100 books like Emily's Quest

“She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” I read these opening sentences over and over. They both threw me off and enchanted me. What is this strange cadence? I wondered.

The song of the words wove around me and drew me into a world both political and mystical. In some ways like the Avalon of Marion Zimmer Bradley, in other ways, most definitely not. I have friends who are Lauren Groff fans. I have never made it past the first few pages… until I picked this book up. 

Lacy Crawford’s memoir of sexual assault at the elite St. Paul’s School straddles the precarious line between lyric and reportage. Crawford shies from nothing: we are there as she is held down and orally raped by two upperclassmen; as she describes the consensual sex she undertakes in an attempt to reckon with her rape, as even her own parents abandon her.

Crawford spends the last third of the book untangling the web of documents that prove the school knew of both the assault and her resulting STI (oral herpes that went so far into her throat that doctors couldn’t identify the sores, leaving her sick for months). The horrific burning of her throat keeps her from being able to speak or sing in the school choir, a metaphor for St. Paul’s deliberate destruction of evidence of her rape and subsequent illness to ensure legal protection for her rapists and the… show more.

I love nothing more than a book that unsettles me, that I grasp almost bodily in the reading but have to return to again and again to truly understand. Lose Your Mother is that kind of book. In Chapter Seven, Hartman tells us that, while working in the archive of the Atlantic slave trade, she came across a scandal: on board the slave ship Recovery, two African girls—one named Venus—are murdered by the captain, John Kimber.

A trial ensues. A mate is put on the stand, who admits there was a book on the ship, a list of all its horrors, The Dead Book, but it’s lost now. Lose Your Mother is Hartman’s attempt to write her version of The Dead Book without committing the same violence against the girls that they endured in their short lives. How she wonders, can we reimagine life for Venus when all we know… show more.

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth… show more.

I was raised Protestant in Québec, a province with a post-Catholic culture. There were few novels I could relate to growing up there. I was in my early teens when my sister-in-law lent me Emily of New Moon from her personal collection. Possibly because it’s about a nascent author, but also because it describes a Presbyterian lifestyle that felt familiar to us both. Emily Starr is a passionate girl who’s sent to live with her aunts and cousin on a farm on Prince Edward Island following her father’s death. Writing to her father “On the Road to Heaven,” she offers hilarious criticism of her culture’s religious legalism and takes her first steps as a poetess. Considered Montgomery’s most autobiographical work, it is a story full of laughter, excitement, and beauty. 

If you like your detectives gritty and your murders grizzly, then consider this treasure by an award-winning author. One of the Jonah Geller series, this one has him doing a favor for a very rich dying man, to track down the murderer of Slammin’ Sammy Adler, a Montreal columnist. 

Jonah has his own childhood memories of Sammy which took him back to a geeky kid he protected in summer camp in a previous lifetime. The clues unfold one by one, as do the personal perspectives on Montreal, until Jonah uncovers the secrets behind Sammy’s murder, tied to a story of love – or is it lust?

A rich mix here: humor, mild suspense, serious themes encompassing Jewishness and the fallout of the Nazis’ mass murder of European Jews, and cautionary themes about obsessions and the dangers of hero worship. The background setting is a Montreal neighborhood Richler grew up in, knew well, and happily depicted.

Some of Richler’s other novels also describe Montreal and some of its people. You could argue that Barney’s Version and Solomon Gursky Was Here are better books overall. I particularly liked this one because it has a youthful verve and adventurous feel.

This book is a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland that takes place in a bizarre 90s Montreal parallel world, and it’s every bit as mind-bending and crazy as it sounds. There’s disturbing violence and sexual elements, but somehow, it never felt gimmicky. It’s a coming-of-age story unlike any I’ve ever read, and I’d recommend it to anyone who speaks French.

I must have read this book at least half a dozen times over the years. Trevanian was the author of The Eiger Sanction, which became a film starring Clint Eastwood and served as my introduction to Trevanian.

Set in Montreal, this character-driven novel centres around a world-weary detective named LaPointe and the characters on his beat. Close to retirement, Lapointe finds himself on the trail of a killer. Will he catch him before his own past catches up with him? It’s a great story.

Of course this title will catch anyone’s attention, but I’m including it here because of how mundane the plot is. It’s just people people’ing and therefore experiencing and learning. They just happen to be all the things they are. It’s a fun and funny ride living in a small Parisian apartment with these characters, eating their food, and laying with their friends.