STAFF PICK - The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Sometimes I love picking up a book just because everyone is talking about it and it has BUZZ!  This first novel  was not something I would normally have picked up but a certain CEO of a Canadian bookstore chain “picked it” so I thought I’d see what the fuss is about.  I wasn’t disappointed with the story and as the twists and turns of the family unraveled I couldn’t put the book down.  I can't say that I loved any of the siblings particularly but their partners were great and their characters more than made up for the shortcomings of the four Plumbs.   Here is a brief summary from the publisher:

"Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund, 'The Nest,' which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest's value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems. Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can't seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they've envisioned? 

Louise

#CrazyforCanLit: These are OUR stories

In the spirit of #CrazyForCanLit, as well as Women’s History Month, I had a plan to write a blog post about my top five CanLit heroines. However, when I went through my short list of personal favourites, I realized that many of my favourite female characters in Canadian literature were personally connected to me in some way through geography or ethnic background. Here are a couple of my very personal favourites:

Sandra Birdsell’s 2001 Giller-nominated novel, The Russländer, is a very personal read for me. The story follows the life of Katya Vogt, an elderly Mennonite woman living in Winnipeg who remembers her life as a young girl living in Russia at the time of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Katya's life as a child is mostly happy, but her family eventually becomes caught in the violence that erupts between the wealthy landowners and the impoverished Russian workers. We see the horrifying results of these tensions through Katya's eyes, and watch her attempt to come to terms with this tragedy even as an elderly woman now living safely in Canada. 

This book echoes my own grandmother's experiences about living in Russia as a teenager in the same time period, and gave me a richer understanding of the stoic but unwavering religious faith of my Mennonite ancestors. In recent days, I have thought a lot about these refugee ancestors of mine, who were actually banned from immigrating to Canada between 1919 and 1922, along with Doukhobors and Hutterites, due to their alarming religious views and tendency to not assimilate to the greater Canadian culture. The parallels with current political situations are impossible to ignore, and I credit books like The Russländer with strengthening my empathy towards our modern day refugees of war, because it reminds me that this too is my own history. 

While Sandra Birdsell's books have helped me understand how my past helps to mold my present political views, many of Miriam Toews' books relate to me on a more direct level. Toews grew up in the same southern Manitoba town that I did, and her description of East Village in the Giller-nominated and Governor General’s Literary Award-winning book, A Complicated Kindness, describes the Steinbach of my childhood to a T. While my own family wasn't as repressive as Nomi's, I still feel a kinship to a character who is stuck in her small home town, stuck in a religious ethnic identity that she doesn't identify with, and stuck in her own rebellious adolescent mind. I feel like I could have easily written this quote when I was a snarky and self-absorbed teenager:

We’re Mennonites. After Dukhobors who show up naked in court we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.... Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking , temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock’n’roll, having sex for fun, swimming, makeup, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o’clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno.

Much has been written about Toews' ability to inject sarcasm or humour into tragic circumstances, which is an aspect of her writing that I didn't notice until other people mentioned it. To me, the black humour in the dialogue and internal narration in A Complicated Kindness and her more recent Giller-nominated book, All My Puny Sorrows, felt familiar and completely expected in the context.

Canadian literature provides readers with a wonderful range of characters with wildly diverse experiences, but when it comes down to it – I love CanLit because I see myself reflected in some of these stories.

Staff Pick: In a Vertigo of Silence by Miriam Polli

Just like a person’s memories are ‘snatches of time’ not in chronological order, so too is In a Vertigo of Silence. Written as the collective memory of a family, the novel moves back and forth in time to reveal snatches of the lives of three different generations of a Polish immigrant family.

The writing style could be confusing and distracting, but it is not. This is due to the fully rounded characterizations and the skillful writing. With loss and female tenacity as recurring themes throughout, the characters become so well known to the reader that they will remain in the memory as friends.

The family is a matriarchy with Marishka at its head. A strong and eminently likeable woman, she came to the United States via Ellis Island with her husband, Antoni. They settled in Pennsylvania where he found work in a coal mine. Tragically, like so many other miners in the early 1920s, he perished in the mine. This when Marishka was only days away from giving birth to her third daughter… Marishka’s tenacity is evident in how she went on to become a talented seamstress, laundress and sometimes house cleaner to make ends meet.

