very different cats.

 I did an internet search to learn more about the writer-illustrator team, and found an article (https://discoverestevan.com/articles/lampman-author-maureen-ulrich-launches-new-childrens-book-with-illustrator-brenda-blackburn) about their congenial creative process. Ulrich said “the story can change as illustrations take shape, sometimes allowing the artwork to communicate details that no longer need to be written into the text.” I also learned that on the aforementioned “theatre” page, the illustrator presents “a view of Estevan Street and a playful nod to the Orpheum Theatre,” and that “Blackburn also drew inspiration from photographs of cats belonging to her sister and her own cat.”

There’s also something going on here at the human level. In the article quoted above, Ulrich says “the book’s message extends beyond the antics of two cats. Ella’s transformation shows how companionship and a positive influence can help bring about change.”

 A Friend for Hairy is the cat’s meow.

 

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

 

Three New Reviews: "Ghost Oracle" by Douglas Burnet Smith; “This Book is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies and the Invention of an Idiom” by yasser elhariry; and “mâci-nîhithawîwin: Beginning Woods Cree” by Solomon Ratt, Illustrations by Holly Martin

“Ghost Oracle”

By Douglas Burnet Smith

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95 (softcover) ISBN 9-781779-401472

  

Six years ago I reviewed poet and professor Douglas Burnet Smith’s collection Burden, and praised his “spectacular ability to juxtapose the tragic and the beautiful.” I’ve now read his eighteenth book, Ghost Oracle. It’s set in Greece, and again, the juxtapositions—between elation and sorrow, beauty and filth, history and now—stand out. With his distinct and often minimalistic style, expat knowledge, and original phrases, Smith’s effectively transported me to an island 10,000 kilometres from my own.

Here is a poet of observation and reportage. Indeed, many of Smith’s poems are story-like, including the opening piece, “Neo Kosmos,” which details an experience in Athens: jetlagged, the narrator missed his metro stop on the way to the Acropolis, met a woman (“reading/a novel by Kavvadias”) who helped him, and together they “glided slowly up toward harsh/Athenian daylight.” The poem is structured in laddered couplets and indented, single line stanzas, echoing the stops and starts of subway travel. Several of these pieces are formally structured—ie: poems written in tercets or couplets—with generous indentation. This first poem also demonstrates Smith’s fondness for listing, ie: in “glassed-in relics,” the narrator observes “clay pots, figurines, armless/torsos, toys and bones from a child’s grave.” Trees, groceries, and tourists’ accoutrements are listed. In a poem titled “Byzantine Riprap,” lines are structured like steps and the poet uses another delightful list to describe

 

               […] Terraced slops of myrtle,

                  sage, thyme, oregano, olive

groves, poppies, wild roses, daisies, eye-blue cornflowers, and small

       yellow bell-like somethings—

               chamomile?                        

 

Many poems feature three-word titles, ie: “Masts, Doves, Cigarettes,” Shutters, Rooster, Rhomboid,” and “Figs, Oranges, Oaths.” In the first of the aforementioned, I was happily stopped at this dazzling description of the horizon:

 

                […] where the Aegean’s matte blue

                          stretches west

                to an impossibly long, silver hinge

                          clasping it to the sky—

 

This poem also begins the naming of birds—dove (“double soft grey/stutter-steps in the shade”), sparrows, starlings, swallows, crows, shrikes, hawks, falcons, pigeons—that wing through this fine collection, and illustrates Smith’s use of personification:

 

                […] the sea has tried

                       all night, and failed again, all night,

 

to shed its wrinkled skin.

Goats are “mangy hecklers, snorting.” There’s “wind/tormenting the roof tiles,” and “A water truck rumbles by, waking the dust.” There’s barking, screen doors slamming, a “Cicada high-hat rap” and “a screech owl,\like a battery-drained car alarm.” Sheep?

 

                “… pointillist dots on the crest, foraging, loitering, wool

                        greyish white, sun-on-rocks”

     

Aside from paying attention to sounds—ie:, in a “sketchy Vespa” with failing gears, “he mistook the engine’s whine/for cicadas”—scents also viscerally elevate these poems … “Bread, the scent rising/out of the bakery,” “salt air,” “the perfume of jasmine,” and this gorgeousness:

 

                Undeterred, thyme wafts

 

                down from amphitheatric hillsides

                through the empty streets.  

