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. :-)

Event Recap | Fourth Annual Ontario Book Blogger Meet-Up

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One of my favourite things about being a book blogger in Toronto is having so many other book bloggers in the area attending the same events. Here’s the thing: squee-ing over the once in a lifetime chance to see Judy Blume in person is pretty amazing. Seeing half a dozen familiar faces in the same room all squee-ing along with you is even better.

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So how awesome is it that five book bloggers banded together and decided to organize an event just for book bloggers to squee over books together? I remember hearing about the first Ontario Book Blogger Meet and thinking it was the best idea ever. Scheduling conflicts kept me from attending previous years’ events, so I’m really glad I was able to attend this year. I’ve heard a lot of great things about the event over the years, and I can say now — it was definitely worth the hype!

Organizers Book Blog Ontario posted a pretty comprehensive recap of the event, and you can read it here. It was held at The Ballroom, in downtown Toronto, which had yummy food, cute staff, and a relaxed vibe perfect for mingling and chatting about books. I got to meet and mingle with book bloggers from around Ontario, and chatted with awesome authors Sally Christie, Erin Bow, Danielle Younge-Ullman and Leah Bobet. To give you an idea of how many bloggers turned up – I swear I probably got to talk to only about half the people in the room, and missed out on meeting authors Kevin Sands and K.A. Tucker. No clue about actual attendance numbers, but it’s pretty incredible to see so many people so passionate about books in one room…and to know that we represent just a tiny fraction of the entire book reading, book loving population in Ontario.

Mainly though, what I remember most from the event is being overwhelmed with gratitude. I feel unbelievably lucky to be a book blogger in Ontario, and to be part of such a warm, welcoming community.

So thank you, first and foremost to Angel, Wendy, Michele, Christa and Liz — the hardworking women behind Book Blog Ontario, who must have spent hours (days / weeks / months) putting this event together. They coordinated the author appearances, worked with publishers to put the swag bags together, booked the venue, and basically did all the hard work so the rest of us bloggers could have a great time. They did a great job, and you can read more about them here.

Books in the swag bag

Books in the goodie bag (not pictured: tea and other swag)

Thank you as well to the publishers who generously provided us with more than enough reading material for the rest of the summer. Thank you, Simon & Schuster Canada, Penguin Random House Canada, Scholastic, HarperCollins Canada, Harlequin, Raincoast, Hachette Canada, Dundurn, PGC, and Quirk Books.

I won a prize pack! (Awesome Book Nerd tote courtesy of Raincoast Books.)

I won a prize pack! (Awesome Book Nerd tote courtesy of Raincoast Books.)

Thank you to all the authors who attended, particularly to Leah Bobet and Erin Bow who kindly signed my copies of their books. It may be cliche, but it’s still always a thrill to realize that authors are regular people too, and you may fangirl like mad over their books but still have enough poise to eat a nacho dripping with guac in front of them.

I haven’t had a chance to read Leah Bobet’s An Inheritance of Ashes yet, but Erin Bow’s The Scorpion Rules kept me captivated from the very first page. Incredible world building.

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Finally, a heartfelt thank you to my fellow bloggers. It was so much fun hanging out with all of you and talking about books, the weather, and I’m pretty sure someone mentioned otters at some point. A special shout out to Jen, whom I haven’t seen in years — it was awesome geeking out with you again!

And thank you, fellow bloggers Michele, Hayley, Chandra, Gisele and Wendy, for the books, and an extra special shoutout to Lynne, who I think may be my book twin because we have such similar tastes in books.

Some book recommendations: Lindsey Kelk’s Always the Bridesmaid (so much frothy fun!), Melissa Clark’s Bear Witness (good, not great) and Frances Brody’s A Woman Unknown (really good British cozy!).

This has been a pretty incredible week of reading for me, mostly thanks to this event, and I’m getting giddy just thinking of which bit of bookish goodness I’ll pick up next.

Any suggestions?

Review | A Robot in the Garden, Deborah Install

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23995237This book caught my attention at the Random House Canada Blogger Preview because it was marketed as “like if Up and Wall-E had a baby.” I love Up, and while I never watched Wall-E, the premise of the book sounded too intriguing to miss: 34 year old Ben Chambers discovers a robot in his garden and embarks on a journey around the world to find out where it came from and return it home.

A Robot in the Garden is an endearing, feel good story. Ben’s quest to find the robot’s home adds a sense of purpose to his generally aimless life, and teaches him about love. The robot Tang is indeed written to be loveable — a child-like total innocent who latches on to Ben and comes to rely on him for everything. I personally found Tang annoying after a while — his helplessness at times struck me as neediness and his wonder at the simplest things was at times cloying. So I wasn’t completely in love with Tang, as I expected I was meant to be, but to be fair, his behaviour is fairly realistic given the world the author built.

To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed that the story took place in a world where robots were everywhere, and that the problem with Tang is that he’s practically obsolete as a model. I suppose when I heard the promo pitch at the Blogger Preview, I’d imagined a world like ours now, and Tang as a rickety, patched up robot that was truly alone in the world because humanoid robots haven’t hit the mainstream yet. (I was about to say that they haven’t been invented yet, but then I remembered this pretty awesome sounding hotel in Japan.) Tang being an obsolete model in a world full of robots makes the story feel a bit more predictable, and the themes raised feel more standard.

That being said, Install’s story is as charming as you’d expect it to be. There’s a hilarious chapter about an android hotel, and a nice subplot about two secondary characters finding love. My favourite part was a scene near the end where Ben goes to a family affair and runs into his ex wife, and it is she who most clearly notices the change that Tang has brought about in him. I love that, because it encapsulates what the whole journey to find Tang’s home has been about: a man finding the humanity in a robot, and a robot helping bring out the humanity in a man.

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

Review | Arctic Summer, Damon Galgut

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19348334I love E.M. Forster’s writing. I love the poetry of A Passage to India — the aphorism “only connect” and the final passage about the impossibility of interracial friendship and same-sex romance at that place and time going so deep as to appear to be ingrained in nature itself. I love the rawness of Maurice — the author’s own pain and longing practically pulsing off the page.

So with Arctic Summer, a novel about the years Forster spent writing Passage to India, Damon Galgut both piqued my interest and had a hell of a lot to live up to. In brief: he delivered. Arctic Summer is a beautifully crafted portrayal of Forster’s travels in India, and the relationships he formed. Galgut even echoes Forster’s style somewhat — the subtle suggestions of violent emotions, the attention to small details, and the meandering thoughtful interludes of reflection.

It’s difficult to pick particular passages that reminded me of Forster — it was more a niggling sensation throughout. Galgut did take some descriptions of India from Forster’s novels, so in the scene where Forster visits a set of caves, the experience could very much have led to what eventually became Passage. Still, Forster’s influence seems to permeate much of the book, enhancing the feeling that we really are entering the mind of the author. Take for example the following passage:

Whom could he tell about his love? He wrote about it to a handful of people at home, but he was aware of how absurd, how ridiculous, it sounded… It was more as if he’d fallen into love through Mohammed: into a small circular space in the very centre of his life, where almost nothing threw a shadow. [p. 221]

The first section frames a emotion within the context of socially acceptable self-consciousness, yet the dissembling into the purely metaphorical in the second section reveals how deep his emotions actually run. It’s this type of linguistic tension that reminds me of Forster, and this interplay between social norms and emotional truth being reflected in language.

The story itself also reflects the themes Forster explores in Passage and Maurice. We see Forster’s romances, and we see how his fascination with Indian culture clashes with the haughtiness of his fellow Englishmen and women. We see his various efforts to connect with others, as well as his attempts to capture the wonders of his experiences in words.

Galgut does a great job in taking us into Forster’s head, and in reflecting the thought processes that could have gone into writing Passage. He also makes tangible the relationships that Forster could only hint at in his own writing, as well as the tragedy that these relationships couldn’t work out. Arctic Summer renewed my love for Forster’s work, and I finished this novel with a desire to re-read Passage and Maurice, and to check out P.N. Furbank’s biography E.M. Forster: A Life, which Galgut mentions in his acknowledgements as a key source.

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