Brown Girl in the Room is an all too realistic and relatable story of being a woman of colour and building your career. The events and themes in this story will likely feel familiar to anyone who’s dealt with office politics and difficult co-workers, and Ramsingh does a great job of depicting the insidiously subtle form racism can take in the professional world.

Sara Ramnarine is hired as a senior public relations officer for a community non-profit called Albatross. While her name is South Asian in origin, her parents immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean, and Sara herself grew up in Toronto and doesn’t herself have lived experience of being a newcomer to the country. Yet Albatross views her hiring as a highly political act, even though her bosses and co-workers won’t quite admit it. Her bosses are hopeful she will help the company build stronger relationships with the South Asian community they serve, and Sara has an uneasy feeling that their faith in her has less to do with her public relations abilities and more to do with the brownness of her skin. I love how subtle the wrongness in her environment is; Sara herself can’t pinpoint why some of the things they say make her uncomfortable, and often ends up questioning her own discomfort. Early in the novel, she talks about a ‘diversity’ question that came up in her interview, and how worried she is that Albatross expects her to speak a South Asian language, even though she is fluent only in English.

I also love how the author humanizes even the bad characters in the beginning of the novel. Sara’s professional rival Anna is small-minded and mean, constantly criticizing Sara’s performance, but she’s also ultimately an insecure older woman who fears that she’s hit the peak of her own career. Sara’s manager Phillip ends up allowing other employees to infringe on Sara’s authority, but he comes off mostly as well-meaning yet ineffective rather than cruel. I only wish this level of complexity continued for the entire book. As the story started to shift towards Sara’s growing awareness of the injustice in the way she’s treated, Anna and Phillip become more two-dimensional as characters and their actions become outright malicious, which in turn felt repetitive after a while.

I liked the shift in dynamic when Venah joins the company as a ‘diversity expert’, and how her role heightens Sara’s own insecurities about her own relationship to ‘diversity.’ Venah insists on calling Sara by her more South Asian-sounding full birth name Saraswati and single-mindedly views her responsibility as hiring South Asian interpreters and serving South Asian food, regardless of the languages spoken and the cultural backgrounds of the communities attending Albatross events. She felt fairly one-note as a character from the beginning, but I like how she embodies the surface understanding of diversity that Phillip and leadership at Albatross appear to be interested in.

The author also does a great job in portraying how slowly and deliberately Sara’s confidence is chipped away. Ramsingh makes it clear that Sara has talent: board members and managers in other departments, who are either women of colour themselves or at the very least not threatened by Sara’s success, praise her work. Yet whenever Sara accepts the praise, she gets into trouble for not being a team player, and all the while, behind the scenes, Phillip and his boss Mara are making sure the credit is redirected to another employee. It takes Sara a while to realize that she isn’t imagining things nor overreacting when she feels mistreated, and it’s easy to understand why it took her so long.

The ending fell short for me, just because it was so abrupt. I can understand that situations like Sara’s don’t have neat resolutions in real life either, but the final few scenes had such a big build up towards a big event that it was disappointing to have it cut off before that event even started. New elements as well were brought up and new characters were introduced in the last few chapters, but their stories didn’t really go anywhere, and I felt like more closure for that subplot would have been a more fitting end.

Brown Girl in the Room is not an easy read, and I may suggest a trigger warning for anyone who has dealt with workplace harassment and discrimination in their own lives. Sara is bullied throughout the novel, and while the form of the bullying is often subtle, the author’s writing isn’t. The novel is admirable in its realism, and I hesitate to call it heavy-handed, because what Sara goes through doesn’t feel exaggerated in the least. But the book does tackle its subject with utter seriousness, and while I understand it’s a serious subject, the lack of levity is hard to deal with on a sustained basis. I deliberately stayed away from this book over the winter holiday break, because I didn’t want to mar my enjoyment of my days off. Possibly this heaviness is precisely the effect the author is going for, but I don’t think I quite realized what I was getting into when I started.