 

                

Greece is the Aegean (“Crepuscular, sorrowful,/violet”), olives, cats. It’s long queues and anti-tourist graffiti. “Heat, ticking like time.” Slow ferries and whitewashed houses. Upon finishing these much-enjoyed poems, I feel I’ve been escorted to somewhere exotic … and it smelled of lemons and dust.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“This Book is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies and the Invention of an Idiom”

By yasser elhariry

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-781779-401502

 

Hol[e]y: the intriguingly titled This Book is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies and the Invention of an Idiom, by yasser elhariry, is a dense compendium that explores what is so not there—holes—it’s worthy of its own study. At times erudite, at times downright silly (“dead unserious”), ehlariry, an author and Associate Professor of French Studies at Dartmouth College, focuses his cultural, literary, religious, philosophical, and scientific gaze on holes of all types in this wide-ranging treatise which “began as a serious joke,” and, in which, the writer “took a massive gamble in writing.”   

In this “alternative cultural history of holes, long thought of as enclosures, container, graves, or one-way dead ends,” elhariry “push[es] back against these age-old conceptions of holes, countering that holes are openings and heavily coded sites of significance.” Throughout his heavily-referenced text he “demonstrates how cultural forms and theoretical discourses about holes shape modern and contemporary cultural production as much as they are shaped by it.”

This is a deep dive into a peculiar subject, but the range of references alone make for playful and interesting reading … and plenty of puns. “I write badly and put holes in my writing (mistakes, typos), but it’s not like I’m writing in a hole,” elhariry asserts. The author’s background—“born to migrant Egyptian Muslims, grew up in Dubai in the 1980s and 1990s, listened religiously to grunge and metal and the Spice Girls, and [his] teenage years were ruled by American shows, MTV, and blood-soaked action movies”—informs his work. The trilingual writer includes English, French and Arabic in this text, and he “drop[s] song lyrics everywhere like they’re hotcakes.”

The first chapter opens with a black and white photograph of a hotel in Geneva. The sign above this nondescript dwelling, Hotel Montana, reads “HO EL.” In this chapter, elhariry’s subjects include the work of  “Queer francoarab poet” Karima Ouaghenim  and “southern French poet” Christophe Tarkos. The writer contends that “Critics are down on queer poets. They miss their holes like the deserts miss the rain” (a lyric from “Missing,” by the English duo Everything But The Girl).

Holes in headlines are examined, ie: “Sand Hole Collapses at Florida Beach, Killing 7-Year-Old Girl” and “How did a Boeing Jet End Up with a Big Hole?” Song lyrics; poetic statements (“Black holes are stars falling in on themselves”); idioms (“You’re in the hole if you’re in dire financial straits” and “Shut your piehole”); narrative plot holes; holes in the human body; black holes in the universe; donuts and Swiss cheese; Islamic rituals involving “corporeal holes;” and Oscar the Grouch, who “lives in a hole under a trashcan” … it would seem that elhariry has left no hole unturned.

But this is also a book of questioning: “Are there happy holes? Do holes even exist? Aren’t they more accurately called openings?”         

In his Acknowledgements, we find the “largest hole” is the grief elhariry experienced upon his mother’s death, and “ghosts and grief …. Haunt each of [his] words here.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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 “mâci-nîhithawîwin: Beginning Woods Cree”

By Solomon Ratt, Illustrations by Holly Martin

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95   ISBN 9-781779-401427

   

The striking cover of Solomon Ratt’s latest work, mâci-nîhithawîwin: Beginning Woods Cree, is an image of two stylized muskrats vertically swimming in green water with fish and aquatic plants connecting them to a circle. Titled “That muskrat life” and created by artist Bree Island (Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Treaty 8), the image is “a reminder of our ability to adapt and transform,” and Muskrat’s story “is about strength and perseverance, and believing in oneself.” These attributes are critical when it comes to learning a language, and that’s what this hefty, coil-bound, introductory workbook aims to do: help the reader learn Woods Cree.

Ratt is a well-known educator, storyteller, and Cree-language advocate from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band with several publications to his credit; this new workbook complements his earlier publication, mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree (Y-dialect), and he’s also published nīhithaw ācimowina/Woods Cree Stories and the memoir kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, about his residential school experiences, plus other Cree language workbooks, with the University of Regina Press. The retired Associate Professor worked for several years at First Nations University of Canada, and his many literary awards speak to his recognized talents.

This latest publication “offers simple and accessible grammar lessons” with “clear explanations, engaging exercise, and helpful illustrations”—the latter are provided by Holly Martin, a Swampy Cree artist, originally from Moose Lake First Nation, whom Ratt’s worked with in the past. The often humourous line drawings provide a light complement to the lessons, and will be appreciated by both young and older learners.

