Category Archives: Book Review Blog

My book reviews and fun bookish news as a book blogger. All about other people’s books, and not my own. :-)

Review | Pride and Joy, by Louisa Onomé

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PrideAndJoy

SUCH a fantastic book!

Pride and Joy hooked me with its very first paragraph:

Mama Mary Okafor is turning seventy today, Good Friday, and at first, no one was happy about this. Simply put, if there’s anything anyone, including Mama’s daughter, Joy, knows about Mama, it’s that she would rather die than upstage God, and yet, here she is turning seventy on a holy day.

As someone who grew up in a devoutly Catholic country and with a devoutly Catholic mother, this opening made me laugh. With two simple sentences, Onomé has painted me a vivid picture of exactly who Mama Mary Okafor and her daughter Joy are, and how they relate to each other.

Onomé’s skill in writing vivid characters carries through as the story continues to unfold. Mama Mary then proceeds to die in her sleep, and before Joy can even figure out how to grieve, Mama Mary’s sister, Auntie Nancy, declares that she has had a premonition that Mama Mary will rise from the dead on Easter Sunday. The declaration is both comic (she got the insight from seeing a brown cow on the road) and tragic (beneath it all is very real grief that the sister she has followed her entire life is gone, and to a place she cannot follow), and it’s testament to Onomé’s skill that the author balances both emotions so masterfully.

As the story progresses, an ever-intensifying escalation into absurdity barely conceals the family’s ever-intensifying struggle to manage their grief. A reporter comes to film the resurrection, dozens of Nigerian Canadians show up on the lawn to hold vigil, and a cousin shows up live streaming the happenings to her social media followers. All at the same time, relationships — between siblings, between romantic partners, amongst cousins, and across generations — deepen, fracture, and heal in varying degrees. And the birthday party turned resurrection vigil gradually morphs into a beautifully moving, raw, and gut-wrenchingly real portrait of a family coming to terms with a heartbreaking moment in their living history.

The Okafors are Nigerian Canadian, and, with the caveat that I’m not myself of that culture, the book very much feels Nigerian. Characters speak Igbo, details like the cow in Auntie Nancy’s premonition feels culturally specific, and when they Zoom in Pastor Lazarus and his congregation from Nigeria, it’s both hilarious (“Lazarus” being the name of someone who was brought back from the dead in the Bible) and also very vividly brought to life.

The book also feels very Nigerian Canadian, specifically in Joy’s anxiety that her son Jamil has learned more about his Italian heritage from his father than about his Nigerian heritage from Joy. With Mama Mary gone, who will teach Jamil the language and all the traditions that Joy isn’t confident about knowing herself? It’s an anxiety that struck a chord in me as an immigrant; my mom was my strongest link to my Filipino heritage, and ever since her death, I’ve felt more pressure to remember and keep alive all the many traditions and practices that used to be such a naturally large part of my way of life.

Overall, I absolutely adore this book. The way characters come together in the end, how they’ve grown as individuals, and how their relationships have evolved over the course of Easter weekend… it’s all so masterfully done. I particularly felt my heart swell at a scene near the end where Joy and her brother Michael “do something dumb.” The song “Sweet Mother” isn’t familiar to me at all, but I imagine it’s as meaningful to some readers as it is to Joy and Michael. The scene is pure silliness, and a vivid reminder of how cathartic and full of love silliness can be.

Read this book. It’s fantastic.

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I won a copy of this book in an online giveaway, with no expectation of a review. I just loved it so much that I wanted to blog about it.

Review | The Cat Who Solved Three Murders, by LT Shearer

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Murder! Cats! Art theft! Seriously, take a look at that adorable cover. How could I not fall in love with this book?!

The Cat Who Solved Three Murders is a cozy mystery starring a retired detective, Lulu Lewis, and her talking calico, Conrad. He talks only to Lulu; to everyone else, he simply says “meow.” It’s a unique concept, but one that, I’m afraid, turned me off somewhat. As a cat person, what I love most about cats in books is how the author manages to bring to life all the wonderful ways cats communicate without having to say a word. By giving Conrad human dialogue, I feared that LT Shearer simply created a regular human-like sidekick who just happened to have four legs and a tail.

That being said, Conrad does get his lovely moments of pure kitty cat. He comforts people by sitting on their laps and purring. He delights people by how skillfully he balances on Lulu’s shoulder. And in two delightful scenes, he turns action hero with claws and hisses. (My cats may, of course, argue that any self-respecting cat would’ve skillfully disappeared from sight in those scenes rather than put themselves in such danger, but, ehh, kudos to Conrad the action hero kitty.)

The mystery that Lulu and Conrad tackle is pretty good. The story begins when Lulu is invited to the mansion of a wealthy friend, Julia, for Julia’s husband Bernard’s 60th birthday party. But when Lulu and Conrad (her plus-one, which I thought was cute) arrive, they learn that Julia and Bernard’s home had been burgled. Julia was fortunately out of the house when it happened, but an insurance agent who’d been at the house to assess the value of some paintings had been killed, and Bernard injured. Some of the details around the burglary strike Lulu and Conrad as odd, and when someone is killed at the birthday party, they realize the need to dig deeper.

Like I said, the mystery aspect is pretty solid. The clues aren’t very subtle, so the big reveals are easy enough to figure out, but it’s still fun to see the story unfold. I like that Conrad is the one who discovers a significant clue by the pool, and there was a bit of fun in how Lulu had to come up with an elaborate story for why she’d noticed the clue herself but didn’t mention it till a day later.

Beyond that, as refreshing as I thought it was that this cozy mystery had a professional detective who was actually competent and receptive to the heroine’s contributions, I found it a stretch that Tracey included Lulu on so much of the investigation. It doesn’t matter that Lulu used to be a detective herself; surely, some of the things Tracey shared with her should have been confidential? Tracey treated her more like a partner than a civilian; she included Lulu in suspect interviews, allowed her to see the autopsy results, and just shared information like phone records without a single thought. Even though the author explained that Tracey was young and inexperienced, and even though it clearly worked for the best with this investigation, it still struck me as unprofessional on Tracey’s part, and I feel like that should have been addressed somehow.

And as much as I like Conrad, I do wish he’d been more cat-like. As affectionate and compassionate as he is in some scenes, his personality still came off as disappointingly flat. I do get that cats are often portrayed as jerks in books, so it’s kinda nice that this cat is portrayed as a nice character. But, well, Prozac in Laura Levine’s Jaine Austen mystery series shows more personality in a single scene than Conrad does over multiple chapters.

Conrad’s dialogue does often make him feel like a human stand-in. Even though he reminds Lulu about his cathood multiple times (like when he hears something that she doesn’t, and he reminds her it’s because cats have better hearing), it comes off as unnecessary. Worse, it’s a glaring reminder of how easy it is to forget that Conrad is a cat, not because he’s such a special creature for being able to speak, but because he isn’t quite as compelling as real kitties are. Also, as much as I love cats and appreciate how many characters seem delighted by Conrad’s presence, the whole “that’s a cat!” “he’s on your shoulder!” “he meows!” type of scene actually got old. Even for me, which says a lot, because normally, I love scenes of people gushing over cats. But here, it just happens so often, and in pretty much the same way each and every time, that the novelty and charm eventually wore off.

Still, overall, Conrad is still a pretty cool cat, and I like that he literally saves the day a couple of times. Lulu seems a good series lead, and the mystery itself was fun to read about. This may not have met my (admittedly ridiculous) high hopes of becoming my new favourite mystery series, but it’s a fun mystery nonetheless. And I’m all for more cat detectives in fiction, please and thank you!

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Secret Sex: An Anthology, edited by Russell Smith

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SecretSex“New risky fiction — with no names attached.”

What happens when you take 24 of Canada’s most prominent authors, invite them to write sex scenes, and promise them you’ll never reveal which scene they actually wrote? From the cover design (brilliant, by the way), to the anthology title, to the masquerade book launch, the marketing for Secret Sex turns out to be much sexier than the stories themselves.

To be fair, the editor makes it clear in the foreword that this is not a collection of erotica. Rather, it is a collection of sex stories written by literary fiction authors. So the sexiness is more akin to, say, D.H. Lawrence or Marian Engel than Sierra Simone, Sylvia Day, or even Shonda Rhimes’ take on Bridgerton.

So as someone who usually prefers sexy genre romance to literary fiction, and novels to short stories, I was prepared to flip through a few pages of this, figure out it isn’t my thing, and call it a day. Imagine my surprise then when I not only loved the first story (“Sext”), but actually read this all the way through to the end.

Not all the stories were my cup of tea, of course. As with any anthology, there are some hits and misses, and as with any fiction, especially the kind that features sex, your mileage will vary. I will admit that as a reviewer, not knowing who wrote which story also brings a kind of freedom. I can judge each story without thinking of the writer involved, or other books of theirs I may have enjoyed. Which does make my response to each story more candid than usual.

For me, there was a stretch maybe two-thirds through where the stories started to bore me, and I wondered if maybe I should have stretched this out one story at a time rather than try to read it all in a few days. But then a story (“Content Farm Confidential,” about a content ghostwriter who gets with her finance bro boss) revived my interest with its smart commentary on the sometimes soulless nature of sex and love, and remaining two stories (the voyeuristic “Mirror, Mirror” and the vampire story with Henry James undertones “Portrait of a Lady”) held my attention to the end.

My personal favourites:

  • “Politics of Passion” – an Indigenous man and a white woman meet at a conference on treaty issues. I absolutely adore the incisive political commentary and subversion of stereotypes that come through in sly little bon mot descriptions through an otherwise lighthearted, flirty-sexy story. For example, the woman is “colour challenged. Pigment denied.” The man “has a smile that told of strange and desirable secrets. Therefore, he was Anishinaabe.” (The “therefore” in that last quote sticks the landing.) And finally, no spoilers but the last two lines are the perfect ending. Brilliant piece.
  • “Bite” – vampire BDSM erotica. Sexiest story in the collection, IMHO, and the story most like what I would have expected and hoped from the marketing.
  • “Restoration” – this one was probably the most literary amongst my favourites, but I really liked how the author managed to fit an entire novel’s worth of story arc within a few pages.
  • “Watching You Watching Me” – beautifully sad, about a woman dealing with divorce. I especially love this part: “All flings depend on this foundation of fantastic, the relationship with a phantom other who lives only in our head… But marriage is a fantasy too, the most elaborate one of all… The fantasy of knowing an other, of being known,of knowability itself.”
  • And finally, “Sext” (about two adults sexting, one with perhaps more feelings than the other) and “Cloudburst” (about raining cocks, literally) are both punchy and hilarious snippets of fun. Both are made extra special by their surprisingly emotional gut punch endings.

The rest for me ranged from “not bad” to “meh, had to skim.” The only other standouts for me are “Calliope” (about a disembodied brain jealous of its human friend’s human lover) for the originality of its concept, and “Patience” (a fairly straightforward love story and sex scene) for the way it revealed the narrator’s trans-ness through their description of sex: “She is sucking what I have so much, more than enough to be a cock. When I come, my throat reveals itself the way she revealed the cock I know I have…” The narrator of “Patience” had earlier expressed dislike at being called “beautiful,” and it’s only during sex that it becomes clear why.

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Thank you to Dundurn Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.