walrus reads

Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga

in seven fallen feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, award-winning journalist Tanya Talaga casts Thunder Bay, Ontario, as a microcosm of Canada and its deep-rooted racial tensions. The fallen feathers in the title represent seven young Indigenous people who, between 2000 and 2011, died while attending high school in Thunder Bay. With precise, unsparing detail, Talaga shows how their deaths illuminate the way Canada’s judicial, policing, child welfare, health care, and education systems fail Indigenous youth.

Most striking are Talaga’s intimate descriptions of what families experience when a loved one goes missing. She writes that officers would dismiss disappearances by stating a loved one was simply “out partying.” Often, families relied on their friends and community members to conduct a search. In the case of a death, authorities would sometimes fail to contact the relatives. By focusing the lens on individuals, Seven Fallen Feathers succeeds in making Canada’s longstanding ill treatment of Indigenous communities personal to any reader — and impossible to ignore.

— Martha Troian

Arrival by Nick Mount

nick mount’s arrival: The Story of Canlit transforms our literary world into a hothouse of personalities. Mount brings to life the explosion of creativity from the late 1950s to the early 1970s — the era, in his words, of “Canlit’s original freaks and geeks.” Not only is Mount’s prose highly readable but he also has a Malcolm Gladwell– esque flair for mining history to find surprising anecdotes on the authors and publishers who powered the Canlit boom, among them Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and publisher Jack Mcclelland. At times, Arrival reads like you’ve bumped into the author at a pub and convinced him to give you dirt on Canada’s literary icons of the 1960s. We learn, for instance, that the planned first broadcast of Munro’s fiction was cancelled because the CBC instead covered the Massey Commission’s “national inquiry into the absence of Canadian writers.” (Perhaps this helped Munro hone her vaunted sense of irony?) Mount also describes Mcclelland’s publicity stunts, which included “miniature jockstraps with a book about sexism and racism in professional football” and “a cocktail for The Last Spike called The Last Spike.” As with any good bar tale, the anecdotes sound almost too good to be true. The book is thoroughly researched, but Mount has certainly read enough Richler to know when a story needs some colour to help it along.

— Paul Barrett

The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova

camilla grudova is a modern fabulist. In her debut collection of short stories, she turns people into wolves, or into insects that resemble sewing machines. Grudova’s literary debts — to Kafka and Atwood, especially — are evident; she writes about weird transformations in cinematic prose (“She wasn’t like known mermaids, divided in two, fish bottom, a lady on top. The fish and the human were blended together like tea with milk,” opens the story “The Mermaid”). The uneasy settings in The Doll’s Alphabet belong, primarily, to women. Grudova evokes these worlds through extended descriptions that have the magical logic of dreams — which is perhaps why the visceral, piled-on details are the ones that stay with you. Though the stories read like allegories, their power is in the images they summon more than in the lessons that lurk beneath.

— Hamutal Dotan