By JK, on January 25th, 2011
In the last week before our Civilians Read debates, we’re sharing the interviews our panelists did with this year’s slate of authors. Yesterday Natalie St. Pierre interviewed Jeff Lemire, and today Sarah Labrie is talking with Ami McKay, author of The Birth House.
SL: Describe what the Canada Reads experience has been like for you. Is it like Survivor, cut-throat and strategic, or are you just watching it all play out?
AM: It’s not my game to win, so there’s no sense in my getting all Jerri Manthey (for all the old-school Survivor fans out there) about it. Most of the “fight” and strategic planning in my life happens while I’m trying to get what’s in my head down on the page.
I plan on just shutting up; sitting by my laptop and listening to the panelists go for it.
SL: This year’s competition is between an eclectic mix of books. In what ways do you think The Birth House stands out?
AM: The Birth House has been known to take many readers by surprise. A lot of people read it (or avoid it) thinking that they know exactly what it will be. They immediately put it [...]
By JK, on February 1st, 2010 Set in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1930s and ’40s, The Jade Peony combines the stories of three Chinese-Canadian siblings Jook-Liang (Only Sister), Jung-Sum (Second Brother), and Sek-Lung (Third Brother) at pivotal moments in their lives. These kinds of stories are often referred to as “coming-of-age” stories, though in this case they are much more. Appropriately enough for a story about new immigrants, the children’s stories attempt to sketch a detailed geography of identity — one that must be constantly surveyed, defined, and defended from invaders. Trying to escape the colonial Overlords of parents and culture, these fledgling nations are subject to no shortage of civil wars, and certainly, like our own country, suffer from an incoherent identity, one that shifts and evolves.
This is, of course, something common to all children, but much more so to those of recent immigrants. The children attend two schools (English & Chinese), and are bombarded by their Poh-Poh (grandmother) with ancient wisdom and tradition, while encouraged by their parents to be modern. They worship Shirley Temple, John Wayne, and Joe Louis, but also see the world through the stories told them by their grandmother — seeing the Monkey Man or the Fox Lady, mythic Chinese characters [...]
By Sarah, on January 15th, 2010 Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.
This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.
Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had [...]
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