“An angel is a belief. With wings and arms that can carry you. If it lets you down, reject it,” (Kushner 242). Thirty-year-old Prior Walter has recently been diagnosed with AIDS and while undergoing treatment discovers that an angel is calling to him. Unable to deal with Prior’s diagnosis, his partner Louis leaves him and …
I received this book from Simon and Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review. “Driving home, I’m caught in the crazy paradox: people want to be remembered when they’re gone, yet everyone’s afraid to talk about the dead. The fastest way to forget someone is to stop saying their name,” (Waite). When Jessica Waite’s husband dies suddenly …
You can bet that had I known there was a mermaid saint when I was preparing to get confirmed I would have wanted to choose her. That being said, I probably would have been too wracked with Catholic guilt to choose a mermaid for a saint name and would have stuck with St. Joan of …
“It wasn’t hard to be brave. Not if it was for someone you love,” (McCauley 336). After a tragedy that results in her mother’s death, Marin Blythe finds herself lost in the world until she receives a letter from her favourite horror author, Alice Lovelace and former friend of her mother, offering her a nanny position …
“Is it some disorder of the mind that causes me to see things, hear things, that then vanish as though they never were?” (Gish 230). Spinster Ada Byrd has just started a teaching position in Lowry Bridge, an isolated town where no one knows of her disgrace and shame from her last post. As she establishes …
Well, it sure has been a bit since my last flower talk. Let’s fix this by talking about the next flower Ophelia hands out, shall we? According to Jessica Roux’s Floriography, pansy (viola tricolour var. hortensis), also known as “Johnny Jump Up, heartsease, tickle-my-fancy” and other names (Wikipedia) was given the meaning “You occupy my thoughts” …
“God, she whispers and it’s all she whispers, over and over and over again. God, I’ll do anything. Please, God… And then He appears,” (Summers 9). In 2011 Bea’s younger sister Lo would have died in the car accident that killed their parents if it weren’t for Lev Warren. After finding Bea praying in the chapel he brought …
“Some are born anxious, some achieve anxiety, and some have anxiety thrust upon them. I am lucky enough to have been blessed with all three,” (Donahue 7). I heard Anne Donahue read from her collection of essays a few years back (the same literary festival where I heard Claudia Dey read from Heartbreaker, so I guess I’m …
“Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly, so dancingly into your smug little mouth,” (Awad 74-75). I’ve been a fan of Mona Awad’s since first reading Bunny but it’s only …
“This is what I know: She left last night,” (Dey 3). Billie Jean Fontaine is missing. Seventeen years earlier she arrived to a smalltown far in the territory and now she’s left her teenaged daughter Pony, her husband The Heavy, her devoted dog, the teenager Supernatural who always seems to know more than anyone, and the …
Sarah O'Connor 