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Book Reviews in October 1995 Issue

One Room in a Castle Letters from Spain, France & Greece
by Karen Connelly,

432 pages $24.95 TC
ISBN: 0888011946
Book Review
Owning the Place
by Mark Abley
Karen Connelly has an enviable, somewhat disquieting ability to possess the spirit of a place. Or, at least, to believe this of herself.
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A Fine Balance A Novel
by Rohinton Mistry,

640 pages $37 TC
ISBN: 0679446087
Book Review
Not Job's Comforter
by Merna Summers
Mistry's portrait of India in the time of Indira Gandhi depicts lives of struggle, exploitation, and desperate loss, suggesting to the reader that when it comes to meting out afflictions, the Hebrew God was a piker compared to Mother India.
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The Art of Mary Pratt
by Tom Smart,

168 pages $65 TC
ISBN: 086492173X
Book Review
Real Symbols
by Mark Cheetham
Mary Pratt's paintings have fascinated and given pleasure to an increasingly large and diverse audience over the past 25 years.
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Irony's Edge The Theory & Politics of Irony
by Linda Hutcheon,

256 pages $0 CT
ISBN: 0415054524
Book Review
Irony Gets Ironic
by Stan Fogel
Hutcheon's strengths are the clarity of her prose and the thoroughness of her research.
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Coming Down
by Audrey Thomas,

256 pages $14.99 TP
ISBN: 0140249842
Book Review
Looking for Betrayal
by Lynne Luven
Audrey Thomas's new novel trundles readers through the red soil of West Africa and the shifting sands of memory as William's trek of discovery labors through past and present.
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Real Life A Novel
by France Daigle,

160 pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 0887845614
No Song, but Silence
by Helene Le Beau,

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
pages $11.95 PT
ISBN: 0889104670
Book Review
Reality Bites
by Eileen Manion
Taken together, these two novels, translated from the French, provide a sense of the range of experimental fiction.
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Shadow Maker The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen
by Rosemary Sullivan,

324 pages $28 TC
ISBN: 0002554062
Book Review
Good Old Netherworld
by Diana Brebner
Rosemary Sullivan has come to this biography with her heart and her agenda on her sleeve. She was haunted by the mystery of Gwendolyn MacEwen.
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Coyote's Morning Cry
by Sharon Butala,

128 pages $12 TP
ISBN: 0006385958
Book Review
The Artist as Shaman
by Pat Barclay
With her sincerity never in question, many of Butala's perceptions and insights easily make connections between her individual experience and the "common humanity" she shares with her readers.
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No Cure for Love
by Peter Robinson,

352 pages $7.99 MM
ISBN: 0140251871
Book Review
L.A., Yorkshire
by Richard Perry
Robinson makes an 180 degree turn away from Inspector Banks' society of proprieties adhered to and sinned against, to the smogmurky, drug-elated, violence-addicted fantasy world of Los Angeles.
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Macken Charm
by Jack Hodgins,

320 pages $18.99 TP
ISBN: 0771041853
Book Review
Mourning Glory
by Glenn Sumi
Populated with larger-than-life characters -- colourful loggers, rustic prophets, and powerful women -Hodgins' fictional universe is as distinct as Laurence's Manawaka or Richer's Montreal.
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A Sudden Brightness
by Alice Boissonneau,

200 pages $19.95 PT
ISBN: 1550960687
Book Review
On the Verge
by Irene Mock
What are the ways in which human beings bear the unbearable -- death, abandonment, betrayal?
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Beyond Quebec Taking Stock of Canada
by Kenneth McRoberts,

464 pages $24.95 TP
ISBN: 0773513140
Canada & Quebec One Country, Two Histories
by Robert Bothwell,

288 pages $34.95 TC
ISBN: 0774805242
Book Review
With or Without Quebec
by Allan Levine
Just when you think that nothing further can be said or written about Quebec's often strained and tortured relationship with the rest of the country, along come two new books that tackle the subject from relatively novel angles.
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Inviting Blindness
by Bill Gaston,

120 pages $11.95 CT
ISBN: 0889821453
The Undoing
77 pages $9.95
ISBN: 091941737X
Radical Innocence
by John Pass,

96 pages $9.95 PT
ISBN: 1550171070
Collected Poems
by Ralph Gustafson,

260 pages $24.95 TP
ISBN: 155039052X
The Slow Reign of Calamity Jane
by Gillian Robinson,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 1550821172
Ragas from the Periphery
by Phinder Dulai,

144 pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 1551520214
Book Review
Plain Speaking
by Scott Ellis
Revieweing poetry in Canada is like being class monitor in a one room, country schoolhouse when the teacher's away.
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Interviews
Hit Single - interview with Leon Rooke
by Nancy Wigston
Leon Rooke reveals that readers and audiences aren't the same
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Letters to Editor
Letters to the Editor
If BiC sees its mission as primarily a combination of information and boosterism for Canadian writing, it should nevertheless be concerned with the prerequisites of credibility upon which any journal's effectiveness in our literary culture depends.
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Essays
Reading the Labels
by Elise Levine
Coming through Slaughter displays a knowingness of the unspeakable and how we are each freighted with the dark particulars of history, with the obscene, terrible consequences of time and place goose-stepping us from birth to death.
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Essays
A Rare Book Story
by Helen Porter
Like most writers from the regions Newfoundland writers rarely see their works on the shelves of mainland bookstores. Even in our own province the books are all clumped together under a sign that reads Of Local Interest.
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Prose/Poetry
Half-Right - student writing award winner
I've changed. There can be no aloof square holes for crowding round pegs. Or the other way around. I forget how it goes. I'm flexible, I bend now. I can be whatever's needed. A man taught me that.
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Prose/Poetry
Poetry - student writing award winner
In your wedding dress, tight across the chest and tinged yellower than the custard tt began as, I could be a continuation.
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Profiles
A Bit of Wallowing
by John Degen
Christine Stater steps up from the Gutter.
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Children of God
by Philip Loren,

