BOOK REVIEWS &
RECOMMENDATIONS
with Abby Kernya IG @abbigalekernya
Upstream: Selected Essays
by Mary Oliver (2016)
Genre: Poery, Nonfiction, Memoir
Recommended Age: 14+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 4/5
Positive message: 2/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 4/5
Sex: 3/5
Language: 1/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 1/5
“Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
The end of January where I live in Canada has broken out of the harsh grips of winter to an unexpectedly warm and kind spring. It seems only fitting, then, that I should introduce Mary Oliver for this book review. Mary Oliver is one of my favourite writers that I count myself fortunate enough to have come across. Her writing is whimsical, calming, nurturing, and above all else -- simple. There is a time and place for overdramatic and grandiose writing, and believe me I don't favour one over the other, but the beauty of Mary Oliver is the simplistic beauty she so passionately conveys in her work.
Upstream is a collection of essays that details Oliver's childhood living in rural Ohio surrounded by nature. Though Oliver's religion is a guiding factor in her personal life, Upstream is a devotional collection that favours the divine beauty of nature and human's special place among it. During this particular warm pocket of early February, I have found myself picking back up this collection and describing to friends the "self-devotional" message I found loud in this work. Oliver is one of those writers whose works are tied to their religious background, but can be read and enjoyed by everyone. Upstream explores the glorious gift of life weaving in and out of the material and natural world in a breathtaking display of the divine connection between humans and this earth we walk on.
Oliver's description alone of animals and the forest behind her childhood home is enough to cast this collection of essays on your radar for the upcoming spring. As February leans heavily on the topic of relationships, Oliver uses her adoration of the natural world to better recognize her relationship with herself in a devotional understanding of self-love and acceptance.
Mary Oliver remains one of my favourite poets and never fails to push my introverted self out in nature to walk around the beautiful world she spent her life worshipping. From an atheist, agnostic, religious or spiritual perspective, Oliver depicts life as a delicate gift to be celebrated through kindness and appreciation. Upstream follows a young child experiencing the world for the first time to a young adult carrying within her the curious child who once wandered into the woods and, as Oliver explains, never fully returned.
If you are in the mood to read glorious depictions of nature, find yourself among the trees and flowers, or are curious about living a softer life, then I cannot recommend this collection of essays enough.
“And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”
A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews (2004)
Genre: Canadian Lit, Literary Fiction
Recommended Age: 16+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 4/5
Positive message: 2/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 4/5
Sex: 3/5
Language: 1/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 1/5
“...and I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?”
— Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
Life has been weird lately. It has been weird in the sense that sometimes I wake up and forget where I am. For a second each morning, I panic and try to find something familiar in the dark of my room to prove that I am here, and not somewhere else very far away. Growing up in a very small and isolated town, this feeling of displacement makes me who I am. I start to feel homesick when I find peace somewhere bigger than that town. From watching my friends grow up and go sideways, it’s sad to understand that when you’ve outgrown your community, there is nowhere else to turn but inside yourself.
With this quick glimpse into my current mindset, it should come as no surprise that Miriam Toews is making a double feature in reviews. Last issue, I reviewed Toews’ A Complicated Kindness which was my first introduction to this phenomenal Canadian author, and I was fortunate enough to study Towes’ A Complicated Kindness for a Canadian Literature class in university.
This novel follows Nomi and her father Ray—two remaining members of their family in a rural mennonite community after Nomi’s sister, Tash left the community, followed by her eccentric mother Trudie. Nomi, like her sister and mother, hates this town. She hates her uncle “The Mouth”, the town’s pastor who relishes on punishing and exploiting shame, she hates that her older sister left and that her mother didn’t take her secret passport with her when she left too. But, Nomi loves her father, who loves this town as much as he loves Nomi. When Nomi starts rebelling against her community—drinking, drugs, an older boyfriend, her place in this tiny mennonite community is put at risk.
A Complicated Kindness is a story that isn’t defined by one theme or the other. Rather, this novel is raw and vulnerable and proves Toews’ master of her craft. It rips up the boundaries of familial love and stitches it back together again and again and again. It highlights the suffocation of rural Canadian towns and in all of the pain and internal grief that exist alongside familial isolation, Towes writes a complicated sort of love that exists within it all.
I will never tire of Toews’ work. A part of me will always be in my hometown, and a part of me will always be in the characters Toews’ creates.
“Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”
Love and attention exist on the same scale. You love what you mention, and as someone who, despite my teenage angst and rebellion against an environment I could not control, always finds a way to mention where I came from. For anyone who feels bigger than their hometown or anyone who struggles to find kindness even in the darkest of moments, please do yourself a favour and pick this book up.
“When she looked at me she saw a child surrounded by flames, screaming. And that must have been hard for her.”
All My Puny Sorrows
by Miriam Toews (2014)
Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Canadian Lit
Recommended Age: 16+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 4/5
Positive message: 2/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 5/5
Sex: 3/5
Language: 2/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 4/5
Consumerism: 1/5
“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”
— Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
It’s been a really long time since I have had such a visceral reaction to a book. Around a month or so ago, a good friend of mine recommended Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows after realizing we shared the same love of books that hold the capacity to destroy their reader.
Lately, I’ve been going through a lot of changes in my life—some good, some bad, all equally as frightening. Reading All My Puny Sorrows found me when everything felt so uncertain and self-doubt continuously plagued my psyche in a never-ending spiral of change. The book follows two sisters Elfreida and Yolandi as Yolandi narrates their sheltered religious upbringing in relation to her elder sister’s rebellious grit and desire to find life outside of their community.
I should stop my review now to warn readers that this book is not for the faint of heart, and not for those looking for a happy time.
Elfreida—in all her lust for life and worldwide success as a pianist—wants to die. In the most simplest of ways, Yolandi’s sister doesn’t want to stay alive. Through the book’s narration of Yoli’s perspective, to watch the person she idolizes more than life itself rot in a hospital bed after a failed attempt and balance her role as a sister and friend to the shell of a human once resembling her sister all while dealing with two children and a divorce, All My Puny Sorrows tests the limitations of love; asking just how far will one go to honour those they love even if it kills them, even if it doesn’t.
Through motherhood, sisterhood, and childhood, how does one escape genetic sadness? What do you do when the one person on this planet you love more than anything wants to leave it? In a delicate analysis of human suffering, Toews bends the limit of humanity and explores grief as a crash course for unaltering love, and how far family can go to save each other.
There was a moment that caught my breath when I first read it. When Elfreida lies in a hospital bed, she tells her sister there is a glass piano inside her and she’s terrified it will break. I won’t get into my interpretation of this imagery, for that I invite you to pick up a copy and decide for yourself what it means.
I remember approaching the climax of this novel and leaving my house in search of a calmer place to finish. With tear-stained cheeks and a hollow hole in my chest, I closed this novel and sat in silence on the couch in my office. All My Puny Sorrows has left a stain on my soul—one that I cannot thank my friend enough for, and one I cannot recommend enough.
Carmilla
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
Genre: Horror Fiction, Gothic Horror, Sapphic Fiction
Recommended Age: 14+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 2/5
Positive message: 1/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 5/5
Sex: 3.5/5
Language: 2/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 1/5
Consumerism: 0/5
“'I have been in love with no one, and never shall,' she whispered, 'unless it should be with you.' How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!”
— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
Dear reader,
If there is one thing you must know about me before continuing on with your regular scheduled programming, it’s that I love a good aesthetic. Gothic castles, chilly weather, dark skies, wind blowing through bare trees, a haunting apparition at the end of your bed, a mysterious sickness—what more could a girl want!
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu scratches my gothic itch as I patiently twiddle my thumbs in anticipation of fall. This short novella, published before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, follows the friendship of Laura and a mysterious damsel in distress known as Carmilla. As Carmilla is graciously taken in by Laura and her father after a tragic accident, her allure becomes a bloody sight to behold.
Carmilla, regardless of the debates behind Le Fanu's initial intentions of publishing a sensual female relationship as ‘monstrous’, undoubtedly is one of the greatest sapphic stories in the Gothic genre. The relationship between Laura and Carmilla blurs several lines of its time, and has instead become a romance that still proves magnetic today.
It is a relatively short read, coming in around 100 pages. Read in an afternoon, Carmilla marked the end of a very long and frustrating reading slump—I thought, what better way to get back in the groove than to read about lesbian vampires? Truly, I made the right choice.
