Without a Guide

Finished June 29
Without a Guide: Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures edited by Katherine Govier

This collection of experiences by women writers, many of them Canadian, ranges widely and shows interesting, not always pleasant experiences by women traveling in the recent decades. Despite the title, there are sometimes guides and sometimes the women are part of a group. But the experiences show the way that the women came to travel in these instances, their decisions and how it affected the experiences that they had.
There are seventeen essays here.
* Hanan al-Shaykh in Cairo with a documentary-making friend
* Margaret Atwood in the Galapagos Islands with her husband, parents, and child as part of a group
* Clare Boylan in London with her mother
* Wendy Law-Yone using marriage to escape Burma and taking her brother with her
* Ann Beattie tagging along with Japanese tourists in San Francisco along with a photographer friend
* Ysenda Maxtone Graham on a misguided trek into the Grand Canyon with a friend
* Katherine Govier in Morocco with her husband
* Bapsi Sidhwa in the remote Black Mountains of Pakistan with her husband and a military guide
* Susan Musgrave in Panama and Colombia with an ex-con drug smuggler
* Robin Davidson across the Outback in Australia with her dog and four camels
* Irene Guilford in the Czech Republic retracing the steps of her Lithuanian refugee mother when she escaped Russian forces following the Second World War
* Michelene Adams revisiting the Jamaica of her birth and finding what she'd thought she'd lost
* Kirsti Simonsuuri visiting northern Finland in the height of winter
* Janice Kulyk Keefer describing her robbery and its aftermath in Spain
* Alice Walker in China with a group of other writers
* E. Annie Proulx on a nightmare train trip from Montreal to Chicago and back
* Carol Shields on a singular encounter on her last day in Japan
As you can see, some wonderful writers here and a wide range of experiences. Well worth the read.

Divide Me by Zero

Finished June 29
Divide Me by Zero by Lara Vapnyar

An interesting novel. The narrator and main character, Katya Geller grew up in Russia and emigrated to the United States as a young adult with her mother and new husband. Katya's father was in the Russian navy and was killed at sea when she was very young. Her mother was very affected by this loss, and only gradually came back to herself and Katya mentally. Her mother was a mathematician and a mathematics teacher, and she wrote quite a few textbooks on the subject in Russia.
As the book opens, Katya is in the middle of a divorce, and has just realized that her mother is dying. Over the course of the book, we discover how she came to this place in her life.
When she was a schoolgirl, she fell in love with one of her friend's teachers, referred to throughout as B. He had a special relationship with her and yet emigrated to the United States with his wife and child. Katya eventually moved on and fell in love with a young man, Len. Len is a computer scientist, and although had not planned to leave Russia before marrying Katya, is easily convinced when she and her mother get accepted to immigrate.
Katya finds life in the States different than she expected, and struggles to find a job and a way forward. She and Len have two children, and her mother lives with them as well.
The chapters of the novel are interspersed with mathematical phrases and statements written by Katya's mother as part of a new textbook she is working on. Katya is both narrator and a writer herself, seemingly of the novel we are reading. Katya has strong emotions and often acts before thinking, especially in her personal life.
This is a very different novel, with elements of Russian novelistic style as well as the elements of math that repeatedly appear throughout.

The Deepest Night

Finished June 27
The Deepest Night by Shana Abe

This is the second book in the series that started with The Sweetest Dark. It is 1915 and Lora Jones is a scholarship student at Iverson, a prestigious boarding school for upper class young ladies housed in an old castle on England's southern coast. Lora grew up in an orphanage, and spent some time in a mental institution as well due to the music that she hears due to her special abilities. In the first book in the series, Lora discovered that she wasn't an ordinary human girl, but one that could change into a dragon. Here, she is recovering from injuries she received then, and has a new mission, to rescue Aubrey the eldest son of her benefactor, who is in a POW prison in Austria.
To help her, she has only the younger son of her benefactor, Armand, a young man who has fallen in love with her although her love is elsewhere. Armand does what he can to protect Lora, whether at the school, or outside of it. Even sometimes from his own father. And Lora does what she can to protect Armand, even as he begins to go through the changes that will bring him into his own dragon transformation.
I enjoyed the first book and always meant to follow up on the series, and am glad that I did. A lot of the plot here has to do with social classes, but there is also World War One which figures strongly in the book. Lora has her baggage from the past, and she has challenges in the present with not only the mission that the stars have for her now, but also with some of the girls that she goes to school with and with the social situation that she finds herself in. I really liked her as a character, and how she developed over the course of the book.
Looking forward to reading the third one

Free Day

Finished June 23
Free Day by Inès Cagnati, translated by Liesl Schillinger

This is a heartbreaking story. The narrator Galla is a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who has been able to attend high school in a nearby town due to a scholarship her teacher put her down for. Her father does not support this endeavour, but her mother does to an extent. She misses Galla's help with the other children. She boards at school and returns home to visit on a regular basis. The visit on this day though is an unplanned one, and it doesn't go well.
Galla's family is poor, making a subsistence living. Her family is not accepted welcomingly in the community, and it's hard to tell whether her father's attitude is due to this or the community's behaviour is a result of his attitude. Galla is the oldest of many children, and she has often been left to look after them by her parents. Her father is prone to rages which affect everyone from his family to community members.
On this trip Galla is hoping to surprise her mother, and her story is told through memories that arise as she travels the twenty miles by bicycle to her family home in the marshes. She also talks to herself about what she sees now, about her feelings about things from her family to her situation at school where she can't even afford to purchase appropriate supplies. She deeply cares for her mother and her siblings, particularly her sisters, and this becomes clear by her actions and the memories she brings forward.
Galla's father is not welcoming to her and she is unable to see other family members on her visit, and it only becomes clear what is happening towards the end of the book.
One leaves this book with a desperate hope that Galla will be able to escape this life for a better future and bring her siblings along with her.

Fever Dream

Finished June 21
Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

This short novel is very creepy. A woman, Amanda, and her preschool daughter Nina have rented a house in the countryside for a vacation. Her husband will be joining them in a few days. She has a ritual that is constantly in her head regarding her daughter that she calls the rescue distance. Her own mother used the same phrase. It is how far away her daughter can be from her for her to feel safe. Part of the calculation that goes into this is her surroundings, and so one of the things she does at the vacation house shortly after arriving and settling her daughter in bed is walk around the perimeter of the house and its property to get a sense of the space.
At some point early in her vacation she meets a woman, Carla, that she becomes friendly with, and as the book begins, the woman is at her house, sitting out by the pool, and Amanda is a bit uneasy. Carla tells her about her own child, David, and some of the information she shares about David is unnerving.
Much of the story is told in retrospect, as Amanda is lying in a bed with someone at her side who is urging her to tell the events of the past few days. There seems to be some urgency in this retelling, but the reader is unsure why, and what is going on. We soon learn the identity of the person sitting with Amanda, but this doesn't help us understand.
There is a menace hanging over things and although we already know things aren't going to go well for this woman, we want her to escape the fate that seems to be in store for her and Nina.
A very uncomfortable read.

14th Annual Canadian Book Challenge

Welcome to the challenge for the year starting July 1, 2020 and going until June 30, 2021.
This should be an interesting year, and please share in the comments how you think this will affect your reading.
Are you having difficulty accessing books due to library service limitations and suspensions?
Have you been trying online formats of reading due to not being able to access physical books?
What types of books have been grabbing your attention? Dystopian? Escape through Romance or Thriller? Nonfiction? Books with more diverse viewpoints?

I'm also interested to see if participants in the challenge are interested in engaging in any discussion. If I chose a different Canadian book every month for discussion, would that be of interest? I would be changing up genre, choosing some fiction and some nonfiction, some new and some that were published many years ago.
Please leave your thoughts on this in the comments.

To sign up for the challenge for 2020-2021 which begins July 1, 2020 and runs to June 30, 2021, please fill in the Mr. Linky below.
Remember that you can find out more on the FAQ page for this challenge.

Harvey Comes Home

Finished June 17
Harvey Comes Home by Colleen Nelson, illustrated by Tara Anderson

This middle grade book about the delightful West Highland Terrier Harvey and his adventures is set in Winnipeg. When Maggie and her family go off on vacation, a dog sitter is engaged, but it doesn't take long for Harvey to follow his nose out of the yard to adventures.
Once Harvey has followed those interesting smells for long enough, he no longer smells his way home, and he must scavenge for food and shelter until a boy finally spots him outside a seniors home. Austin has been going to the seniors home daily, as a punishment. At the home, he helps his grandfather with cleaning and light maintenance work, and begins to interact with the residents. One of them asks for his help with crossword puzzles, and another supplies him with delicious baked goods. There is one resident, the oldest one at 96 who keeps to himself, until the arrival of Harvey.
Harvey provides a bridge for Austin to connect to Mr. Pickering, as the older man begins to share the stories of his childhood, Bertie, the girl who was his best friend, and his farm dog General.
Austin is reluctant to let Harvey go, and doesn't do what he should in finding Harvey's owner.
Meanwhile Maggie is kept in the dark about Harvey going missing until after they return from vacation, and then she is distraught. She makes up posters and begins posting them all over town, as she is desperate for his return.
The eventual reconnection as Harvey reunites with Maggie is poignant as Austin feels his loss and Maggie sees the connection that Harvey has made with Austin.
I really enjoyed this book.