If you enjoy Jennifer Weiner’s books or tweets, you’ll likely also enjoy her memoir Hungry Heart. Written with her characteristic warmth and humour, Hungry Heart is a light-hearted and moving collection of vignettes, told with a wryness that reminds me of Nora Ephron, chronicling Weiner’s life. There are some real gems within this memoir, and passages that many women may relate to.

My personal favourite was the story around her first book Good in Bed, about a plus size heroine whose journalist ex-boyfriend writes about her in his column. Weiner’s description struck home for me:

What if he basically outs you as the fat girl to the entire reading universe and uses your insecurities as fodder for his columns, so you’re not only alone and heartbroken, but ashamed? [p.171]

What I loved most about the plot Weiner describes is that her heroine, Cannie Shapiro, is okay after the breakup, that it isn’t the guy dumping her that breaks her heart, but rather having her insecurities exposed to the public. Weiner goes on to write about how the first agent who offered to pitch her manuscript requested changes to the story, including making the heroine only fifteen pounds overweight, or as the agent called it, “normal fat,” and shifting the focus away from the heroine’s sex life. Weiner’s responses echo the same pet peeves I have with many romance fiction titles, where there is a sad dearth of stories about actually plus size women. I remember a romance book I read in high school where the hero’s hands spanned the heroine’s waist with room to spare, and a friend and I were laughing about how it’ll take multiple heroes’ hands to span our own waists. It was to that high school reader in me that Weiner’s chapter spoke the most, and when she decides to find another agent who’ll take the heroine as-is, I almost cheered out loud. Then came the following passage:

Who did I write this book for? That one, I knew how to answer. I’d written it for me, and girls and young women like me. My girls: the ones who wouldn’t lose fifteen pounds and fit into a bikini, the ones who were always hearing You’ve got a great personality or You have such a pretty face. The purse-minders, the wallflowers; the ones the wing-man who’d agreed to “take one for the team” took home from the bar. The ones who hardly ever saw themselves — their physical selves — reflected in stories where the heroine got the guy, the job, the money, the power, the happy ending. Maybe there’d never been a bestseller with a girl like that as its star…but what if there had been? What difference could that have made in my life, the way I saw the world, and what I let myself hope for within it? [p.183-184]

You know those scenes in movies, after the protagonist gives the climactic speech and everyone around them is all fired up and slightly teary eyed with emotion? That was me while reading that passage. I remember being at a food court in a mall, reading that passage, getting teary eyed and doing my best not to leap into the air and scream “Yes!”

Hungry Heart spoke to me, as I’m sure Weiner’s books and tweets speak to her millions of fans worldwide. I loved reading about her childhood and her family — her mother is hilarious, her Nanna is adorable (the story about her cameo in the movie of In Her Shoes is awesome!), and the chapter near the end about her estranged father was very moving. I also loved reading about her adventures in writing, and the insecurities she faced while fighting to keep her vision for her books intact. It’s a fantastic read, and I’ll end this review with another of my favourite passages from the book:

I give fat women happy endings. And in today’s America, that right there is a political, even a radical act. [p. 240]

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

I read some pretty fantastic books this year. Below, in no particular order, are some of my favourites, in case you’re in the mood to discover a new read:

1. Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

One of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read, this chronicles Shonda Rhimes’ decision to spend a year saying “yes” to invitations and challenges she would have previously turned down due to fear. See my gushing commentary throughout the audiobook on Goodreads, and I highly recommend checking out the title for yourself. I highly recommend this to anyone, particularly women, who may want just that extra nudge to get out there and pursue your dreams.

2. Hag-seed by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is clearly having the time of her life with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and I had just as much fun delving into her modern re-telling. This re-telling features a theatre director who seeks revenge twelve years after being fired from a thinly veiled Stratford Festival, a group of prisoners who swear using only Shakespearean insults and who adapt Shakespeare into gems such as the song and dance number “Evil Bro Antonio,” and a play within the play that I personally would love to see on-stage. See my full review.

3. Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

A thought-provoking exploration on what it means to be Jewish in America, Here I Am is a monster of a book that takes a while to digest. The dissolution of a Jewish American man’s marriage, his eldest son’s decision not to have a Bar Mitzvah, and a geopolitical situation in the Middle East that calls for Jews from around the world to return to Israel, the multiple threads create a complex tangle that compels the reader to tease the strands apart. I’m not sure I completely understand what this book is about, I just know that I’m glad I read it.

4. The Translation of Love by Lynne Kutsukake

This is a beautifully told tale of post-World War II Japan, and the various women and men dealing with the aftermath. I was struck by the heartbreaking irony of Japanese people looking for hope from the American general, Douglas MacArthur, a figure instrumental in their country’s downfall in the first place. I was moved by the futile hope inherent in the love letters Japanese woman asked to be translated for American soldiers they know only as “Joe.” And I absolutely loved the fragility and strength of Kutsukake’s characters, who are, each in their own way trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of war.

5. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

A powerful and moving tale that re-imagines the underground railroad as a literal railroad taking escaped slaves to freedom, the story of Cora and Caesar’s escape is a harrowing read and a brilliant piece of writing.

6. Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Told in Sing-lish, the story of Jazzy’s search for the perfect rich ang moh (Western expat) husband is much more cutting and emotionally devastating than the narrator’s breezy tone suggests.

7. The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker

A scientific and historical geekfest into the rise of the common house cat, this book fascinated this particular cat lady to no end. See the full review on my blog and some of my favourite passages highlighted on Goodreads.

8. Laughing All the Way to the Mosque by Zarqa Nawaz

This collection of cross-cultural anecdotes about growing up Muslim in Canada made me laugh throughout and wish that I’d watched the author’s hit TV show Little Mosque on the Prairie. See my longer review.

9. The Hundred Names of Darkness by Nilanjana Roy

I loved the first book in this duology The Wildlings, and enjoyed reading about the further adventures of Mara and the rest of her clan in the Nizamuddin neighbourhood in Delhi, India. Similar to the latter books in the Harry Potter series, Hundred Names deepens the mythology around these cats and takes these characters to a whole other level in their adventure. See my full review.

10. The Parcel by Anosh Irani

A complex, disturbing story of a hijra (neither male nor female, but a third gender) former prostitute in Bombay, India who must prepare a young girl (the “parcel” in the title) for life as a sex worker. Nothing in this story is simply good nor evil; morality is in shades of grey throughout, and the story’s power lies in its ability to make the reader sympathize with a character who is responsible for doing what is, objectively, a despicable act. See my full review.

Special Mention:

11. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I’m cheating with an 11th book, simply because this sprawling epic, set in Korea and Japan, about multiple generations of a Korean family, is a fantastic story to lose oneself in. My review will be posted closer to its release date in February 2017, but I highly recommend you add this title to your TBR pile.

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Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada, Simon and Schuster Canada, Hachette Book Group Canada, and all the wonderful publishers who’ve sent me review copies this past year. Thanks as well to the Toronto Public Library, The FOLD Festival for Literary Diversity, and the International Festival of Authors for the non-review titles I discovered, enjoyed and added to this list.

My Goodreads review for Margaret Atwood’s Hag-seed states simply: “Oh wow oh wow oh wow. Standing O.” One of, if not the best book I’ve read all year.

I should have known that if any Hogarth Shakespeare author were to surpass Jeanette Winterson’s impressive Gap of Time, it would be Margaret Atwood. Like Winterson, Atwood takes a very playful approach to adapting The Tempest, but while the genius of Gap of Time was in its linguistic virtuosity, the beauty of Hag-seed is in its sheer sense of FUN. Margaret Atwood at play is the best kind of Margaret Atwood, and I love how she’s so clearly having a ball with this material. Her playfulness and humour are out in full force, making it by far my new favourite of the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

Atwood’s Prospero is theatre director Felix, who teaches Shakespeare to prison inmates. Twelve years ago, he’d been the Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Festival until he was betrayed by his protege and fired. When he learns that his former protege and other theatre colleagues, who are now politicians, would be visiting the prison before shutting down its Shakespeare program, he sees his opportunity for revenge.

