There are books that dazzle you with their poetic, fever-dream prose.
There are books that are structurally inventive. There are books that wow you with the mythic quality of their worldbuilding. There are books that leave you tormented by their characters. And there are books that truly have something important to say: about violence, about love, about queer identity, about belonging, and about how we write history and tell our stories.
And then there is this book, which does all of the above and then some. It had me in a vice grip from the first sentence. It reminded me of the transformative powers of fantasy as a genre, to render the familiar weird and in doing so, provoke revelation. It’s a devastating knife’s edge of a book that continues to haunt me months after reading it.
The people suffer under the centuries-long rule of the Moon Throne. The royal family-the despotic emperor and his monstrous sons, the Three Terrors-hold the countryside in their choking grip. They bleed the land and oppress the citizens with the frightful powers they inherited from the god locked under their palace.
But that god cannot be contained forever.
With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her…
I have no interest in video games, but this one came highly recommended and sounded like a cute, diverting read about Gen Xers coming of age. Little did I know that the author was hiding down a blind alley waiting to mug me, tear out my entire heart, and leave me bereft and grateful for the pain.
Whatever the medium, the process of artistic creation and collaboration is equal parts joy and agony, and this book captures those tensions perfectly. It’s a love story where the love is not between the two leads but between the characters and their love of the art form.
What I expected to be a story about two friends making a video game together was in fact a profound meditation on grief, loss, and disability that resonated deeply with my own experiences.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest, examining identity, creativity and our need to connect.
This is not a romance, but it is about love.
'I just love this book and I hope you love it too' JOHN GREEN, TikTok
Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Sadie is visiting her sister, Sam is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there, but playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition -- and a special friendship. Then all too soon that time is…
I’ve been a huge fan of Chelsea Vowel since listening to her podcast, Métis In Space, and an admirer of the decolonial lens she brings to science fiction and fantasy, so I was thrilled when she at last released an entire book of her own fiction.
These are stories about rewriting the past and reclaiming the future for Indigenous peoples in general and Métis people in particular. It is a demanding book in many ways. It demands that you engage with languages and histories that settler Canadian culture seeks to obscure. It demands that you sit with the discomfort of a future in which your own identity is not centred. It demands, on occasion, that you read the footnotes. It demands that you imagine a better future for all of us.
Infused with Vowel’s wit and eye for detail, each story is a challenge and a joy.
Powerful stories of “Métis futurism” that envision a world without violence, capitalism, and colonization.
“Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, “Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?”
In the wake of a worsening climate crisis, magic runs rampant and demons roam across the Canadian prairies. A long-dead god stirs in the Pacific Ocean, while the wilderness is choked by invasive, screaming grass.
The Cascade has shattered political stability, leaving a scandal-plagued government clinging to power in Ottawa. As catastrophe looms ahead, a precognitive political rainman, Ian Mallory, stands between run-of-the-mill corruption and a nightmarish, dystopian future. It is up to a diverse and unlikely band of activists, scientists, journalists, and one underpaid, emoji-spell wielding intern to save their beleaguered country from its own worst impulses.
