CANADA LIVES HERE

Finding Larkspur by Dan Needles, Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95. All the food we eat and dairy products we consume come from the villages. Canada’s national character, too, is very much a product of our small towns and back roads. And yet we know so little about life there. Dan Needles remedies that with wit and empathy.

If you live in the country it is important to wave on all occasions. If you haven’t seen a person for several months, you raise your arm over your head.

If you haven’t seen them for several days, you engage them at the elbow. If you already passed the person on the road twice today, you just raise a finger on the steering wheel. And if you are carrying something heavy through the yard, like a bag of dog kibble, you snap your head backwards. That’ll do.

A soothing, healing balm on my soul wounded by city life and a daily barrage of doomsday headlines.

A BEACON OF HOPE

Out of Darkness by Denise Chong, Random House Canada, $24.95. Rumana Monzur’s carefree life as a beloved daughter comes to a harsh halt on her wedding night when Sumon first attacks her.

A litany of beatings and verbal abuse follows. When she doesn’t scour the toilet to his satisfaction, he berates her. “How come your parents did such a bad job of raising you?” Her mother-in-law is of no help, marriage is a sacrifice, she says. “If you really want to keep your marriage, you have to take these beatings.”

Rumana struggles to understand the complex character that her husband is and the chameleon-like transformation – charming to those on the outside, a monster behind the closed doors of their room. On the other hand, his occasional and surprising support. When she wonders if she will get a teaching position at the University of Dhaka without political connections, he tells her not to listen to naysayers. She had attributes other candidates lacked, he tells her. She feels a sense of relief when he confesses to an addiction to painkillers – there is hope, she thinks. He will get help and all will be better.

She is hired, becoming the youngest faculty member of the international relations department. And he reverts to his controlling behaviour, suspicious of her every move, every moment spent outside their home.

Everything is leading up to the afternoon of the brutal attack. In front of their five-year-old daughter Anusheh.

Later, when Rumana tells her daughter the bad guy who hurt her was found dead in the hospital, Anusheh’s response is heartbreaking, “He can’t hurt me the way he hurt you, then.”

Can there be two ways to comprehend an attack? Denise Chong, who put in a phenomenal amount of research – the book was over six years in the writing – shares the debate that raged on the web and in the media after the attack. While Rumana’s friends sent testimonials and letters of support, prominent women’s right activists condemned this. The character testimonials insinuated, they said, that someone less devout and family-oriented deserved the attack.

A family friend is torn between his loyalty to her father and father-in-law. What one family would have seen as abuse, the other had taken to be the natural order of marriage.

There can be no spoilers in this story that made international headlines – we all know how it turned out. But the sheer volume, the detailed information, takes away from the story a little.  The political, social and cultural portrait of abuse takes up too much of the narrative. If it weren’t for the brief prologue, one might think this was a book about life in Dhaka, or about an international student. Chong gets to the horrific attack 200 pages in. Yes, that’s not all there is to Rumana, the attack is not what defines her, but it is, after all, the darkness from which she emerged.

What shines through, however, is Rumana’s spirit, her strength and her sense of humour.

“I will never forget your warmth, love, support and tolerance, especially when I hit some of you with my stick,” she says, when invited on stage to deliver a speech at her graduation from law school.

THE HISTORY ON OUR DOORSTEP

Unrest by Gwen Tuinman, Random House Canada, $36. We tend to think of historical fiction as books about the kings and queens of yore, forgetting that real history lies in the experiences of ordinary folk.

It lies on our doorstep – in Ottawa of the 1800s.

Unrest sheds light on a chapter of Canadian reality that many of us may only know of in the broadest of strokes, if that. It transports readers to Bytown, the lawless cesspool that will become the city of Ottawa and the homestead and lumber camps that surround it. Whiteboys, the secret Irish agrarian organization which defended tenant-farmer land-rights; Shiners; the hardscrabble existence of people on the fringes of society; the discrimination the early Irish faced... 

Quiet, ungainly Mariah, her face horribly scarred in a dog attack in Ireland lives on sufferance in her sister Biddy’s home since they sailed for a new life. She’s treated as the spinster aunt, working alongside Biddy’s husband Seamus, but the three of them have a bitter secret.

The history of the polite-to-a-fault and friendly Canada of today lies in the stories of brash, duplicitous women who sometimes have no alternative to becoming so as they navigate the social restrictions of their era. It lies in murder and mayhem, and in wild adventure.

Healers use native plants for common complaints. And two rusty nails boiled in water to help cure anemia.

Those who skate down Rideau Canal today are blissfully ignorant of the stories of the Irish who participated in the construction of the canal between 1826 and 1832.