Atwood sets the comedic tone early, with this gem on page 1 from the inmates’ production of The Tempest:

ANNOUNCER: What you’re gonna see, is a storm at sea:

Winds are howlin’, sailors yowlin’,

Passengers cursin’ ’em, ’cause it gettin’ worse:

Gonna hear screams, just like a ba-a-d dream,

But not all here is what it seem,

Just sayin’.

Grins.

Now we gonna start the playin’. [p. 1]

There’s an irreverence to the language, and a hard rhythm in its tone that makes it such a joy to hear and I like to think is probably similar to how Shakespeare’s audiences responded to his own rhythms. To be honest, throughout most of the excerpts from the inmates’ Tempest throughout the story, all I could think of was how much I’d love to see it on-stage myself. I watched The Tempest in Stratford Festival, starring Christopher Plummer, and it was fantastic, but there’s a rough-hewn charm to Atwood’s prisoners’ version that totally gives a fresh take to the story.

Felix’s approach to teaching Shakespeare is to let his students re-write the Bard for their own productions, as long as it stays true to the story and the only cuss words they can use in class are the ones already in the play. You can imagine the hilarious potential in even the everyday dialogue of this story:

“You’re such a poxy communist,” says SnakeEye.

“Shove it, freckled whelp,” says Red Coyote.

“No whorseson dissin’, we’re a team,” says Leggs. [p. 127]

My inner English major geek also loved the deeper conversations within the humour, such as the close reading the inmates gave The Tempest, including some discussions around the racist overtones in Shakespeare’s unjust treatment of Caliban. I particularly loved how each Shakespeare character (the actor and the production team behind them) was given a chance to envision how their story turns out beyond what Shakespeare had written. Not only does this deepen our insight into who they are as characters, but it also reveals to us who the actors are, who brought them to life on stage.

There is an added layer of tragedy as well that I loved in Felix’s production of The Tempest. Originally envisioned as a tribute to his deceased daughter Miranda, Felix was robbed of the chance to put on the production of his dreams at Makeshiweg Festival, and so the play became a sort of magnum opus in his own mind. His staging of it at the prison, while the setting of his revenge on those who betrayed him twelve years ago, is also cathartic, a culmination as it were of his life’s work, and like the magic scheme that Shakespeare’s Prospero unveils on his island, Felix’s staging of The Tempest also appears as the key to his own psychic freedom. In Felix’s mind, Miranda has lived on as a Muse, aging in real-time and fuelling his artistic vision and desire for revenge; the scene where she speaks to him during the prisoners’ production of The Tempest is eerily arresting and simply beautiful.

Hag-seed is such a fantastic, absolutely brilliant book that retells The Tempest with such verve and joie de vivre that it’s best just to sit back and enjoy the ride. I had the privilege of attending an author reading and interview at the International Festival of Authors, and Margaret Atwood read from one of the my absolute favourite parts of Hag-seed: a song and dance routine the inmates came up with called “Evil Bro Antonio.” I’m afraid I don’t have a video of Atwood’s rhyming (a once-in-a-lifetime lit nerd experience!) to share, but here’s an excerpt where Antonio’s character speaks of his brother:

It was my bro called Prospero,

He was the real man,

He was the Duke, he was the Duke, he was the Duke of Milan.

Ooh-ah hah! Ooo-ah hah! Stamp clap, clap stamp, snapsnap stamp.

…He was stuck in his book, doin’ his magic,

Wavin’ his wand around and all that shit,

I took what I like, and that was fine,

Whatever I wanted, it was mind,

I got so used to it.

But he didn’t look, he was slack, didn’t watch his back,

What a fool, not cool, laid out the temptation.

I was bossin’ around the whole Milan nation,

He didn’t see what I took, it turned me into a crook,

Turned me into his evil twin, I went the way of sin,

Only way I could win.

Ooo-ah hah! Ooo-ah hah! Stamp clap, clap stamp, snapsnap stamp. [p. 156-157]

Standing O, Ms. Atwood. Brava!

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.