Some ideas for your summer reading
The Shining Girls Lauren Beukes Mulholland Books
Fed up with police, who have stopped taking her theory of a serial killer hunting women seriously, Kirby Mazrachi turns to the former Chicago Sun-Times crime reporter who covered her story — a vicious, seemingly random attack that should have killed her. Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls is a perfect summer read. Its chapters are each snapshots of a single day and the narrative, told by the individual characters living those single days, weaves through time — from the 1930s to 1993.
Dan Velasquez is a crimeturned-sports reporter who follows the Cubs around. His name is mud with cops after a few stories, but when Kirby unravels her scarf after scamming her way into an internship at the paper, revealing the scar across her neck, and wants to know about the “others,” he’s back on the case.
Harper Curtis is our villain. He happens upon a house — The House — and every time he steps out the front door he can will himself into the future or past. Harper travels through time to snuff out the flames of girls who shine — a predetermined group, to which Kirby belongs. He checks the newspapers to relive his crimes and when he sees that some have incorrectly reported Kirby’s death, he moves on to his next victim.
But Kirby survived and needs to know who did this to her.
Together with Dan, and some very captivating May-December tension, they work together to chase a theory that seems too unbelievable to be true.
MATTHEW PEARSON L’ABC de Monsieur Pizza Ohara Hale Courte Echelle
My French teacher says one of the best ways to learn the language is to read lots of children’s books, so I’ve been making regular pilgrimages to the Vanier branch of the Ottawa Public Library, where a kind librarian helps me choose titles.
I also went with my Frenchspeaking beau to Le Salon du livre de l’Outaouais, a giant book fair held every year in Gatineau.
And that’s where I met Monsieur Pizza.
His life story is told in rich colour and detail in the book, L’ABC de Monsieur Pizza.
Readers learn Monsieur Pizza, a wide-eyed and delicious looking slice of pepperoni pizza, is just like us, only cheesier.
We follow along as the bon vivant peels artichokes, slips on banana peels and looks at caterpillars.
And so it goes through the rest of the alphabet.
My favourites include the letter G (“Monsieur Pizza fait des graffiti”), the letter L (“Monsieur Pizza fait sécher le linge) and the letter Y (“Monsieur Pizza aime le yoga).
His flexibility is quite something.
For beginners like me, the 2013 book by Montrealer Ohara Hale is completely bilingual — English on one side, French on the other. That makes it easy to understand and, I suppose, lends it crossover appeal for French children (or adults) trying to learn English.
There’s even a cliffhanger ending as Monsieur Pizza’s loyal sidekick, Monsieur Champignon, races off the last page on a skateboard, surely bound for his own wild ride through the alphabet.