“They lived on drained swampland along the excavation site in shanties or caves dug in the canal banks. One thousand Irish canal workers and colleagues died of accidents or diseases like malaria transmitted by mosquitoes. The Rideau Canal Celtic Cross stands today at the edge of the first canal lock to honour their sacrifice.”

A WOMAN OF LETTERS

The Letters We Keep by Nisha Sharma, Skyscape, $28.99. On her first day of freshman year, aspiring engineer Jessie Ahuja is introduced to two campus legends.

The legend of Davidson Tower, where more than fifty years ago, two students in love disappeared in a devastating fire. And to campus legend Ravi Kumar, a handsome, privileged nepo baby.

He is aggravatingly charming and nice and though she comes from a different world and believes they can have nothing in common, he gets under her skin. He teases her by addressing her as Jessie Jaisi Koi Nahin, referencing a television show that she has never watched!

When a campus prank locks them both in the haunted tower, Jessie discovers handwritten letters from the fabled lost students in a hollowed out copy of Persuasion. The letters offer clues about what happened to the interracial star-crossed lovers and Jessie and Ravi are drawn together in their search for answers, in their desire to learn how that love story panned out. After all, it was playing out just a few years after the landmark Loving v. Virginia case when a court struck down state laws banning marriage between individuals of different races.

The Letters We Keep explores privilege and class and the truth in desi stereotypes in a fresh, fun way.

When Jessie’s parents visit her on parents’ weekend, her mother is dressed in “capris and a visor, while her father wore a polo shirt tucked into the jeans he had hiked up to his mid-torso”. The description is bound to bring a grin to your face!

Nisha Sharma found inspiration for her first adult romance in the letters she found among her grandmother’s papers after she passed.

She has dedicated this book to the “desi moms who came to the US and always wanted to go to college but never could. Don’t worry, mamas. You raised a generation of strong, resilient, beautiful daughters who carry the torch in your honour”.

THE SONGS OF SPRING

A Nature Poem For Every Spring Evening, Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, Batsford, $26.95. Though we step into spring in March, it arrives slowly, hesitantly, in my garden only in late April or May.

A Nature Poem For Every Spring Evening meets me there.

This is what I find for May 11, for instance:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass – innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

– The First Dandelion by Walt Whitman.

I dive with great pleasure into this sublime compilation of nature poems. The words of famous poets and lesser-known voices combine with beautiful illustrations to celebrate a wondrous season of new beginnings.

GHOST TOURS OF TORONTO ISLANDS!

Ghostlight by Kenneth Oppel, Puffin, $12.99. Every day, Gabs takes people on ghost tours of Toronto Islands. But he doesn’t actually believe in ghosts – until he accidentally awakens the spirit of a girl. She is here to set the record straight. Can Gabs help her do that? From the author of books like Silverwing, Sunwing and Firewing that have been enjoyed by a generation or two of readers.

BE LIKE A POSSUM

When In Doubt, Play Dead by Ally Burguieres, Quirk Books, $17.50. This delightful little book provides life advice from an unexpected source, as the tag line says.

Such as, “Opossums only live for about three years, which means they have even less time than most of us to waste on stress and drama”.

And, “Eat veggies! Yours or someone else’s – it doesn’t matter”.

Reject limiting misconceptions about your own abilities and embrace a uniquely opossum way of seeing the world!

A SCI-FI WHODUNIT

Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini, Tor Publishing, $38.99. The prequel to To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, is set in 2234, on Talos VII. The crew of the Adamura must discover who built the mysterious abyss on the seemingly uninhabited planet.  

Sure to find new fans among the 14-plus, and their parents who grew up devouring Paolini’s earlier best-sellers Eragon and Eldest, etc.

TEEN REVIEW

By HARSHITA KAUSHAL

Refugee by Alan Gratz, Scholastic Press, $20.8. Refugee is an eloquently written piece of work, following the stories of three young children and their families, each in the hope of finding refuge.

They are forced to flee their brutal homelands in different eras. It is a story that touches your heart and leaves you shaken as you discover the difficulties faced by Josef, escaping the 1930s Nazi Germany attacks; Isabel, fleeing Cuba in 1994; and Mahmoud, getting bombed out of his home in Syria in 2015.

Alan Gratz has done a great job in helping readers understand that there is always room for compassion and peace. That with peace, the world can become a place for every individual to feel safe.

He uses details to create imagery and tie the stories together.

As you read this book, you discover the unimaginable experiences of survivors of significant events in world history.

Overall, Refugee is an outstanding novel, with the main purpose of educating and delivering the importance of having the courage to step up and make a change. This story is something you don’t want to miss, serving as a reality check of the hardships faced by refugees globally. 

• Harshita Kaushal is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.