by Robert Cree, with Therese Greenwood,
ECW Press,
2025/$26.95/264 pp.

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by Fran Kimmel
ECW PRESS
2025/$24.95/288 pp.

A book titled Cattail Lane might be expected to start slowly, meditatively. Birdsong and swaying rushes. Not so with this Cattail Lane, by Fran Kimmel, which bursts into action with the surprise arrival of an unknown teenage son into the stagnant life of an absentee deadbeat dad. We are in a small town, probably in central Alberta. Other than that, it takes a minute for the reader to get oriented, deftly paralleling the confusion and abruptness the character experiences.

Once we settle in with our main characters—Nick, the mystery dad, Billy, the son, and Evie, Billy’s grandmother, who orchestrated the whole thing but due to advancing dementia can no longer explain herself—we are able to proceed with what turns out to be a fairly familiar plot structure.

Evie has a secret: she knows Nick has a son (conceived during a teenaged one-night stand with her daughter), whom she raised after her daughter died and who she put in Nick’s unknowing hands once her dementia started to take over.

At Evie’s long-term care facility, Prairie View Manor, we meet Nick’s potential love interest, Sarah. At a dingy bar we also meet Candace, the love interest from Nick’s old and disappointing life. Through these two women we get to know his past and his future. While the author keeps us from Candace’s point of view, we do get a shifting point of view between Nick, Sarah and Billy. We get a glimpse at Evie’s perspective in one of Nick’s later recollections, but we are left wanting either a flashback or a small chapter from her point of view. This may be the author reminding us of what is lost with dementia, but it is also within the power of the novel to bring her back. I would have loved a moment with just Evie.

Ultimately Cattail Lane becomes a rather straight shot to a lesson about the importance and meaning of family and community, most movingly told through the story of Billy and Evie and their life before Nick. Eventually they come together to overcome the limitations of Evie’s disease and paint a mural at Prairie View Manor based on a photo Nick took.

While some subplots crowd out the more effective parts of the story, all in all this is a good summer read. Cattail Lane would be a perfect companion to an afternoon in a hammock, perhaps lakeside while listening to birdsong and swaying rushes. Kimmel shows an almost equal care between the characters and landscape and creates a warm and welcoming world for the reader—one that does stick pretty closely to unsurprising plot lines but pleasingly veers away from a clean ending, which adds depth to the characters. The story closes with a satisfying sense of beginning rather than ending.

Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.

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by Kirti Bhadresa
ECW PRESS
2024/$24.95/296 pp.

In her debut short story collection, Kirti Bhadresa orients a wide range of stories around characters of South Asian descent, mostly women. These stories deftly subvert immigrant cliches in their presentation of familial dynamics, food and cultural expectations, while not shying away from the sharp-edged realities of daily microaggressions, interracial (white-partnered) relationships, discrepancies in class and labour, and first-generation hustle. Cinematic in scope but intimate in each depiction, An Astonishment of Stars features among its protagonists a couple who moves from India to open a restaurant on the prairies and a mother who uses her white husband’s name to book a dinner reservation. With attentive care, Bhadresa traces the ordinariness of lives often made invisible.

In the more memorable stories, innocuous details evoke a story’s mood. “The Fundraiser” portrays the “pallid sausages” bought by a mother for a school fundraiser, despite the family not consuming meat. The title story, “An Astonishment of Stars,” constructs a family’s world around an abandoned airplane that creaks in the wind. Such vivid distillations serve as a core around which a story can pivot and stretch. At times I was reminded of Flannery O’Connor or Souvankham Thammavongsa—authors whose stories are taut with a thrumming tension. But too often in this collection, however, the narration feels detached, as if observing characters from a distance. When this narrative style is deployed in long stories, more suited to novella length and in which decades elapse, even lifetimes (“Backstage Passes,” “Lighten Up”), intriguing characters feel less dynamic than they could be and blend into fast-moving montages.

The strongest stories feel the closest to the characters they portray, landing in a specific scene and unspooling in crystalline moments made liminal and material. “Summer Camp” upends a coming-of-age experience, granting a long-suffering teenager sudden, dazzling agency. “Braids” tugs at the complexities of a kid on vacation with her father where she finds, to her burgeoning racial awareness, that she resembles the locals more than other tourists. The collection is at its best in a story such as “Invasion,” where a supple grace defines the writing and transports the reader into the life of a pregnant mother who is following her own mother’s recipe from deep intuition. Knitting together bodily awareness and glimpses of familial history, Bhadresa’s understated craft and keen gaze land here with confidence, and her ode to brown and South Asian women comes alive. Mothers and daughters, aunties, parents, neighbours and other forms of relation encounter one another and shine in the beauty of seeing and being seen.

