Nicola Peffers’ memoir, Refuge in the Black Deck (Caitlin Press, 2017), tells of the struggles many women face to make it in a “man’s world.” Peffers, an Alberta native hailing from my own hometown of Fort McMurray, gives an honest-to-a-fault description of her time as an Ordinary Seaman in the Canadian Navy. Reading the book, I found myself alongside Peffers as she endured harassment, discrimination and exhaustion aboard the HMCS Winnipeg.Continue Reading Refuge in the Black Deck by Nicola Peffers

I knew that What We Once Believed (Caitlin Press, 2017) would speak to the feminist-mother in me when I read the epigraph, a poem by Catherine Barnett about mothering the mother and a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that asks: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

What We Once Believed, the latest novel by British Columbia author Andrea MacPherson, provides a glimpse of such consequences—and they are both absorbing and complex.Continue Reading What We Once Believed by Andrea MacPherson

In Just Jen: Thriving through Multiple Sclerosis (Roseway, 2017), a book less than two hundred pages long, Jen Powley takes us on a trip that we wouldn’t otherwise experience. This is exactly what I want from a book: the opportunity to go on an unfamiliar journey.

I say this even though I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis sixteen years ago. But everyone’s journey with MS is different. Jen shows us the hard realities of MS with an easy, straightforward honesty and a great sense of humour. Along the way, we get to know this extraordinary woman as she wakes readers to the depth of relationships bound by this disease.Continue Reading Just Jen by Jen Powley

Ever since I met my “Upper Canadian” husband in my hometown of Fredericton at age twenty and moved to southern Ontario at twenty-one, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Maritimes, as well as with rural and small-town life in general. At times, I have resented what I saw as its narrowness and stubborn attachment to the past. I can credit Sara Jewell and her Field Notes: A City Girl’s Search for Heart and Home in Rural Nova Scotia (Nimbus, 2016) with adding more weight to the “love” side of the equation. Now back east, living in Halifax after seven years abroad, I’ve come to appreciate anew the warmth and hardiness of my birthplace. Field Notes reminds me of what I had lost and now regained.Continue Reading Field Notes by Sara Jewell