Something for Mom...

Mother's Day is less than two weeks away. One of our favourite picks for mom is Lisa Genova's latest novel: Left Neglected. Lisa's first book, Still Alice, was a bestseller about Alzheimer's from the patients point of view. Left Neglected is just as good, exploring the world of a busy mother who suffers from a traumatic brain injury. WE HAVE A SIGNED COPY OF LEFT NEGLECTED THAT WE ARE GIVING AWAY FOR MOTHER'S DAY!

TO ENTER THE CONTEST PLEASE EMAIL BRONWYN WITH "MOTHER'S DAY CONTEST" IN THE SUBJECT HEADER.

THE CONTEST CLOSES AT 4PM ON FRIDAY MAY 6TH. THE WINNER WILL BE CONTACTED VIA EMAIL.

Robert Sawyer

Loves Waterloo! The former One Book One Community author (in 2006 for Hominids) will be presenting his final novel in the WWW trilogy: Wonder on May 3rd. The free event takes place at the main branch of the Waterloo Public Library at 7pm. The trilogy is partly set in Waterloo and features Perimeter Institute prominently.

Wonder by Robert Sawyer ~ Reviewed by Tricia

I am a huge fan of Robert J.Sawyer's WWW Trilogy, which is set in Waterloo. I gobbled up the first two books in the series, Wake and Watch, and impatiently waited for the final one to be published this spring. Wonder was worth the wait. Sawyer has tied up several loose ends from the previous two books and done it in a way that is very clever. But let me back up a bit for those who have not read the first two. The books centre on Caitlin Decter, a once-blind teenager and math whiz who, with the aid of her Eye-pod computer, can not only see the world but can also see the world wide web. She discovers a "being" on the web who daily grows in the wisdom of the world. Webmind is Caitlin's christened name for this being. The people of the world welcome Webmind's presence as a boon to humanity but governments see it as a potentially dangerous interference and try to shut Webmind down. Wonder has Caitlin, her parents, and her friends trying to protect Webmind. The Chinese dissident that we met in the first book plays an integral part in saving Webmind as does Hobo, the chimpanzee-bonobo cross who is fluent in American Sign Language. I could not figure out how he would do it but in true Sawyer fashion he gives a very satistying solution to the ending. All three books were a delight to read and having read one a year for the past three years, I am now going to go back and read them again, one right after the other.

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Robert J. Sawyer — called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by The Ottawa Citizen and "just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days" by The Denver Rocky Mountain News — is one of only eight writers in history (and the only Canadian) to win all three of the science-fiction field's top honors for best novel of the year:

• the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award, which he won in 2003 for his novel Hominids;

• the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award, which he won in 1996 for his novel The Terminal Experiment;

• and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won in 2006 for his novelMindscan.

Rob is also the only writer in history to win the top SF awards in the United States, China, Japan, France, and Spain. In addition, he's won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada as well as eleven Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras"). The ABC TV series FlashForward is based on his novel of the same name. He was born in Ottawa in 1960, and now lives just west of Toronto with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink.

The Water Man's Daughter

Debut author, Emma Ruby-Sach, has penned a murder mystery that takes place in South Africa. The staff at the store can attest that whenever a book arrives that is connected to the African continent in any way, I grab it before anyone else can. I am especially glad I grabbed this novel!

The story is focused around three women each of whom is conected to the violent murder of a Peter Mathews, a Canadian water executive, that takes place in a township of Johannesburg.

Claire, his daughter, arrives from Canada hoping to find the answer to why this happened. Her eyes open wider each day she spends under the African sun as she learns the truth about her father, and the company he worked for.

Zembe Afrika, an up and coming policewoman in the township, is heading the murder investigation. She has deep ties to the local community and must balance that with the demands of her police work. Shound Zembe reveal what is happening beneath the surface to her superiors or protect her friends?

Nomsulwa is a local activist, who organizes protests against the water company's privitization policies. As an "enforced" favour to Zembe, she must divert Claire from the investigation. The more time Nomsulwa spends with Claire, the more she feels drawn to her, in spite of their differences.

Emma Ruby-Sachs writes like an accomplished novelist, not a debut author. The twists and turns of the story kept me hanging on and the ending was a total surprise. I am excited to meet Emma at our event with her and Robert Rotenberg on May 17th. I think she is a talented new voice on Canada's literary scene. - Bronwyn

We Love Cooking...

especially when there is alcohol involved! Meet Carla Johnson, author of Cooking With Sin, on April 30th. She will be sharing samples of some of her favourite recipes from the cookbook.

“Cooking with sin, are we?” Carla Johnson's Mennonite grandmother scolded when she caught Johnson's mother “red-wine handed” pouring red wine into her pan of chicken cacciatore. That moment locked into Johnson's memory and led her to start a blog where she shared her story-recipe. Several others joined in. People from all walks of life, from professional chefs to grandmothers, share personal stories and the recipes woven through them. Each recipe has alcohol in it and was tested & beautifully photographed.

• “Stuck on Reduction” Madeira Caramel and Watermelon Salad

• “Suitcase and a Dream” Dark Stout Chocolate Cake

• “Working Past Midnight” French Toast

• “Nightmare Kitchen” Chicken and Sun-dried Tomatoes

• Milk and Cookies for the “Real” Santa

“Cooking With Sin” allows people to come together over dinner, even if they are many miles away or many years apart. The stories are wonderful, the recipes are delicious and the *sin* factor sure makes it a lot of fun.

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Carla Johnson is an experienced author, long-time educator, an energetic public speaker and an avid blogger. This is her second book and she is already collecting recipes for her next edition of “Cooking With Sin.” Looking to create a book that stood out above the crowd, Carla made sure each recipe was carefully tested and extensively photographed.

One Book One Community Pick 2011

Yesterday was the annual unveiling of the One Book One Community pick. The launch was held at the new Waterloo Region Museum. The building is beautiful and fits with theme of this year's book, "Bury Your Dead" by Louise Penny. The mystery explores a portion of Canadian history as well as modern-day Quebec city. Lynn Hadrell, editor of The Record, unveiled the book. Louise Penny sent a video message to the launch and was gushing with excitement about being chosen. Tricia Siemens, former co-owner of the store and founder of the OBOC program, reminded us of the magic of the previous picks and how the program has brought together the region in sharing one special book. For more information on the program: www.oboc.ca and our website

Bury Your Dead:

As Quebec City shivers in the grip of winter, its ancient stone walls cracking in the cold, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache plunges into the most unusual case of his celebrated career. A man has been brutally murdered in one of the city's oldest buildings - a library where the English citizens of Quebec safeguard their history. And the death opens a door into the past, exposing a mystery that has lain dormant for centuries... a mystery Gamache must solve if he's to apprehend a present-day killer.

Louise Penny:

On May 1, 2010, Louise Penny's The Brutal Telling won the Agatha Award for Best Novel. Louise is not only the first Canadian winner, but she has also made history winning The Agatha Award three years in a row! Louise Penny is the author of the international bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache novels. Her books are set in Quebec and have debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and won awards internationally including the British Dagger, the Canadian Arthur Ellis and the American Agatha, Anthony and Barry awards. She was born and raised in Toronto, and now lives in a picturesque village in Quebec with her husband

Alexi Zentner ~ Touch

If you have already read THIS then you know how excited we are about our upcoming event with Rupinder Gill. Joining her is Alexi Zentner, a former KW resident with his first novel Touch. I started reading this last night and I shift could end soon so that I can get home and keep reading! Sawgamet is a mining boomtown gone bust, a logging village where the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, where the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the dark mysteries lurking in the woods. Thirty years after his grandfather's pronouncement, Stephen, now a pastor with a wife and family, returns home on the eve of his mother's funeral, to reconnect with the stories of his mythic grandfather and to confront the losses of childhood. Introducing a world of wonder and tenderness, a world where the monsters and witches of the woods are set against singing dogs and golden caribou, Touch is a haunting tale of three generations of love and loss in a town in Northern BC.

- Bronwyn

Wednesday, April 20th - Princess Cinema 7pm
$10 or free with the purchase of any of these titles from Words Worth Books. A portion of the proceeds from this event will be donated to The Record Literacy Fund

Miriam Toews ~ Irma Voth
Irma Voth entangles love, longing, and dark family secrets. The stifling, reclusive Mennonite life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth - newly married and newly deserted - is irrevocably changed when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the community.
She embraces the absurdity, creative passion and warmth of their world but her intractable and domineering father is determined to keep her from it at all costs. The confrontation between them sets her on an irrevocable path towards something that feels like freedom as she and her young sister, Aggie, wise beyond her teenage years, flee to the city, upheld only by their love for each other and their smart wit, even as they begin to understand the tragedy that has their family in its grip.
Irma Voth delves into the complicated factors that set us on the road to self-discovery and how we can sometimes find the strength to endure the really hard things that happen. And as Gustavo, a taxi driver, says, you go on, you live and you laugh and you are compassionate toward others. It also asks that most difficult of questions: How do we forgive? And most importantly, how do we forgive ourselves?

Miriam Toews is the author of four previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding, the Governor General Award-winning, Canada Reads-winning, much loved bestselling novel A Complicated Kindness, and most recently The Flying Troutmans, which won the Rogers Writers Trust Award for fiction. The author also penned one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.

Cynthia Holz ~ Benevolence
Dr. Ben Wasserman is an organ transplant psychiatrist stymied by a man who wishes to donate a kidney to a neighbour for no apparent reason beyond a wish to help. While doggedly searching for an ulterior motive, he secretly hopes the would-be donor is a bona fide altruist. At the same time, Ben's psychologist wife, Renata Moon, is treating a young phobic whose husband died in a train crash. When her client reveals that she is pregnant, Renata's own feelings of disappointment in her childless marriage are triggered anew. It doesn't help that Ben's widowed mother, Molly, wishes out loud that her eldest son had married a nice Jewish girl instead of a "barren shiksa" like Renata. As the strain on Renata and Ben's marriage grows more acute, Molly takes in a boarder, a man from her past with difficult secrets that threaten to complicate the family dynamics even more. There are disapproving questions, surprising connections–and magical, unexpected, life-changing answers–all around.

Cynthia Holz is the author of four previous novels and one collection of short fiction, all of which have been widely acclaimed. She was born and raised in New York City and has lived in Toronto since moving here as a journalist in 1976, an occupation she set aside soon thereafter in favour of writing fiction.

Jamie Zeppa ~ Every Time We Say Goodbye
As eight-year-old Dawn waits for her father early one autumn morning, at the front door of her grandparents' house, Jamie Zeppa immediately draws us into the tangled, tumultuous story of the Turner family of Sault Ste. Marie. Dawn and her younger brother, Jimmy, are the youngest generation of Turners and their unpredictable father, Dean, is finally coming to bring them to live with him in a new house with his new wife. Dawn calls this "Day One" — as in the beginning of her real life — and she is full of optimism. Her grandparents, Frank and Vera, however, are less convinced, since they know very well the ups and downs of their dear, but unreliable, son's behaviour.

Jamie Zeppa is the author of Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan, which won the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award for Adventure Travel Writing. She won the CBC Canadian Literary Award for Memoir and her essays have appeared in AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds, My Wedding Dress: True-life Tales of Lace, Laughter, Tears and Tulle and Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth about Motherhood. She has written articles and reviews for Chatelaine, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Literary Review of Canada and Ascent, as well as several UK newspapers. Jamie has a teenage son, and she teaches English at Seneca College in Toronto.

Kalila-Rosemary Nixon

It's become abundantly clear that to navigate the thicket of novels out there with literary merit, it's always a good idea to go to those who have produced short story collections first.
The writing and structure of Rosemary Nixon's first novel, Kalila (Goose Lane Editions) takes a difficult subject and turns it into prose that is sharp, precise and beautiful.

Maggie and Brodie Solantz are the parents of Kalila, which means beautiful, though it's her misfortune to spend all of her young life in a neonatal care facility in Calgary, due to a host of medical troubles that doctors can't pin down.
Without giving away an ending, I seldom tear up at the modern novel (three times, perhaps) but the strength and structure of Kalila, combined with the author's own history gives this novel an authenticity that's easy to spot, and impossible to ignore.
There's nothing maudlin or overwrought here. Kalila is genuine, contained and nearly perfectly executed.
The characters of Brodie and Maggie are formed by images and memory, as opposed to overcooked dialogue and it informs their humanity greatly.
Nixon apparently wrote Kalila over a fifteen year period and it shows. I believe she passed up obvious avenues to broaden the books appeal, but this is too precise and fully realized to be a Jodi Picoult novel.
I appreciated the subtlety and restraint in Kalila, and it's one of the finest books I've read this year.
I'm very excited to see her when she comes to town on April 12.
Please see the website at http://www.wordsworthbooks.com/Suzanne%20Desrochers.htm

David

More Happenings in April

Stephen Haff - Still Waters in a Storm Monday, April 18th - 7pm - FREE - In Store Event

Stephen Haff is an innovative educator in New York City. He runs Still Waters in a Storm, a drop-in educational centre for all ages in the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn. Stephen will be discussing the importance of reading at any age and his observations of our education system. This will be a thought-provoking evening for anyone who is a lover of words or teaches in any capacity. Learn more about Still Waters HERE, read an article about Still Waters HERE, watch a BBC profile of the program HERE.

Letters of Support

What Stephen Haff is doing at Still Waters is giving inner-city kids a chance to meet with well known, artistically serious writers: Peter Carey, Richard Price, Colum McCann, Patrick McGrath, among others. That's an amazing line-up. But equally amazing is the atmosphere that Stephen has created in this alternative learning sanctuary. I've worked with lots of different literacy outreach programs, but Still Waters is unique: the love of language Stephen has instilled in his cohort of kids is wonderfully inspiring. And as a result, as a writer and a person, you meet the kids on common ground—the blank page—but nothing is common in this exchange. The enthusiasm and invention and concentration of the kids on what they write gives you the sense that the English language, in all its permutations, is in an interesting and invigorating state of repair.

Tom Sleigh
Senior Poet
Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing
Hunter College, City University of New York


My name is Peter Carey. I am the author of eleven novels, and the winner of numerous international literary prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice), the Commonwealth Prize (twice), and Australia's Miles Franklin Award (three times). I am also the executive director of the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program here in New York City.

I write now to encourage your support of an extraordinary writing project named Still Waters in a Storm, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In the first instance I write in support of Stephen Haff, whom I have known for nineteen years. Stephen Haff went to Yale, so you could say he had a course set out for him, except he refused it. He left New Dramatists. He entered the public school system, not to work with the most privileged students but the least advantaged. Time and time again he earned his students' trust. Why did they give it to him? The answer is, quite simply, because they saw who he was. I believe you will, too.

I am writing today because another Stephen Haff project is being born. He, of course, would say it is not a Stephen Haff Project at all. In a sense he would say this rightly, because the project is being made by Bushwick residents of all ages, including small children, teenagers, and a wide range of adults. It is the writing group, the one called Still Waters in a Storm.

The members of the group, and there are already 20, write freely, about anything, in any style or genre. They meet over pizza. They write, read aloud and discuss their writing. If you could be a fly on the wall you'd hear complex, inspiring group discussions that would take your breath away.

The writers describe the group as "family," as "therapy." Some say it's what gets them through the week. Yet anyone who has been privileged to read their work knows that much more than this is happening--stories and poems and essays begin tentatively, but soon the rhythms become more complex and confident, the metaphors more striking, the meanings more layered.

When Stephen Haff walks through your doorway, you may not at first recognize a miracle worker, and perhaps that's his secret. He listens. He hears the voices of the street and invites them in. Almost removing himself, nearly disappearing, he makes room for others to express themselves and thereby gives them the space to show who they really are.

In traditional schooling, teachers are the stars and students must run the curriculum. Stephen Haff's method is different, not least in that it succeeds in those tough streets where the old-style game no longer works. This approach is feeding school's refugees what they need, and delivering what a whole city wishes for them.

Good news is hard to find these days. That is why we need to support Stephen Haff and Still Waters in a Storm.

Sincerely,

Peter Carey

AND THE DAY BEFORE (SOMETHING FOR THE KIDS...)