Carmilla is a beautifully written story about attraction, yearning, youthful ignorance, and blinding hatred. If you are looking for a read that not only sets the perfect ambiance for a gothic romance, but also one that strays away from the traditional hetero-vampiric storyline (Carmilla, having predated Dracula, truly is a trailblazer!) then I cannot recommend this enthralling novella enough.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds
by Ocean Vuong (2016)
Genre: Poetry
Recommended Age: 14+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 3/5
Positive message: 4/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 5/5
Sex: 4/5
Language: 4/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 2/5
“it's june after all & you're young
until september
he looks different
from his picture but it doesn't matter”
— Ocean Vuong, “Because It’s Summer”
If any of you have been long-time readers of my bi-monthly book reviews, then it comes as no surprise that I’m once again talking about Ocean Vuong.
Since June is Pride Month, I wanted to choose a queer author and naturally, my mind drifted to Vuong's poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is an award-winning contemporary collection of poems that details Vuong’s experience as a queer Vietnamese immigrant living in America. In a coming-of-age fashion, Vuong writes about the grief of war, the fragility of violence, his identity as an immigrant, his identity as a gay man, and explores the poetic limits of gender and expression that sets the standard for modern poets.
When it comes to my relationship with Vuong’s work, it is impossible to pick favourites without discounting the entirety of my affliction with everything he writes. I would, in all seriousness, pay to read his grocery lists. That being said, in no particular order, I want to highlight a few poems that have constantly stuck with me since receiving this collection as a gift on a quiet covid Christmas morning.
First, “Immigrant Haibun” is the first poem I remember vigorously annotating and obsessing over when I first read the collection. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” stands out as an unforgettable letter to Vuong’s future self, and “Thanksgiving 2006” is a cold isolating poem that found its way embedded into my mind as I myself was cold and isolated away from everyone during those years in lockdown.
Of course, you cannot gain the full scope of the Vuong experience with just those poems, and I cannot recommend his work enough. I promise, your perspective on contemporary poets will forever be changed—I know mine certainly did.
His command of the page with such elegant prose and cadence is truly unforgettable. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a collection that demands to be read slowly, then read again, then again and again.
"I pull into the field & cut the engine.
It's simple: I just don't know
how to love a man
gently. Tenderness
a thing to be beaten
into. Fireflies strung
through sapphired air.
You're so quiet you're almost
tomorrow."
- Ocean Vuong, "Into The Breach"
Bunny
by Mona Awad (2019)
Genre: Fiction, Humour, Satire, Dark Humour
Recommended Age: 16+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 2/5
Positive message: 1/5
Positive role models: 0/5
Violence: 5/5
Sex: 4/5
Language: 4/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 1.5/5
“The real world lady, it's out there. Do you even know that? You're going to have to get back to it sometime.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
Down, down the rabbit hole we go…or should I say bunny hole?
It's imaginative, it's exotic, it's a bad trip, it's every dark thought you don’t say aloud. Bunny by Mona Awad takes place in a prestigious New England University where a group of cliquey English students, known formally as the bunnies, wreak havoc on their own personal playground. Samantha has the delight of being the only non-bunny in their creative writing workshop – a narration I greatly appreciate as a current creative writing student stuck in workshops with my own personal bunnies…minus the cult.
Oh, yes. This is a story about a cult.
Pampered in pink ruffled in feathers and generationally wealthy, these bunnies put your average New Englander to shame. Samantha and her best friend, Ava, watch the bunnies from afar until one night Samantha accepts their offer to attend their “smut salon”, an extension of their writing workshop. Bunnies known as The Duchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette warp Samantha into the world of the bunny in a night that spirals into months. Missing boys, bloodied bunnies, secret rituals, what's not to love?
How far will loneliness push someone? How much can you caress your desires before it no longer becomes fantasy? Awad does a beautiful and innovative job of displaying the power dynamics between women, the dynamic between confidence and isolation, the struggle for control, and the relationship that exists between self and self-destruction. Bunny is weird, Bunny is gross, Bunny will leave you asking yourself, “what the f*ck did I just read?”
For this reason alone, Bunny is five stars for me. A Frankenstein-esque story meets the cousin of The Secret History, Bunny is a satirical fever dream that explores the privilege, power, and limits of the human condition. Nothing is real, but everything exists – how can anyone find their way back from this?
“Sad. Very sad, Samantha. To be lost like this. Sad, sad, sad that when someone asks you, What do you want? nothing comes to mind but a pair of fists clutching little broken bits.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
MORE RECOMMENDED READS
Babel
by R.F Kuang
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
This Wound Is A World
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Beautiful World,
Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong