Julie Lawson’s The Ghost of Avalanche Mountain and Destination Gold!

Lawson, Julie.  The Ghost of Avalanche Mountain. Toronto and New York: Stoddard Kids, 2000.
-  -  -.   Destination Gold! Victoria: Orca, 2000.
In an article published a few years ago in CCL/LCJ, I wrote about two other novels by Julie Lawson, author of White Jade Tiger, discussed in the last entry.  Now I’d like to go [...]

Julie Lawson’s White Jade Tiger

Lawson, Julie.  White Jade Tiger.  1993.  Toronto: Sandcastle Dundurn, 2006.
The text is a traditional third person past narrative, usually focalized through the central character, Jasmine, but frequently interspersing sections involving not only Keung, a Chinese boy who comes to BC to find his father in the nineteenth century but also other Chinese characters connected to [...]

E.R. Franks’s Life is Funny, One More Time

I’ve found a review of Life is Funny, discussed in my last post, that I wrote back when the book was pubished in 200.  It takes quite on different slant on some of the same aspects of the novel:
Life Is Funny is about as shapeless a novel as they come. It has eleven main characters, [...]

E.R. Franks’s Life Is Funny

Frank, E.R.  Life is Funny.  New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.
This is another example of a series of fairly separate short stories each focalized from a different first-person present point of view and woven together into what announces itself as a novel–although how exactly it becomes one, how it has any actual cohesiveness, is not necessarily [...]

Dennis Foon’s Skud

Foon, Dennis. Skud.  Toronto Groundwood, 2003.
Four boys who attend the same high school all face problems relating to their understanding of what it means to be masculine.  As a result, at least three things happen in the course of their alternations, as each speaks of what is happening to himself in first person in the [...]

Conventional Attributes of Masculinity

Some of the novels I’ve been looking at lately, and plan to do some thinking about in entries here, revolve around ways in which their male characters think about their maleness and what it might mean or ought to be. For that reason, I thought I’d better post here a handout I prepared some years [...]

J.L. Powers’s The Confessional

Powers, J.L.  The Confessional.  New York: Knopf, 2007.
The El Paso Chamber of Commerce must have hit men out gunning for J.L. Powers, the author of this book–or if not, they should have.  It makes life in that city sound completely hellish (and indeed, confirms my own impression of it from a brief stay at a [...]

Rachel Anderson’s The Bus People

Anderson, Rachel.  The Bus People.  1989.  New York: Henry Holt, 1992.
Originally published in the UK, this book is a set of interconnected stories–a form of alternating narrative I haven’t looked at closely before.  in this case, they really aren’t all that interconnected.  The central characters in each of the stories are children who ride a [...]

Monica Hughes’s Log Jam

Hughes, Monica.  Log Jam.  Toronto: Irwin, 1987.
Opposite to what tends to happen in novels presenting similar situations written more recently, Monica Hughes Log Jam rejects the power of Aboriginality in favour of white middle-class values.  The novel’s  pair of intertwined narratives involve a white middle class girl with family problems and an Aboriginal boy [...]

Helen Frost’s Keesha’s House

Frost, Helen.  Keesha’s House.  2003.  New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2007.
There are no characters in this novel (by the Helen Frost who wrote The Braid, discussed here in a previous entry) and in fact, really, no plot.  It consists of a series of poems in traditional forms, mostly sestinas and some sonnets, each presenting a [...]