Céline Chuang is a writer and bookseller in Edmonton

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by Kevin Van Tighem,
Rocky Mountain Books, 2024

Kevin Van Tighem retired as superintendent of Banff National Park in 2011, and since then he has shared his expertise on Alberta’s flora and fauna through books and columns, including in this publication, which, he writes, “gave me the chance to write about things that I believe make Alberta what it is. Things that aren’t just about oil and money.” In short, evocative essays, Van Tighem discusses the impact of industrial development on Alberta’s landscape, the state of wildlife across the province and the ethics of hunting. This updated edition also includes a preface detailing his experience running for the NDP in Livingstone-Macleod during the 2023 provincial election.

by Premee Mohamed,
ECW Press, 2024

“We tell the kids, Never travel alone. We tell them, Go where you like. But don’t go alone.” In the second installment of Premee Mohamed’s post-apocalyptic series, following The Annual Migration of Clouds, Reid Graham has biked from a ruined Edmonton campus across a dangerous Alberta to attend Howse, a university hidden in the Rocky Mountains. Her new community survives by sharing resources and supporting those sick with the mysterious Cadastrulamyces. At Howse, Graham is surrounded by relative opulence—Howse has no gathering places such as cafeterias or study halls, but also no death board because there are “not just days but weeks, months when no one dies. For [Graham’s community] it’s every day.” In exacting prose Mohamed questions the extent of our responsibility to family, community and personal survival.

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by Curtis LeBlanc
ECW Press
2023/$22.95/240 pp.

The synopsis for Curtis LeBlanc’s new crime novel, Sunsetter, says the book is, among other things, a tale about “the fickleness of late-stage capitalism.” Sounds academic, but as with many classic crime tales that ruminate on themes of grift and corruption, this subtext is key to unravelling the book’s many mysteries.

The Sunsetter is a travelling rodeo and carnival, making its annual trip to teenage Dallan’s isolated prairie town. He and his friend Brooks are aimless and bored, looking for a drug hookup. Also in town is Hannah, a teenager struggling to survive on her wages at the local massage therapy clinic. She’s in love with Nick, a carny with the Sunsetter, and dreams of living with him. During a night at the rodeo, individual tragedies draw Dallan and Hannah together (to say more would spoil the plot), leading them on a path that reveals the corruption underlying the town’s drug trade. It’s an ideal thriller, filled with shady characters, corrupt cops, car crashes and sudden violence.

LeBlanc, author of two earlier poetry collections, clearly loves the genre, with his novel reminiscent of other stories from the hardboiled (Jim Thompson’s gritty morality tales) to the character-driven (Joe Lansdale’s southern-set yarns) to thrillers with a hint of horror (such as Ray Bradbury’s haunted environs). LeBlanc’s care as a poet creates rich and precise prose—the small-town prairie setting feels lived in, and the smell of beer, gunpowder and desperation lingers in the pages.

As with the best literary thrillers, Sunsetter doubles as social commentary, particularly on the opioid crisis and the complicity of policing with crime. Mirroring the twisty corruption revealed in the novel, the failure to properly address the opioid crisis speaks to our collective abdication of responsibility in the face of continued tragedy. To draw out the capitalist critique further, the criminalization of drugs needs the drug trade to exist; the book illustrates philosopher Paul Virilio’s dictum, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” (Or, as the characters in Sunsetter find out, it isn’t paranoia if they’re really after you.) Much as the Sunsetter draws everyone into its orbit, so too, the book suggests, does capital. Some look to make a few bucks at the carnival, others to drown themselves in liquor and flashing lights. LeBlanc’s novel confronts the reader with the uncomfortable ways the drug trade exploits the mutual needs of both dealers and users—late-stage capitalism makes everyone complicit the victim needing the victimizer. Maybe the answer, as one character discovers, is to just run away and join the circus.

Bryn Evans is a writer and social worker in Calgary.