The workbook begins with a short introduction of the Cree, “the most widespread of Canada’s First Nations peoples,” (of the 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan, 49 are Cree Nations) and explains that there are five different Cree dialects in Canada, and in Saskatchewan the N, TH, and Y dialects are spoken. This book uses the TH dialect and the Woodland Cree Standard Roman Orthography (SROw), in which “one letter represents one sound,” and there are ten consonants and six vowel sounds.

The book is organized into eight chapters, ie: “Nouns” and “Inanimate Intransitive Verbs,” and includes exercises, verb charts, and a vocabulary list. While linguists generally estimate that the Cree language is about 2,500 to 3,000 years old, this publication offers 21^st Century aids to assist in the learning. Online audio resources from the Cree Literacy Network (creeliteracy.org) are available to help with pronunciation, and there’s a QR code readers can scan “to request [their] copy of the answer key.”

Tâpwî mâni-mâka (it is so true) that a thorough, well-organized resource such as this one will be helpful to individuals undertaking independent Cree language studies as well as classroom educators. Notably, the vocabulary includes important weather words and phrases, like kaskatin (it freezes up) and mithoskamin (it’s break-up).

It’s interesting to me how many Cree words I know from my years of living in Turtleford and Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, ie: mistik (tree), môniyâw (a Caucasian), and amisk (beaver). Now I can learn some more.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

Three New Reviews: Lost in Translation by Edward Willett; Broken Realm by Jenna Greene; and Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing edited by Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan

 

"Lost in Translation"

by Edward Willett

Published by Endless Sky Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$26.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-58-4

 

It took me several days to complete Regina author and publisher Edward Willett’s far-future science fiction novel, Lost in Translation, as it required taking copious notes to keep the various humans and aliens straight, and to follow the out-of-this-world plot. Of all the Willett books I’ve read, this one’s been the most challenging, but I’m guessing that it is this very multitude of strange, double-consonanted characters; weird planets inhabited by “the Seven Races;” special abilities; the complex hierarchy of command; and violent wars that would have true sci-fi afficionados heralding this well-crafted novel.      

The book opens with Jarrikk, a bat-like, red-eyed S’sinn creature on planet Kikks’sarr, who’d been hobbled from flight due to an attack by humans (“bloody-handed murderers”). This attack also resulted in the death of his youngling fellow S’sinns—his “brothers.” Jarrikk understandably fosters a huge hatred toward the three murdering humans, who left behind “a pile of bloody meat indistinguishable from any dead beast.” The author scores A+ for gore.

Trouble’s been brewing on Kikks’sarr ever since humans arrived to the planet—the S’sinn no longer live in their “airy treetop structures,” and instead, for safety, have withdrawn into “high mountain caves.” Jarrikk’s first order of business is to let Flight Leader Kitillikk know what’s happened to his mates, then to repeat the sober story for the Hunters. A retaliation starts a human/S’sinn war.

Another thing about Jarrikk: a flightless S’sinn has few options; they include suicide, or taking the Oath and working for the Translators’ Guild. Translators “never lie,” and they must “Link” with other Translators, who are few and far between. Linking requires dual injections, which spread “Programming,” and using the “warm silvery cord” to connect the parties’ via a “contact patch behind [their] right ear.”

Jarrikk’s required to Link with a human, Kathryn, who has been suffering since her parents were slaughtered by S’sinn on the “farming planet” called Luckystrike, “a thousand light-years from Earth.” Both Kathryn and Jarrikk can empathetically read others. Poor Katy always gleaned her parents’ emotions, and after their obliteration she was whisked to an orphanage on Earth. Her trauma catapulted her into “bondcut” …  “an endless emotional loop”). Due to their perception and empathy, both Katy and Jarrikk are indoctrinated into the Guild of Translators, which serves the Commonwealth. The Translators “cannot lie under Programming.” Their responsibility is to translate during trade negotiations.

This complex story is not unlike what’s unfolding in real-world geopolitics right now. There are violent wars over territory, and one despotic figure, in particular—in this story it’s Flight Leader Kitillikk—is hell-bent on destroying anyone or anything that stands in the way of obtaining power through war. We have NATO, this book has the Commonwealth, which decrees that “̒the war between the S’sinn and the humans is ended,’” because “̒trade has been disrupted. Innocent ships have been destroyed,’” and there will be “̒serious economic consequences …’” Sound familiar?  

With attraction, revenge, and regeneration therapy also in the mix, Willett’s created a 309-page interstellar storm.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Broken Realm”

By Jenna Greene

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99  ISBN 9-781998-273546

 

Jenna Greene’s action-filled fantasy novel, Broken Realm, stars seventeen-year-old seamstress and loner, Keely Thompkins, and Briggs Ray, an eighteen-year-old woodsman and outsider. The pair are vaguely connected in the “real” world (they’d attended the same school), but when they meet in the woods and both see and touch “a faint distortion between a pair of high-branched trees” with a “strange, multi-coloured shimmer” and “faint heat,” the pair are transported into a realm in which they’ll be fighting for their lives, without even knowing why. What they do know: after passing through the portal and discovering their village has disappeared, they both now sport unusual parallel lines on their skin—Briggs on his wrist, Jenna on her shoulder blade.

The major strengths in this 350-page, slow-burn romance are the characterizations of the leading pair (both of whom battle demons); Greene’s ability to write riveting action scenes; and the detailed description of something called “The Frosting,” where winter instantly descends … and takes lives with it. These terrifying and icy descriptions are where Greene shines, ie: “[Briggs] spied whorls slithering across the ground, creeping over cobblestones and up concrete foundations. Grey steps turned frosty. Trees were wrapped with ribbons of ice.”

It’s also interesting that the story is timeless: we don’t know where this real world is, or when the story is taking place.

We immediately learn about Keely’s crippling phobia concerning doors and crossing thresholds—a specific kind of agoraphobia—which mostly confines her to the attic room where she works. “Her goal was to endure, not thrive,” Greene writes. 

Keely’s mother died years before, and, in his perennial grief, her father’s disinterested in his daughters, but at least Keely has family; Briggs has no recollection of ever having one. “̒No one claimed me,’” he tells Keely. His childhood consisted of “begging for crusts while wearing ill-fitting, threadbare clothes,” and school was a place to keep warm during the winter. Now, as a woodsman, he could earn money, though it was “barely enough to survive on.” Fortunately, having “lived half his life outdoors,” Briggs is able to start a fire and forage tubers to keep them alive.

I do have a gripe with this author’s distracting and frequent habit of beginning sentences with gerunds (“ing” words), ie: “Taking the book back, she cracked the spine.” Strong, active subjects and conjugated verbs create more direct and engaging sentences; gerund phrases often add unnecessary length to a sentence without adding clear meaning; overusing sentence-beginning gerunds blurs the flow of thoughts and bores readers; and this practice can also lead to dangling modifiers. Avoid!    

But back to those strange marks. After much effort, the young pair learn that they “bear the symbol of the gods,” and it will be up to them to repair “The Great Rift” that separated the Twin gods, Ahisa and Menor, and caused the world to transform—and not in a good way. Can they do it?

Greene has previously published other YA and children’s titles. See more: jeannagreen.ca .

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family, and Healing”

Edited by Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.95  ISBN 9-781779-401281

   

The anthology Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family, and Healing, edited by Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan, is a collection of personal essays, poems, letters and interviews that gives voice to LGBTQ+ Muslims and, in doing so, it creates a community for both authors and readers.

The text presents opportunities to learn about the personal struggles, traumas, and joys inherent in the lives of LGBTQ+ Muslims around the world, and it illustrates how storytelling is a transformative tool in healing from self-hatred, racism, family complexities, faith issues, societal expectations, alienation, and abuse. The editors consider the book “an intervention in both LGBTQ and Muslim communities, addressing the erasure of queer and trans Muslim voices from mental health discourse and from within their religious and cultural spaces.” It collectively highlights “the stormy convergence of faith, queerness, and mental health,” and opens with a powerful introduction by Imam Muhsin Hendricks, “one of the world’s first openly queer Imams,” whom, we learn, was “murdered in cold blood” in February 2025. This tragic fact alone underscores the often threatened existence of LGBTQ Muslims, and demonstrates why these voices need a stage.

Thawer is a Toronto-based social worker, psychotherapist, and author who “explores intersections of mental health and systemic oppression,” and Khan is an associate professor of Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University who changed her own focus from trauma to healing. They’ve organized the anthology into four parts to address “Identity and Family;” “Struggles and Resilience;” “Healing and Transformation;” and “Community and Spiritual Practices.”

In Part One, writer Sami Sharif addresses their difficult relationship with their mother, “born and raised in one of the poorest states in India,” and how they—“a queer boy in the suburbs of Ontario”—can reconcile their very different lives and experiences. Sharif explains that “relief” came once they “reframed [their] journeys (safar) as overlapping rather than being in opposition.” Now they can “embrace [themselves] as two weirdos (ajeebon) making it through this life together (saat milkar).”

