Sarah O'Connor

Book Review: Secrets in the Water by Alice Fitzpatrick

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January 9, 2025

I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review.

After her grandmother dies, Kate Galway can’t help but thinking of her beloved aunt’s suicide fifty years before. No one on Meredith Island can forget it, not when Emma was so loved and had such a bright future ahead of her. While clearing out her grandmother’s house Kate finds out that her late mother believed that Emma was murdered and conducted her own investigation of the island to try and find her killer. Kate decides to continue on with the investigation with the help of her neighbour, sculptor Siobhan Fitzgerald, including taking a look at the wealthy Sutherland family with whom Emma was intimately acquainted with. As their investigation deepens the women end up receiving threatening notes and are the targets of violent incidents making them wonder, are they on the right track? And if so, who wants them to keep the truth of Emma’s death a secret? Continue reading

Ten Years Later

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January 5, 2025

1.

I don’t know how to start this and I don’t really know what to say, I only know that I want to say something. I’ve had parts of this post sitting in a draft for months now preparing for today. I had planned to get my thoughts out early, to say what I wanted to say but I should have known I’d drag it along because whenever I write about my mom I am ripping at a scab, I am digging into a wound. I know that it will hurt, and it does hurt. It always hurts, and it always will.

My sister sent me a screenshot of a tweet by FaizahFunmilola that said, “Someone once compared grief to carrying a needle in your pocket. Most of the time, you go about your day without noticing it. But then, out of nowhere, you get pricked, and all the pain comes rushing back.” That is what today feels like. Continue reading

Book Review: Baby Cerberus by Natasha Ramoutar

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January 1, 2025

I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review.

“The first line/of my eulogy is this: ‘I would cross/the River Styx for you.’ I would,/I honestly would,” (Ramoutar 9, “Baby Cerberus”).

Ramoutar’s newest poetry collection does a perfect job of balancing light-heartedness and grief, of looking back towards the past and finding joy while also regretting what used to be. Continue reading

Book Review: We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin

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December 30, 2024

I received this book from Simon and Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review.

“I tried to be happy, but sometime your own happiness comes at the expense of other people’s, doesn’t it? It’s hard to balance being both happy and considerate. I often tried to be both by lying, but that usually made it worse,” (Austin).

Sigrid and Margit are about as different as sisters come. Sigrid is queer, never finished high school, has lost her best friend Greta to the opioid crisis, and hates her job at the Dollar Pal where someone is continuously calling in bomb threats while Margit is the first in their family to go to university and is for all intents and purposes the perfect child. Neither sister can understand the other, but both are struggling in their own ways, and thinking back to their childhood may help to reconnect them. Continue reading

Book Review: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

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December 28, 2024

“If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself,” (Harpman 35).

Thirty-nine women and one young girl are kept in a deep underground bunker and watched by guards. The women don’t know why they’re there. They have no memory of how they arrived in the bunker and only hazy memories of their lives before. Years pass, but one day something unexpected happens that changes the women and girl’s fates forever. Continue reading

Book Reviews: Hamilton – A Guidebook from Memory by Robert Motum, Jojo Chooi-Harley, and Jonathan Harley

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December 9, 2024

I received this book from one of the authors in exchange for an honest review.

“Hamilton General Hospital – 21

This is where I said goodbye to my mother.

I wonder where my family will say goodbye to me,” (Hamilton – A Guidebook from Memory).

Hamilton A Guidebook from Memory invites readers to explore the city of Hamilton through short essays, artwork, and music through the memories of it’s contributors. Continue reading

Book Review: The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson

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December 6, 2024

“It’s looking like I’m in more of a mystery now than a romance. Or maybe I’m in both. It’s all very exciting, plus a little bit creepy…I don’t pray but sometimes I talk with my mother, tell her…I’m living in one of those novels she used to like, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m fleeing this house in my pajama bottoms and my UCLA t-shirt,” (Swanson 20).

American art student Ashley Smith spending a year abroad in London was planning on spending Christmas alone, but when she receives a last-minute invitation from her classmate Emma Chapman to spend the holidays in her family home of Starvewood Hall she can’t resist. It’s a dream week away. Spending time with a large family in a small English town, and then of course there’s Adam, Emma’s handsome twin brother. Romance begins to bud between Adam and Ashley, but Adam is being investigated by the police for the murder of local girl. And then there’s the strange person both Emma and Ashley have seen on the wooded path between Starvewood and the local pub. Ashley begins to wonder what kind of story she’s in, a romance or a gothic thriller? Thirty years after that horrific week and a trip down memory lane from a familiar diary, past and present meet many Christmases later. Continue reading

Book Review: A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

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December 4, 2024

“Maybe this is love, the things we endure for the other, the willingness to face death, to stare it down, and not be afraid,” (Ernshaw 216).

Travis Wren has a gift for finding missing people, all he has to do is touch an object belonging to the missing person and he can get an image of where the person went. When he is hired by the parents of a famous author of dark children’s stories, Maggie St. James, Travis finds himself on the road to a town called Pastoral. A rural community founded in the 1970s, the town itself seems like a thing of legend, but Travis follows the road Maggie took thinking we may find it. Years later Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, finds Travis’ abandoned truck on the border just outside of the community where he himself is not supposed to go in fear of bring the rot, a deadly disease, into the community. But Theo isn’t the only one with secrets, his wife Calla and her blind sister Bee also carry them safely in their hearts, but secrets can only stay hidden for so long. Continue reading

Book Review: Storm of the Century by Stephen King

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December 2, 2024

“Give me what I want, and I’ll go away,” (King 75).

The Storm of the Century is coming to Little Tall Island, and while the town folk have dealt with their share of bad storms this one comes with promises of hurricane-like winds and five feet of snow, and something worse. Just as the storm begins one of the town’s eldest residents is murdered violently and the culprit, Andre Linoge, waits in her house to be caught. When Constable Mike Anderson apprehends him and puts him in the town’s tiny island Linoge has no answer for what he’s done or why he’s on the island except for one request: to give him what he wants, and he’ll go away. Continue reading

Book Review: Yellow Birds by Karen Green

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November 13, 2024

I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review.

“We may be nomadic and seem a little lost to people, but we’ve stripped away all the nonsense here. What’s the rush to get back to a conventional life? What’s the rush to go back and become good little corporate citizens, and lose our opportunity to truly pursue the things that matter to us without worrying about ‘the game?'” (Green 14). Continue reading