Over time, we meet Marishka’s three daughters. Paulina, the eldest, is an artist and very close to her mother. Anna, the beautiful middle child, is a mentally fragile women who drinks to excess. Eva, the youngest, makes a ‘sound’ marriage and has one son.

We then come to meet Emily, Anna’s daughter. Emily is bullied at school partly because she comes from a fatherless family. She faced betrayal by her best friend, Wanda. In her adolescent years she developed an eating disorder. Her grandmother fears for Emily living with her disturbed mother, so she moves in with them to take over Emily’s care and welfare. Emily and her grandmother are soul mates. Things go well until Marishka becomes ill, and Anna is institutionalized. At that time both Marishka and Emily go to live with the dutiful Eva.

The strange thing is, although the bond between grandmother and granddaughter is very close, Emily grows up believing that she only has one aunt… This family secret and the reason it came about affects the entire family.

We follow Emily’s life as she goes off to college and becomes an adult. Then, after a family tragedy, the family secret is revealed…

I mused about the title. Perhaps the silence is the ‘not knowing’ of the family secret. Perhaps the vertigo is the dizzying maelstrom of emotion one feels when something shocking or life-changing is revealed.

I wondered at the many mentions of the moon. I had to look them up as I had never heard of some of them. The beaver moon, the hunter moon, the sap moon, the hunger moon, the buck moon, the planting moon. Then of course the ‘O’ in vertigo of the title on the cover is the moon… Does the author use this device to put forth the adage that the family members, although separated, are all under one moon, so therefore united? Or, did she have something profound and entirely different in mind?


Miriam Polli has written an empathetic and captivating family saga that many will enjoy. Highly recommended literary fiction!

Recent Family Sagas

Sometimes children will ask for books that go on and on. These same children grow into adults who become engrossed and invested in fictional characters and the desire remains the same. For these readers we have family sagas. A family saga can be best described as a book, or better yet, a series of books that relate the lives of sets of interconnected families over time. A family saga that I have been particularly enjoying these last few years is Ken Follett's  Century Trilogy which chronicles the lives of five interconnected families in a sweeping saga that encompasses the twentieth century. Family sagas appeal to readers who are drawn to rich character development and who enjoy grand and sweeping tales of historical fiction.

Some other recent family sagas:

All My Tomorrows by Ellie Dean (Beach View Boarding House novels)

"Friendship, family, love and loss, and keeping calm and making do in the south-coast town of Cliffehaven during the Second World War. Join the Reilly family at their Beach View boarding house and meet the new arrivals Peggy Reilly soon takes under her wing. Jim Reilly and his brother are away fighting the war, Martin Black has been shot down and taken prisoner of war, and his wife Anne returns to Beach View with her baby to seek solace. And twin sisters from the east end of London descend on the boarding house causing chaos from the minute they arrive." Discover

Be Careful What You Wish For by Jeffrey Archer (Clifton Chronicles)


"Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer's Be Careful What You Wish For opens with Harry Clifton and his wife Emma rushing to hospital to learn the fate of their son Sebastian, who has been involved in a fatal car accident. But who died, Sebastian or his best friend Bruno? When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet, the egregious Major Alex Fisher, in order to destroy the Barrington family firm just as the company plans to build its new luxury liner, the MV Buckingham. Back in London, Harry and Emma’s adopted daughter wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art where she falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him. Be Careful What You Wish For showcases the master storyteller’s talent as never before – when the Clifton and Barrington families march forward into the sixties, in this epic tale of love, revenge, ambition and betrayal." publisher

Hall of Secrets by Cate Campbell (Benedict Hall novels)

" In Cate Campbell's sumptuously detailed, page-turning series set in 1920s Seattle, the once-secure lifestyle of the wealthy Benedict family--and their household staff--must contend with the radical, roaring Jazz Age. . . For generations, the Benedicts have been one of Seattle's most distinguished families, residing in the splendid Queen Anne mansion known as Benedict Hall amid a host of loyal servants. But the dawn of the 1920s and the aftermath of the Great War have brought dramatic social conflict. Never has this been more apparent than when daughter Margot's thoroughly modern young cousin, Allison, comes to stay. But Margot is also shocking many of Seattle's genteel citizens, and her engineer beau, by advocating birth control in her medical practice. For amid a tangle of blackmail, manipulation, and old enmities, the Benedicts stand to lose more than money--they may forfeit the very position and reputation that is their only tether to a rapidly changing world." publisher

