About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Douglas Stuart
Rave Toronto Star (CAN) ...page-turning, beautifully written ... This book has a propulsion to it — it’s a page-turner, certainly — but that propulsion reinforces the plot and the characters ... It might be easy to cast judgment on their choices but for Stuart’s ability to write his characters with humanity and empathy — their circumstances aren’t easy, are fraught with poverty and sectarianism and violence. Leaving your community can leave you lonely ... In a narrative that weaves seamlessly back and forth between the camping trip and Mungo’s life before the trip, Stuart creates a world we can almost feel. Some of his lines can take a reader’s breath away as he finds ways of describing beauty even in misery ... It’s a place that still rings out with the working class voices we hear from so rarely in books. A place middle-class writers can’t write about.
Robert Jones Jr
Rave The Toronto Star This debut novel is already having a profound impact, with Jones’s writing here being compared to Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, putting him firmly in an exalted group of iconic Black writers. The Prophets is about the relationship between two Black men enslaved on a plantation in the Deep South ... this book is not just about the relationship between Samuel and Isaiah; it’s about slavery, it’s about relationships, about that entire period in the Antebellum South ... Jones’s voice is so compelling ... once you pick it up, you’ll be drawn in by the voices on the page.
Margaret Atwood
Rave The Star Throughout the poems appear silhouettes and dotted lines and shadows and mirages, images just beyond our grasp, conjuring. The ephemera of life builds up; pictures and Polaroids fade. There’s a tension between past and present, between what is and what was ...
Gabriel Byrne
Rave The Toronto Star (CAN) ... an unexpected pleasure. Take any idea of what you might have about a celebrity memoir and put it aside; it’s beautifully written, very literary and Byrne’s celebrity is almost incidental to his life. Rather than the usual celebrity fare, this one speaks to the heart of the person ... This is not a long memoir but his writing is so rich it conveys depths. He can give you a sense of lost love with a line or two.
Sarah Smarsh
Rave The Toronto Star (CAN) This wonderful little book sits firmly at the intersection of pop music and social commentary ... This book is an homage to Dolly and women like her, written with humour and compassion and a big dose of admiration.
Miriam Toews
Rave The Star (CA) [Toews] is able to take the details of tragedies in her own life, fictionalize them and say something powerful about life, love and art. Her humour and humanity make sensitive issues approachable, taboo topics part of normal conversation ... It appears to offer her rich creative fodder, giving her a closeness to her subject that shows in her writing — it’s engaging and beautiful — and her characters, who are believable and quirky ... A eulogy to her sister, to her father. A writerly kind of eulogy. And she succeeds.
Edna O'Brien
Positive The Toronto Star She doesn’t write much about the writing process — her life seems filled with parties and pleasantries; a few love affairs ... A galaxy of the era’s biggest stars and thinkers are smattered through the pages: Judy Garland, Sean Connery, Gore Vidal, Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, enough of them to satisfy our need for glamour ... This, though, is her style. She’ll be recounting a party, then verge into a small anecdote that somehow manages to arrive at a deeper truth. Her prose doesn’t get bogged down in the dross of everyday life but manages to convey the poetry in ordinariness.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Toronto Star Sometimes you pick up a book that changes the way you see the world ... hard to read — the characters of Elwood Curtis and Turner are so well-drawn, the pacing so exact, the betrayals so heartbreaking ... It is part of the brilliance of this book that Whitehead takes complex, contradictory events and ideas and plants them side by side to create understanding and underscore the complexity of the problems facing us.