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by Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese
ECW PRESS
2022/$24.95/256 pp.

We teeter on the edge of something dark and dangerous.” Such is the tenor of Has Populism Won The War on Liberal Democracy. Written by political scientists Daniel Drache of York University and Marc Froese of Burman University in Lacombe, this engaging and disturbing book is a warning that “the past decade will be remembered by historians for the fact that the populist insurgency held a knife to the throat of liberal democracy and got away with it.”

The book sheds light on factors that led to the current rise in extreme rhetoric, intolerance and authoritarian politics. While there were only three populist governments in the world’s major economies in 2000, that number is now 36. “Today populism is a worldwide phenomenon, growing, metastasizing and reaching into every corner of modern politics.”

So, how did we get here The “middle class has become increasingly convinced that markets are casinos manipulated by the rich,” write Drache and Froese. Rising inequality, the 2008 financial meltdown and the COVID pandemic left voters feeling cheated and angry. Charismatic leaders swept in to offer simple solutions, amplifying the message that “you aren’t getting ahead because somebody else is stealing your share.”

But these “solutions” are a lie. Populist leaders “advertise their movement as giving power back to the people while simultaneously building political machines that give more power and authority to the leader themselves.” To gain yet more power, populist leaders rid themselves of their obligations to other nations. “It is going to be dangerous times as extreme elements in leading states fight for influence and tear at the global order that constrains their darkest desires,” write the authors. Armed conflicts are coming, they warn. And you can say goodbye to a consolidated response to climate change.

Canada has thus far fared relatively well, but the authors note that one province has a penchant for populism: Alberta. Jason Kenney “plays to his base’s belief that they are being cheated out of a prominent place in confederation and promises that he will fight for them.” Readers can guess how the authors might view the new premier, Danielle Smith.

“The populists have made big gains, normalized a paranoid style of politics, and put liberal democracy on its back foot, fighting for its future,” they write. In sum, “it didn’t start with Donald Trump and it certainly won’t end with him.” Restoring liberal democracy will be “a generational struggle,” write Drache and Froese. While they offer some solutions, they struggle to find a clear way to reverse the trends. Only one thing’s for sure: “If democracy dies, millions of us will have had a hand in it.”

Annie Prud’homme Généreux teaches science writing at UBC.

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by Premee Mohamed ECW PRESS 2021/$19.95/168 pp.

The Annual Migration of Clouds imagines the University of Alberta as the site of a self-sustaining community in a dystopic near-future: the labyrinthine BioSci building is now living quarters and people risk their lives to hunt wild pigs in the river valley. The result, the fifth book from Edmonton’s Premee Mohamed, is a promising start to a series that brings big questions about humanity’s future close to home.

Our protagonist, 19-year-old Reid, carries a heritable fungal infection. It invades her mind, illustrated through a series of bracketed interruptions in the text, and she knows it will eventually kill her—just as it horrifically killed her grandmother. In the early pages, however, Reid is offered an out: an acceptance letter from a prestigious institution which cloistered itself in the before-times, free from disease and sheltered from the ravages of climate change. This triggers the question that haunts Reid for the entirety of the text: Will she leave the familiar grind of life on campus and abandon the only community she knows

The novella’s strongest element is its subtle dismantling of techno-optimism in the face of human-made destruction. The university, once a temple to science, has been reduced to its mere infrastructure; medicine is no longer a vestige of hope when the doctors in Reid’s community are bloodthirsty and malicious. After all, Reid is living in the third generation of an endemic infection that society has failed to escape through research, law or space colonization. Perhaps, then, Reid is not merely choosing between her current community and a new one but between ideologies of mutual aid and futuristic innovation. The final chapters also open the question of whether the mental invasiveness of Reid’s fungal infection has protected her from danger, suggesting an innate and unknowable intelligence resistant to human intervention.

Reid does not make her final decision to stay or leave her home until the final pages, which leaves the novella feeling physically and narratively confined to its single setting on campus. Rather than seeing the consequences of her choices unravel in a more dynamic plot, Reid mulls over these fascinating thematic questions during the fairly mundane daily events of her life on the commune. The lingering effect is a book that reads more like a long, deliberative introduction to a larger story rather than a complete narrative in itself.

The effect seems to be intentional: ECW Press has recently announced that two sequels to The Annual Migration of Clouds are already in the works—all the more room to explore Reid’s journey and the delicate interplay between science, how we relate to each other, and the ecologies within which we live.