Some of the authors of these raw pieces have understandably used pseudonyms. In her essay “Samajhdaar,” Y.K. speaks of being an outsider. “By the age of fourteen, I knew that nobody had ever loved me … I craved just one word, one word that would make me feel complete.” During university, mired in shame re: her queerness and feeling she’d disappointed her parents, she writes: “I broke my heart every day, healed my wounds, and waited for my next misfortune to arise.”  

Ayan Yusuf Karshe, an anti-oppression educator, has also struggled with identity, and, with a Somali-born mother who lived years in Saudi Arabia, the Canadian-raised Karshe had to learn—through workshops and reading—how to show their “ostracizing” mother more empathy. “Belonging is a lifelong journey,” Karshe writes.

Other powerful contributions include essays on self-care and creating new faith communities; a letter to an inner child; and a lyrical essay, “The Garden is My Home,” which ends “I am not broken (over and over); I am broken open. Alhamdullilah—praise God.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Three New Reviews: Sadi's Dragons, by Beverley Brenna; Apron Apocalypse, by Jeanette Lynes; and Critters: Wandering Monsters, by Allan Dotson

“Sadi’s Dragons”

By Beverley Brenna

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$16.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-296-6

   

Some authors always “deliver the goods” when it comes to arresting plots, compelling characters, and technical proficiency. Saskatchewan’s Beverley Brenna—a Governor General’s Literary Award nominee, author of numerous books for young people, professor emerita at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Education, editor, and visual artist—is one of those consistently reliable writers, and her new middle years’ novel, Sadi’s Dragons, is another grand success. Brenna books are not only entertaining, they also feel important, and her latest is no exception.

The intergenerational novel deals with serious issues: poverty and the unhomed; a fatal boating accident (and the fallout for eleven-year-old protagonist, Sadi, and her struggling mother); dementia; abuse; and lies. It also positions storytelling, art-making and forging new friendships as integral to the characters’ healing. In short, this is no ordinary juvenile novel with goofy characters, puppy love and slapstick humour … it’s far more layered and impressive, and it credits young readers with having both the interest and the ability to digest more complex plots and realistic, contemporary issues.

We meet Sadi when she’s been alone for five days and living in a tent near a river while her mother has “gone back to the city.” Food is sometimes found in garbage cans, washing is done in the river or—as October’s blowing in—a shopping mall bathroom. We know that Sadi has buried a tragic secret and the imaginative young girl tries to keep it locked up in her “memory box.” Also, as a result of the boating accident that killed her beloved father and twin brother, she’s suffered a brain injury.

Sadi’s chapters alternate with those of Marguerite, a senior artist challenged by dementia. Never-married Marguerite lives quietly with her dog (whose name she can’t recall, and whom she sometimes forgets to feed). She hasn’t painted in a year, and her gallerist is pressuring her for new work. She has no friends, often naps out of boredom (“Because if she was sleeping, she didn’t have to think about anything”), and is so frustrated with her memory loss she’s been throwing items—including canvases and paint supplies—into her back yard.

Brenna skillfully sets tone with the increasingly poor weather, and by using the colour grey. The dog is “like a small grey shadow,” Marguerite’s room is grey, and a day is described as “grey.” Sadi thinks that the river looks “like a long silver dress,” and even though she has an acquired brain injury, she’s always pondering, and comes up with ideas like putting calculators on shopping carts so “you’d know just how much you were spending.”

As much as Sadi is trying not to remember, Marguerite is desperate to remember, and asks herself: “What if I forget who I am?” I won’t reveal how Brenna masterfully connects the girl and the artist—the former fearing foster care, the latter fearing a care home—or what dragons have to do with it. I  encourage you to buy the book, and enjoy finding out for yourself.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Apron Apocalypse”

Written by Jeanette Lynes

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-294-2

 

I’ve previously admired Jeanette Lynes’ poetry and fiction, but with her latest book—Apron Apocalypse, an intimate yet highly-accessible collection of lyric essays—the Ontario-born, Saskatoon-based Lynes hoists an already high bar, and clears it. Lynes is well-known for her numerous books; as the Coordinator of the M.F.A. in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan; and for her wit and wardrobe. Her work—frequently surprising, tight, and always entertaining—has given her a national literary presence. Wikipedia page? Absolutely.   

Apron Apocalypse is smart, candid, stylish and illuminating—a book I’ll be recommending to anyone who loves the hybridity (poetic prose and real-life experience) of lyric essays, and will appreciate how Lynes has imaginatively harnessed her joys, failures and obsessions. She writes extensively about her failed marriage and “divorce trauma,” and self-forgiveness is a theme. She also examines—with linguistic precision—her rural upbringing (sans hot water); paintings (ie: Mary Pratt’s work), poetry (especially Elizabeth Bishop), music and movies (hurray for Sarah Polley!); aprons (she had a collection, but “Pretty aprons couldn’t rescue us all”); mental health; COVID’s toll; etymology (she makes it fun); her own height (“I’m the grain elevator to lots of folks’ woodsheds”) and physical features; and the many rooms, real and metaphorical, that’ve harboured her as she’s moved across the map.

Her prose is saturated with poetry. On the Isle of Mull, “decayed trunks shagged with moss form a sculpture gallery,” she writes, and in wintery Saskatoon, “sunlight will stroke in brief punches, bracing bouts of glare with windchill blasts that bitch-slap one’s cheekbones.” In her “marital house by the shore, a pretty/bungalow with pink siding,/the apron on its hook, hung, like a headless woman.” Lynes “wanted to be a writer more than a wife.” (Ditto.)

She addresses mental health head-on: her ex-husband “once dubbed [her] a sad clown,” and she walks us through campus to counselling sessions when her “inner darkness wails for help.” Of those eponymous aprons, Lynes asserts that rural women “sewed and sewed to stave off sorrow,” but it didn’t always work: a neighbour hung herself in the barn … “apron strings morph[ed] into lengths of rope.”

As a writer and professor, Lynes also writes about writing, and how “During the plague, [her] syntax took a beating. Prose barely clung to the page, kept peeling away from its margins.” She maligns “the hard c,” calling it her “least-loved sound,” and “never cared for the ellipsis,” though “suspect[s] it’s wrong, being prejudiced against certain elements of punctuation.”

One of the strongest essays is the tragicomedy “Sea Cow,” about trying to have a fun holiday in Florida while her “marriage [was] unravelling,” and her efforts “not to be a cow” on the disastrous vacation.

“A lot of one’s life is finding the words,” Lynes writes. For some, much of life is also about the act of forgiveness. “Forgiveness is tough for her,” Lynes contends in second person, “But she keeps trying, stabbing words onto the screen, pushing towards first-person voice. Closing in on her core.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Critters: Wandering Monsters"

by Allan Dotson

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 9-77869-066-2

  

Critters: Wandering Monsters, is another tour-de-force graphic novel by Regina writer, artist, game designer, and teacher, Allan Dotson, and it follows on the horns and tails of Critters: Underdark, a graphic novel shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award.

The new 205-page epic “was born out of [Dotson’s] desire to become a better comics storyteller,” he explains. The story explores “three kinds of evil,” including “systemic evil,” described as an evil that encompasses “monsters raised for war, trained to see others as enemies, rewarded for cruelty, and taught to value gold and power above all else.” Dotson writes, “We don’t have to imagine that world. We live in it.” (One need only watch the news to confirm this.) But the book is also about friends who become family, adventure, and “choosing empathy over fear,” and there’s a good dose of humour across the busy pages, as well. 

There are no less than “13 locations, 21 characters and 5 shape change disguises,” in Dotson’s fantastical world, the first part of which is set in the subterranean landscape of black and white caves and cliffs, the second part on the green, brown, red and orange-hued “Surface,” where humans share the Dinosaur Valley, forests and mountains with elephants, monkeys, winged horses and a spiky-tailed, bat-winged lion-type-of-thing that preys on those very horses.

At the outset, a group of five distinctive and youthful monsters are in a cave when they’re suddenly attacked by “cat bats” that have “escaped from the medusa’s train and are on the run from the dwarves.” Of these five characters, the snake-haired female in a caped jumpsuit, Lena, and her insulting (“stupid hair”) semi-adversary—the snaggled-toothed, pointy-eared hag, Sally, aka Saliel—are almost human-looking. We learn that Lena’s mother is Dread Lady Linorm, a sword-and-arrow-carrying medusa who “sells little monsters at the wizards’ market.”

Child-like Eddy is white-furred with spidery legs and Cycloptic-ish eyes. He’s an “Ettercap,” and part of the book’s humour derives from his innocence and basic diction, ie: “Der is a balla fyre? Shood we be wurreed ‘bout dat?” At one point Eddy warns Lena not to “tok” to a spell-casting creature, not because he can “take over [their] minds or something,” but because he’s “jus’ super boring.” No one’s certain why shapeshifter Uriel is being punished, but it could be for “Coming home late,” “Talking out of turn,” or “Laughing at a funeral.” In another funny frame, Lena tells Saliel that she doesn’t “know any fighting spells,” but she does “know a spell to mend [her] cloths, and a spell to clean [her] clothes, and a spell to make [her] clothes smell nice.” Sarcastic Saliel responds: “No fighting spells? That’s stupid.”