+

Thank you to Tightrope Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In The God Game, when Queen’s Park aide Peter Hansen hires Dan Sharp to find his missing husband, the private investigator unwittingly becomes embroiled in Toronto politics. Did Tony really go on the run to escape gambling debts, or is his disappearance somehow linked to Peter’s political aspirations and the liability of having a gambling addict as a spouse? Is there a link between Dan’s case and the apparent suicide of a Queen’s Park MPP who happens to be the opposition critic for Peter’s boss? As Dan digs deeper into Peter and Tony’s lives, he runs into an old friend and former activist who tells Dan about political fixers, who manipulate events for desired political outcomes, and Dan realizes how complex and corrupt the game of politics actually is.

It’s a good, solid mystery, and a timely one. In Jeffrey Round’s author’s note, he talks about how he wrote the book at the height of the Ontario power plant scandal and the beginnings of the Rob Ford crack-smoking video scandal, and he initially worried that readers would dismiss his story as unrealistic. After all, how much corruption can actually exist in Canada? Unfortunately, his story turns out to be all too believable, and while it’s still more a missing persons mystery than a political thriller (Dan gets a glimpse of but never actually dives too deeply into the political machinery), there’s a lot about the political maneuvering in the story that one can imagine being in the headlines.

While the mystery was good, it was the characters and their personal lives that I loved the most about this book. The subplot involves Dan and his police officer fiance Nick planning their wedding, and in fact one of the appeals of Peter’s case is that his retainer would pay for Nick’s preferred caterer. I loved the wedding planning scenes and how their friends got involved in helping out with the details. I also loved how their relationship develops in this book. As they plan for their wedding, Nick’s struggling to deal with homophobia at work, and Dan’s a bit too wrapped up in the case to provide the support Nick needs. Nick’s also unhappy about the unnecessary risks Dan takes for his work, and the tension comes to a head when Dan and Nick’s respective jobs put them at odds with each other. I really liked how that subplot played out, and often felt more invested in their relationship than in the actual mystery.

The God Game is the second Dan Sharp book I’ve read (apart from Lake on the Mountain), and while I personally preferred the more personal and intimate mystery of Lake on the Mountain, The God Game is an entertaining read, and I look forward to reading more in the series.

+

Thank you to Dundurn for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Keep Her Safe was a bit of a disappointment. At first glance, it seems like the kind of book I would absolutely love — romance, mystery and thriller all wrapped up in one. But the characters never quite grabbed me, and the story started off really slow, and it was only about halfway through that I finally started to get into the story.

When Noah’s mother, a celebrated police chief, is found dead of an apparent suicide, she leaves behind a message for Noah to track down the family of her former partner and give them a bag full of money to “make things right.” A few cities away, in a trailer park, is the family Noah has to track down: Gracie and her mother, who has an addiction to drugs. Gracie barely remembers her father; she was a very young child when he died in disgrace, a police officer convicted of a serious crime.

After a bit of a rocky start, Noah and Gracie become friends and slowly realize their attraction to each other. They also realize there are suspicious circumstances around the crime that Grace’s father was accused of, and that Noah’s mother may have played a role in a grave injustice. Accompanied by a stray dog they informally adopt, they set off on a road trip to investigate the truth behind Grace’s father’s death.

It’s a compelling premise, and once the pieces begin falling together and Gracie and Noah realize they need to head back to Noah’s hometown, the story picks up and catches my interest. But the build up felt really slow, and even as I became curious about how the story turns out, I never really quite became invested in the characters or their lives. They weren’t unlikeable so much as just okay, and while Tucker does give them both personalities, they just seemed somewhat bland. There is a romance subplot, but the chemistry fizzled and the characters’ frenemies-turned-lovers banter fell flat. The mystery angle was the strongest part of the story, and while it took a while to hit its groove, I thought the story ended on a high note.

+

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.