222 pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0887530060
Choral
by Karen McLaughlin,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0889740453
Man-S-Laughter
by Ellen Frith,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 088982147X
Icefields
by Thomas Wharton,

275 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0920897878
Tales of the Ex-Fire-Eater A Novel
by Sheila Dalton,

150 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 0969759002
Tell Me Who You Are
by R. G. Des Dixon,

pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 1550222317
No Blood Relative
by Terry Carroll,

pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 1551280213
Annie
by Luanne Armstrong,

336 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 1896095003
First Novels
First Novels - Wise Teen Girls
by Eva Tihanyi
The season has brought with it a huge pile of books with which I've built a tower in the comer of my study.
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Kids in the Jail Why Our Young Offenders Do the Things They Do
by Paul Vasey,

272 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0887532578
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-fiction
by Denyse OLeary
His method is to exhaustively interview staff and inmates, as well as juvenile court judges. In the news business, a good rule of thumb is go to the source, he explains. And that's exactly where things went wrong.
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Victims of Benevolence Discipline & Death at the Williams Lake Indian Residential School, 1891-1920
by Elizabeth Furniss,

130 pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 155152015X
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-fiction
by Denyse OLeary
The anthropologist Elizabeth Furniss looks at the Indian residential schools from the perspective of the deaths of two children, one of whom died nearly a hundred years ago.
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Endangered Species
by Mary Soderstrom,

211 pages $34.95 TC
ISBN: 0887509932
Brief Reviews
Brief Review - Fiction
by Lorna Jackson
Like the quasi-moral tabloid photographer who scuttles around in her book, Soderstrom doesn't bother to give the lurid or painful details of contemporary life any more than a single dimension.
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The Voyage
by Robert MacNeil,

304 pages $32.95 TC
ISBN: 0385469527
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Pat Barclay
Informed detail, thoughtful characterization, and scrumptious political tidbits keep the story zipping briskly along, and the contrast between David's predictability and Francesca's impulsiveness provides agreeable suspense.
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Into the Purple Duchy
by Matthew Hart,

176 pages $18.95 CT
ISBN: 1550137263
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Lorna Jackson
Matthew Hart relies on satire for the condensation and restraint necessary to such an endeavour, but he underestimates the skill satiric prose demands.
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The Winter Helen Dropped By
by W. P. Kinsella,

256 pages $26 TC
ISBN: 0002243806
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Virginia Beaton
What Kinsella is focusing on is the way that time is measured in small towns, with special reference to events, especially disasters.
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Leaning on the Wind Under the Spell of the Great Chinook
by Sid Marty,

320 pages $27 TC
ISBN: 0002550598
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-fiction
by Tim Bowling
Most North Americans give little thought to the land on which they live, or to the natural and historical forces that shape their lives.
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The Inuk Mountie A Tom Austen Mystery
by Eric Wilson,

128 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0002243946
Follow the Moon
by Sarah Weeks, Suzanne Duranceau,

80 pages $21.89 LB
ISBN: 0060244437
A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare
by Lois Burdett,

64 pages $8.95 TP
ISBN: 0887532616
The Last Quest of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh the King
by Ludmila Zeman, Ludmila Zeman,

24 pages $19.95 TC
ISBN: 0887763286
Aunt Mary Buttons
by Diane J. Jones, Diane J. Jones,

32 pages $11 TP
ISBN: 096994070X
Melanie Bluelake's Dream
by Betty F. Dorion,

pages $5.95 TP
ISBN: 1550500813
Camilla Gryski's Cat's Cradle With a Friend or by Yourself
by Camilla Gryski, Tom Sankey,

32 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 1550742582
The Twilight Marsh And Other Wilderness Adventures
by Todd Lee, Jim Brennan,

96 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 1896095070
Children's Books
Children's Books - Fringe Benefits
by Diane Schoemperlen
Being well aware of the growing need to compete for their attention, many children's book publishers have taken to packaging their products with related paraphernalia in order to attract the attention of their young readers.
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His Banner Over Me
by Jean Little,

207 pages $18.99 TP
ISBN: 0670856649
There Goes the Neighborhood
by Valeri Lupini,

112 pages $8.95 TP
ISBN: 0889951284
The Road to Chlifa
by Michele Marineau, Susan Ouriou,

144 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 0889951292
Rosalie's Battles
by Ginette Anfousse, Marisol Sarrazin, Linda Gaboriau,

96 pages $5.95 TP
ISBN: 0921556500
Dance of the Snow Dragon
by Eileen Kernaghan,

208 pages $9.5 PT
ISBN: 1895449413
Big Burn
by Lesley Choyce,

112 pages $9.5 PT
ISBN: 189544943X
Children's Books
Young Adult Books - Getting to the Roots
by Heather Kirk
Unfortunately, children's books often have shallow roots in the soil of immediate social trends and problems, as well as market demands. Finding good books that go deep is difficult.
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Douglas Fetherling
Douglas Fetherling - A Riveting Non-person
by Douglas Fetherling
In 1956, Anthony Frisch, a poet of the day, organized a national writing competition for Canadian high school students, publishing the winning entries in a special anthology called First Flowering.
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First Novel Award
Student Writing Awards - Rising Stars
The work of the winners in the fifth year of the country's leading student writing competition shows remarkable complexity, as well as evidence of experience.
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Outlook
Outlook - The Gardener's Shadow
by Brian Bartlett
When I recently read this passage, it reminded me how rarely literary criticism connects our immediate world as readers -space, lighting, sound, weather, our most recent meal -- with our impressions of the book at hand.
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