About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Megan Angelo
Positive Toronto Star (CAN) As a journalist, Angelo has immersed herself in issues of popular culture, including women and social media, both of which are at the heart of this clever futuristic tale ... [an] incisive dystopian novel.
Chuck Palahniuk
Rave The Star ...this collection of [Palahnuik\'s] writings about writing include a number of freakishly interesting anecdotes — like the time Stephen King’s hand started bleeding during a marathon signing, where are chapters that address craft, from ideas to execution. \'Troubleshooting Your Fiction,\' for example, offers advice for such problems as \'Your Narrative Voice is Boring\' and \'Your Stories Meander and Ramble.\' This book is a master class. It will make you a better writer. It will make you a better reader.
Catherine Steadman
Positive Toronto Star (CAN) Mr. Nobody, her new suspenser, has an entirely different mouth feel but is just as satisfying [as Steadman\'s debut novel Something in the Water] ... It’s a double puzzle, with Emma confronting her own past while helping her charismatic patient discover his. Great fun, told from shifting perspectives.
Miranda Popkey
Positive The Toronto Star (CAN) Popkey’s singular approach to novel writing ... intense, intimate and, unexpectedly, sexual ... Popkey’s genius is in reproducing her narrator’s dual experience, participating in a dialogue while processing what is being said to her, thus interior and exterior, with all the attendant tangents, riffs, backtracks and corrections. And gradually you, the reader, realize that you are complicit in her project, that Popkey wants to be liked, and to be likable she must seduce.
Jenny Offill
Rave The Toronto Star Offill has achieved the near impossible. She has made grappling with the climate crisis not only important and challenging — but also, a tough assignment, entertaining ... short on plot, long on research culled across millennia ... Bonus angst: The story is set in 2016, an election year of singular upheaval in itself.
Colum McCann
Rave The Star An apeirogon is a multi-sided geometric structure, and so, too, is Apeirogon, the challenging new book by Colum McCann ... Apeirogon\'s geometry is revealed in 1,001 facets, some just a sentence, others several pages. It is creative non-fiction that honours the realities of the historical fact with, as McCann puts it, \'invention at its core\' ... But it is about much more ... Sometimes the bombardment of information seems unrelated to the story. But keep reading, and you will find that everything is connected — and that is precisely the point.
Kiley Reid
Rave Toronto Star (CAN) This debut novel is engaging and smart, with great characters and a riveting story that deals with class, race, female friendship and the work we do ... The genius of this novel is that it tracks the subtle eddies of racism with steely even-handedness.
Gabriela Wiener, trans. by Jennifer Adcock and Lucy Greaves
Positive Toronto Star Ideas, reflections, and humour intersect ... a gonzo journalist who takes an active role in whatever subject she investigates, which as often as not involves sex, and not the vanilla variety ... Suffice to say, Wiener’s free-wheeling style is hugely entertaining.
Jem Lester
Rave The Toronto Star This is a remarkable book, at once hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, written with the glum humour only Brits can carry off ... Lester drew on his and his wife’s experience with their autistic child in creating this entirely plausible yet surreal portrait. Highly recommended for families affected by spectrum disorders and anyone interested in an entertaining novel about a decidedly unentertaining situation.