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 [...]

Richard Marsh’s The Joss: A Reversion

Marsh, Richard.  The Joss:  A Reversion. 1901.  Chicago:  Valancourt, 2007
Marsh, best known as author of the scary and truly unsettling novel The Beetle (1897), was a writer of popular junk for inexperienced or unsophisticated adult readers–and not always a very good one.  His stories, for instance, collected in The Seen and the Unseen (1900) often [...]

Lauren Myracle’s ttyl

Myracle, Lauren.  ttyl. 2004.  New York:  Amulet, 2006.
This novel purports to be the transcripts of IM conversations among three 10th grade girls, who are best friends.  I say “purports” because, when I picked it up, I thought I’d be undergoing an experience in linguistic strangeness.  I’ve never IMed, and I understood it used a whole [...]

Graham Swift’s Out of This World

Swift, Graham. Out of This World.  New York et al: Poseidon Press, 1988.
More or less contemporaneously, Harry, in England, reminisces about his life with his bomb-manufacturing father while, in alternating sections, his estranged daughter Sophie, in New York, tells a psychoanalyst about her life, also often involving her grandfather, Harry’s father.  The two have parallel [...]

Polly Horvath’s The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

Horvath, Polly.  The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane.  Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 2007.
Two cousins who don’t know each other end up living on an island in BC in the house of an eccentric uncle they don’t know, after all four of their parents die in a train wreck in Zimbabwe.  The uncle is an absolute isolate, and [...]