Sarah O'Connor

Book Review: Wild Life by Amanda Leduc

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February 14, 2025

“If someone looks out at the world…they should not be surprised if the world looks back,” (Leduc 61).

In 19th-century Scotland, Josiah MacDougal is banished to Siberia with a small Christian mission after claiming that animals can speak to him. While scrubbing the floor of the church one night, he is visited by God in animal form, two hyenas who tell him he is needed elsewhere. Once returned home, Josiah founds a religion where he believes that the hyena’s divine speech is a plan from God to heal and raised up the human race. But the hyenas, Barbara and Kendrith, are having second thoughts about Josiah and disappear and reappear throughout hundreds of years following the wind while animals around the world start to speak and free themselves, forcing humans to recognize the wildness within themselves. Continue reading

Book Review: Grandfather of the Treaties by Daniel Coleman

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February 3, 2025

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

“Like many stories of origin, the story of peace-making takes place in the teeth of its opposite. Civil life must be carefully built against the dark threat of distrust and violence. Part of the story told in this book is that the ideal of friendship and alliance pictured in the image of linked arms, and its betrayal, is so deeply embedded in Canadians’ collective unconscious that it remains our country’s constitutional – or even better, our constitutive – relationship,” (Coleman 15).

In April 2006, Daniel Coleman went into his office at McMaster University and learned that the campus was providing lodging for police officers who had raised the site of an Indigenous land dispute near Caledonia, Ontario. From here, Coleman’s thought differently about Indigenous issues, which he’d already long supported, and began working closely with Indigenous scholars to understanding the Wampum covenants and seeing if there is a way to repair the relationship with Indigenous peoples and communities and the land itself. Continue reading

Book Review: The Fire Never Goes Out by N.D. Stevenson

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January 24, 2025

“The cells of your body are dying and growing again every day, and you are always in the process of becoming something new. You’re not sure yet who you will be, but you are ready to find out,” (Stevenson ix).

N.D. Stevenson looks back at eight years of their life (2011-2019) through mini comics and old blog posts remembering the highs and lows of various years as they discovered who they truly were.

A note before starting. The Fire Never Goes Out was published by N.D. Stevenson before he came out as transgender and therefore the book uses his deadname and N.D. also refers to himself using old pronouns. For this review I will be using N.D. Stevenson’s correct name and pronouns. Continue reading

Book Review: Sweetpea by C.J. Skuse

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January 22, 2025

“It’s an exquisite privilege to watch someone die, knowing you caused it. Almost worth getting dolled up for,” (Skuse).

Rhiannon Lewis lives an average life. She lives with her boyfriend Craig in a nice enough apartment, adores her chihuahua Tink, collects Sylvanian family creatures, and is trying but failing to get ahead in her job working for a small newspaper. She used to be a bit of a celebrity, being the sole survivor of a famous crime, but now her life consists of listening to her friends plans for marriage as they starr families of their own and writing lists in her diary. Kill lists, for the cashier who packs her groceries wrong, to the homeless man that looks like Ed Sheeran, to anyone Rhiannon deems worthy of a kill. And she’s got a long list. Continue reading

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