Reading this tale is like wandering through a dreamscape. There are always new characters, and they might be shapeshifters, delvers, warriors, elves, medusa wizards, mages, or minotaurs (to name a few). I laughed when Saliel, in a metafiction moment, said “I can barely keep track of what I’m supposed to look like.” For more Dotson: maycontainmonkeys.com.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

  

 

Three New Reviews: U Alive by Chelsea Coupal; Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times by Mark Fletcher; and Another Leaf: A Refugee Story by Marg Epp, as Told by Ma They Yare

“U Alive”

By Chelsea Coupal

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9781771872836

   

Chelsea Coupal’s second book, U Alive, is the most enjoyable poetry collection I’ve read in many moons. The rural Saskatchewan-raised writer and new mother documents—through sensorial and beautifully imagistic poems, mostly written in formal styles (couplets, tercets, quatrains)—a quintessentially prairie childhood; the transition from adolescence to motherhood; our often inexplicable attractions and attachments to people; the vagaries of the months and seasons; a close connection to the natural world; and a concern about the environment.

The book possesses a self-reflective, questioning tone. Each of the twelve sections begins with a stylized poem named for the months of the year. Coupal has split these calendar poems into two columns, and rather than reading straight across the horizontal lines, the poems are best read down the left column, then down the right. In “March,” Coupal contemplates breastfeeding (“The second week I get mastitis”) and philosophizes about her life: “I could have as much time ahead/as behind me, maybe less./I wonder if everything I’ve done/equals good or bad.” Her breast milk “is the colour of salmon,/dyed by [her] own blood.”  

There’s plenty of blood in these poems, ie: “Tongues wet/as blood or birth;” “Lady beetles in bleeding grass;” “blood-eyed ghosts;” “don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week/and doesn’t die;” and “blood on the sheets.” A rural Saskatchewan upbringing gives one a pragmatic perspective on death, I believe. It’s a place where one might see an eagle’s “white face red with the warm blood of a rabbit.”

Seasons are a focal point, too. In spring, “[March] lands/before rain, before geese, before seeding,/before tulips break through soil, wavy-green wings.” And in August, “Some nights the air is water/that surrounds a canoe.” How lovely. One teenaged September finds the narrator at a bush party: “We aren’t dressed/for the gentle sting of clear September night. A bonfire stains/the horizon” and partiers have “crop stubble stuck in [their] socks.”

In an environmental poem about taking a great-horned owl to a rescue, Coupal laments a prairie where “Every acre [is] maximized” and “chemical containers lie around.” The owl “Probably ate a mouse that ate rodenticide.”

I commend Coupal’s smart use of verbs: “birds flurry,” “snow shoots” and “rain swishes.” And who doesn’t appreciate a great moon metaphor? Coupal’s moon is a “pale thumbprint, creased and shadowed” and, in a particularly apropos comparison, it’s “a bullet hole/in the side of an old barn”.

The Saskatchewan Coupal portrays is the one I also experienced, from dancing “in cigarette smoke” to admiring the “wheat-husk whisper” of chickadees that land in retreating writers’ and artists’ upturned palms at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, and coveting the “honey scent” of sweet peas (“Moths in watercolour”).

 Loss is omnipresent in these stunning poems. In “Same Basic Losses,” we find this truism:

      We wait for the same basic losses: death of our pets

      grandparents and then our parents. And when our loved ones die,

      we remember we’re animals.

Sensorial, sexy, and steeped in the “small astonishment/at being alive,” I’ll savour these poems—repeatedly.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

__________

“Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times”

By Mark Fletcher

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-047-1

 

At 398 pages, I harboured reservations about reviewing Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times, a memoir conveyed in stories by Mark Fletcher. What if it was dull and/or poorly written? Then I began reading, and before I’d turned the first page, I was rapt, as Fletcher—wildland firefighter, smokejumper and adrenalin junkie extraordinaire—not only writes exceptionally well, this natural storyteller’s lifetime of intense experiences could make for blockbuster movies. He was in a helicopter that “flew directly through a residual cottonwood tree” and crashed. He’s shared rivers with grizzlies, was threatened by armed criminals, and, most terrifyingly, experienced burnovers: “fire penetrated the surrounding green fuels in a rush of flying embers, licking flames and loud, thick, wind-driven smoke. Burning trees fell close with muted thuds. The dragon was upon us.”

His “beloved profession … nearly killed [him] a number of times,” and he earned ten concussions in the 1980s. “Parachuting into forest fires and firefighting in general come with risks,” he asserts. “Everyone knows I push boundaries.” But there’s no braggadocio here: the author regularly credits his associates, from heavy equipment operators to birddog pilots.

More than half the book brims with harrowing tales from the front line (the “Wildfire” pieces). “Wildlife” and “Wild Times” sections follow, and each section provides “snapshots of [Fletcher’s] life,” which, he explains “has been about healthy relationships” with the “natural environment, with the wildlife that shares our planet” and with myriad people. What shines through: Fletcher was masterful at the career that brought him much joy, but work aside, he also comes across as an empath, an environmentalist, a feminist, and just an all-round nice guy.

A “Huck Finn-type” from the get-go, Fletcher’s career began in 1975, and in 1993 he became a certified air attack officer with the BC Forest Service, Wildland Fire. His entertaining anecdotes are filled with the language of the trade, ie: smokejumping, saw kits, ditty bags, snags, birddog flying, jumpspotting; a reverence for natural landscapes; stories about various characters and Fletcher’s three beloved “fire dogs”. Sid, a heeler, had “an international fan club” and once, after joining his owner on a “carnival ride” of an air tanker flight in the Kootenays, the author later found the dog on his hotel bed in Castlegar. Sid had laid on the channel changer and turned on the TV—he was watching The Littlest Hobo.

Aside from “literally brushing embers off” and meeting the likes of David Suzuki, John Denver, Buddhist monks (whose incense sticks and cones ignited a mammoth old growth cedar), Mexican firefighters (“Frying tortillas on hot spots with fixin’s was a tasty shared meal”), and using sign language to communicate with a Gwich’in-speaking woman who required ATV evacuation, there are wolf, wolverine, cougar, beaver, alligator and lynx stories. The most touching concerns Fletcher’s connection to a great horned owl at his southeast Saskatchewan farmstead, and the “owl medicine” she shared.

May this absolute firestorm of a book receive the readers and recognition it rightly deserves.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 __________

“Another Leaf: A Refugee Story”

By Marg Epp as told by Ma They Yare

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-031-0

 

Ten years ago, while backpacking around Thailand, I visited a Karen village to photograph a woman with gold rings elongating her neck. I knew nothing of Karen culture and was shamelessly after the sheer spectacle. While that experience deserves to be in a “How Not to Be a Culturally Sensitive Traveler” file, it did have me especially eager to read Another Leaf: A Refugee Story, the memoir of a Myanmar-born Karen woman, Ma They Yare, as told, with the aid of translators, to her friend, Marg Epp. A small reparation, yes, but a step in the right direction.

Epp and her refugee sponsorship group at Wildwood Mennonite Church in Saskatoon were responsible, with assistance from the Mennonite Central Committee, for the immigration of single mother Ma They Yare and her five children to Saskatoon in 2016. Ma They Yare bravely fled war-ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) with her family, and they remained in Thailand’s Mae Ra Mu Luang refugee camp for fourteen years before their arrival in Canada (sans the children’s father), where everything—food, clothing, currency, weather, customs, language—was new and strange. Epp’s compassion for the immigrant experience was partially informed by her own family’s wartime escape from Europe to Canada.

The author explains that Ma They Yare “has spent much of her life searching in order that she and her family might live lives that are about more than just survival,” and a Karen proverb about a caterpillar continually and necessarily searching for “a new leaf” to eat “in order to survive and grow” is used as a metaphor. Epp writes: “Like the monarch butterfly [Ma They Yare] has crossed borders in search of safer habitats and has shown us that just living is not enough. There is more to life than mere survival.”

Unable to read or write herself, Ma They Yare stresses the importance of education for her children. Three of the five were born in the refugee camp, and Epp’s included touching letters they’ve penned to their mother in this fascinating story that puts a distinct face on the ongoing civil war in Myanmar (frequent and brutal attacks by the Burmese army on Karen villages continue today); details what life’s like in Thai refugee camps; and records the joys and struggles of integration into Canadian society. 

I get a strong sense of Ma They Yare’s strength, directness and hopefulness in her conversational, first-person accounts, from village life and running from Burmese soldiers in the jungle to “things happening to women that [she doesn’t] want to talk about” in the refugee camp, and being terrified in Canada by the house-rattling wind and the smoke alarm’s initial “deafening shriek.”

It was interesting to read about bamboo houses, dugout canoes, the custom of Karin women getting tattoos “all over [their] body” as protection against snake poison, and Ma They Yare’s “traditional Buddhist Marriage”. Actually, the entire, book was a welcome education for this reader. It’s a story the anti-immigrant faction of Canadian society would be well-advised to read.    

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM