One evening, after dinner, children’s book author Oliver Ryan beats up his wife Amy so badly she ends up in a coma. From that opening page, Liz Nugent takes us into a gradual exploration into who Oliver is, from the perspectives of various people who have encountered him throughout his life. Unraveling Oliver is a tense thriller in that there’s clearly something psychologically wrong about Oliver, and each layer we peel away just gives us deeper and deeper insight into the darkness inside him. But more than a thriller, it’s a fascinating character study of a deeply troubled, psychologically disturbed man.

We begin the book by hating Oliver for his senseless, indefensible act of violence. Similar to a court case where we hear from witnesses, the more we hear from Oliver and from the people who knew him — his college best friend, his mistress, the owner of a vineyard where he worked — the clearer a picture we get of the violence in him. It’s important to note that a lot of these characters’ view of Oliver as cruel comes only with hindsight; often they admit not realizing anything was wrong with him until he attacked Alice.

Much like Dexter Morgan and Humbert Humbert, there’s something undeniably compelling about Oliver, and rather unwillingly, I found myself becoming more fascinated by his character as the story drew on. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I felt sorry for him — despite his troubled childhood and father issues, he still does awful things with such naked resentment and contempt that he remains firmly in villain territory. But I did find myself drawn to him and intrigued by his story.

There is a vulnerability in Oliver that pulls at the heartstrings, even as you want to feel nothing for him but hatred. One particularly heartbreaking story involves a childhood friend whose family takes Oliver in over the holidays, only for Oliver’s father to order him back to his dorm like some evil, child-hating headmaster from children’s books. And later in adulthood, when he finally finds another surrogate family at the vineyard, you can almost feel sorry for him when things go horribly wrong.

I love the format in which Nugent tells this story. As we peel back layers of Oliver and learn who he is and what he has done, we’re all too aware of the fact that all of these narrators bring their own perspectives to the stories they tell, including Oliver himself. None of the narrators knows all the details, and all of them have their biases (for example, the man secretly in love with Alice or the brother-in-law who loved Oliver’s books but didn’t trust the man), so while the facts may be accurate, the portrayal we get of Oliver is ultimately unreliable. This just makes the story even more compelling, as the truth Nugent offers us is fluid throughout.

I enjoyed this book. It wasn’t a page turner and it struggled to hold my interest in places, but overall, I found it clever and compelling.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When it comes to running 1600 meters, Sunny Lancaster is a winner. Wih-winner. And he makes his dad, his coach and his teammates proud. Unfortunately, he’s also bored with running. What he really wants to do is dance.

Jason Reynolds’ Sunny is fantastic. His story of a boy who feels pressured into doing something he doesn’t enjoy is sure to resonate with middle grade readers. I love that both Sunny and his dad are driven by their love for his mom (who died when Sunny was born) — Sunny’s dad wants him to run because his mom was a runner, and Sunny wants to dance because it’s in dancing that he feels closest to his mom. I love the story about his mom, and how Sunny and his dad have to deal with their grief over her death.

I also love that Sunny’s coach made the effort to think outside the box in finding a compromise between Sunny’s love for dancing and Sunny’s being part of the track team. No spoilers, but I thought what the coach recommended is genius. Too often, I’ve seen YA books and movies where the adults are inflexible and deliver ultimatums, forcing the child to choose between pleasing their parents or following their dreams, so it was great to see that these choices aren’t always an either/or, all-or-nothing dichotomy.

Finally, I love the format. Reynolds tells Sunny’s story completely in diary entries, and does a great job in making Sunny’s voice real. Sunny’s love of music and rhythm comes through in the cadence of his writing, and he occasionally inserts beats and sounds. I love the way Sunny describes the way he moves, as he really makes us feel the connection between what he does on the track team and the dance moves he wants to make. Sunny comes alive through his voice, and I can imagine his voice resonating with young readers who also love music and dance.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

Iain Reading has an interesting concept: a heroine who is a Nancy Drew-type teen who can fly planes like Amelia Earhart and goes on Indiana Jones-type adventures. Unfortunately, Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold felt bloated and too much of an info dump to live up to its promise.

In this first of Kitty’s adventures, a summer trip to study humpback whales turns into a gold rush type adventure when Kitty stumbles upon a group of gold thieves who take her hostage and force her to help them transport the gold over the border. As they encounter adventures on the journey, Kitty comes to discover that her kidnappers may not be the bad guys after all.

It’s hard to pinpoint an audience for Kitty Hawk. The story and style feel very middle grade — the narrative is fairly simplistic and there’s never any real sense of danger. Even when Kitty encounters kidnappers and bears and strenuous physical labour, you know her spunk will get her through. However, the length and format of the story feel more YA / adult, and there just isn’t enough of a story to merit it.

The book’s biggest flaw for me was the massive info dumps that get inserted every few chapters. Kitty flies in search of humpback whales and we get a fully detailed run-through of her research plan. Kitty has dinner with a local family and we get an entire chapter about the gold rush. When Charlie (the leader of the kidnappers) tells Kitty a brief overview of something that happened in their past, Kitty and the other kidnappers complain that he needed to go into more detail (I disagreed), and so we get an entire chapter about events that happened in the 1800s that culminated in the story Charlie originally told. These digressions do often play a part in the larger story, but take far too long to tell, and sound like history lessons more than anything else. The format of the book doesn’t help — the small font and justified margins make the info dumps feel even more like a history textbook.

This book just felt long. I’m glad I finished it because the second half is more interesting than the first, but I also ended up skimming a lot. Kitty’s parallels to Nancy Drew are clear — she has Nancy’s red hair, spunk, and can-do attitude with practically any situation. But her story just isn’t as interesting.

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Thank you to the publicist for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.