The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner

"From the internationally acclaimed author of Touch, praised as "an arresting debut" (National Post) and "a haunting, beguiling and beautifully imagined story" (Winnipeg Free Press), comes a powerful family saga steeped in the legends of the ocean. The Kings family has lived on Loosewood Island for three hundred years, blessed with the bounty of the sea. But for the Kings, this blessing comes with a curse: the loss of every first-born son. Now, Woody Kings, the leader of the island's lobster fishing community and the family patriarch, teeters on the throne, and Cordelia, the oldest of Woody's three daughters, stands to inherit the crown. To do so, however, she must defend her island against meth dealers from the mainland, while navigating sibling rivalry and the vulnerable nature of her own heart when she falls in love with her sternman. Inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, The Lobster Kings is the story of Cordelia's struggle to maintain her island's way of life in the face of danger from offshore, and the rich, looming, mythical legacy of her family's namesake." publisher

Cavendon Hall by Barbara Taylor Bradford (Cavendon Hall)

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes an epic saga of intrigue and mystique set in Edwardian England. Cavendon Hall is home to two families, the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them. Charles Ingham, the sixth Earl of Mowbray, lives there with his wife Felicity and their six children. Walter Swann, the premier male of the Swann family, is valet to the earl. His wife Alice, a clever seamstress who is in charge of the countess's wardrobe, also makes clothes for the four daughters. For centuries, these two families have lived side-by-side, beneath the backdrop of the imposing Yorkshire manor.  Cavendon Hall is Barbara Taylor Bradford at her very best, and its sweeping story of secrets, love, honor, and betrayal will have readers riveted up to the very last page." publisher

London Dawn by Murray Pura (Danforths of Lancashire)


"Readers everywhere are clamoring for books like Downton Abbey, the hit PBS Masterpiece Theater series that's taken America by storm. Those readers have become enthusiastic about The Danforths of Lancashire by award-winning author Murray Pura.
In this stunning conclusion to the saga, we find Lord Preston and his family are gathered in London in the late 1930s for what turns out to be a homecoming. The family is finally all together again, gathering in a way they haven't been able to do for years. But looming ahead is the summer and fall of 1940 when both the Battle of Britain and the Blitz will occur. Though the family is blissfully unaware of this soon-to-be reality, Lord Preston, privy to top secret info in his position in the government, has grave concerns; the gravest he's ever had, that England will be invaded. The Danforth family patriarch does his best to hide his fears with a cheerful exterior, but is he successful?" publisher

Staff Pick -Tyringham Park by Rosemary McLoughlin

In County Cork, Ireland there lies a fabulous estate of fifty-two rooms on nineteen thousand acres of land.  It is the home of the Blackshaw family.  Many would assume that wealth and privilege would make life perfect.  However, the residents of Tyringham Park  (M) prove the old adage that ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’.

The family Blackshaw are a dysfunctional lot.  An older husband who is absent most of the time, a young vivacious wife who lives and breathes horses much to the detriment of her young daughters. Then of course there are the servants. The children’s nursemaids, the housekeeper, the groom… they all weave an intricate web of relationships and betrayals that will ensnare the reader.

Set between the years of  1917 and 1943, this historical family saga recounts the life of Charlotte Blackshaw. As a child she was neglected by her mother and abused by her nurse which left her in a fragile emotional state.  When she is nine years old her younger sister Victoria goes missing. The impact of this event ensures that Charlotte’s life and the life of everyone at Tyringham Park is irrevocably changed.

The narrative follows Charlotte from the age of nine to age thirty-five.  It ponders the issues of nature vs. nurture, childlessness, how responsible adults can influence the psyche of innocent children, and most importantly, how fleeting indiscretions can be life changing.

A debut novel by artist/author Rosemary McLoughlin, “Tyringham Park” will appeal to readers of “Jane Eyre” and Kate Morton’s “The Forgotten Garden”.   Fans of “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs, Downstairs” will surely enjoy it.  As I fit all these criteria, I can honestly say it was a memorable favorite.