Kate Black is a writer from St. Albert now living in Vancouver.

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by Arno Kopecky, ECW Press, 2021/$24.95/264 pp.

Unpredictable yet increasingly consistent, smoke season dominates our conversation whenever it arrives. It’s novel, and ominous, and fleeting, the perfect conversational kindling. Imagine, we say, we’re breathing in what used to be a forest, animals included. Or simply, What a sunset.

So Arno Kopecky writes off the top of The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: Promise and Peril in an Age of Climate Crisis. I read this passage on the shore of the Kicking Horse River, on an August evening so smoky from local fires that one couldn’t see more than a few hundred metres downriver. The evening featured a blood-red sunset, both deeply alluring in its beauty and emblematic of our summer of destructive forest fires.

You may know Kopecky as the author of two previous books, The Devil’s Curve and The Oil Man and the Sea, or from his frequent contributions to The Globe and Mail and other periodicals. As I write this, his insightful commentary on BC’s Fairy Creek blockade stares at me from the front page of the opinion section in my Saturday Globe.

The Environmentalist’s Dilemma is his first book of essays, 13 of them. His dilemma is this: Life has never been so good for us humans as measured by countless yardsticks. Think Steven Pinker and The Better Angels of Our Nature. But other species of life suffer from the demands we put on the planet for more convenience, more new and improved things, more-fulfilling lives. Think The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. We are simultaneously making progress and losing ground. How can one both desire the former while deploring the latter Or enjoy the blood sunset while loathing the fire’s devastation That paradox forms the environmentalist’s dilemma.

After an eventful year and a half, Kopecky’s book of dilemmas is timely and relevant. It provides a road map to “engage with the story of our times” and the captivating people crafting a response to climate change in divergent ways. In “Rebel, Rebel,” Kopecky spends a year chronicling the Extinction Rebellion movement, from its English origins to his local Vancouver branch of XR. Why does a retired Anglican priest join Extinction Rebellion rather than some mainstream environmental group “The honest answer is that I feel energized by catastrophe.” In “Once Upon a Time in Deutschland,” we meet his devout Christian, Trump-loving, Iowan farming extended family, and their All in the Family culture wars with Kopecky’s progressive and peppery Edmontonian father.

Rebels, Trumpkins, conspiracy theorists, solitary Alberta dippers, Elizabeth May’s mother, Mickey Mouse—Dilemma’s essays humanize those on the left and right energized by various catastrophes, whether real or otherwise. We need more humanizing such as this if we are to begin reversing the dangerous polarization of our times.

Taken together, Kopecky’s essays form a self-help manual for the inevitable disequilibrium that comes with daily reminders of our inadequate response to environmental catastrophe. Kopecky’s wife, Kiran, puts it well: “There’s nothing wrong with a little cognitive dissonance. We don’t have to make it all go away. We can sit with it awhile, let truths and behaviours that conflict with one another be what they are.”

The book is full of insights like that. When I first picked it up, I half expected angst-ridden, depressing environmentalism. Instead I got wit and relatability. Kopecky is widely travelled and full of panache. This provides him with a deep well of colourful anecdotes to weave into his stories.

Not all of Kopecky’s essays are equally good, but that’s to be expected. If you enjoyed reading Jonathan Franzen’s The End of the End of the Earth, and you need help processing the lunacy of our current politics, you will enjoy this collection too.

Ed Whittingham is co-host of the Energy vs. Climate podcast and a dilemma-ridden environmentalist in Canmore.

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by Angie Abdou,
ECW Press,
2021/$21.95/248 pp.

One of the writers Angie Abdou calls upon in This One Wild Life is Haruki Murakami, who, she tells us, wrote about running to try to understand what running means. In this memoir, Abdou writes to try to understand the world and why she responds to it the way she does. The memoir is partly about what it means to parent when parent and child are not alike. Abdou and her 10-year-old daughter do not respond to the world in the same way; Katie’s joie de vivre has a different source and expression than Abdou’s. Yet they both suffer from a fear (in Abdou’s case more a dread) of “social judgement.” Katie’s is expressed as a form of shyness so extreme she closes in on herself around other people. Abdou proposes a walking cure, which becomes the jumping off point for the book: She and Katie will hike—not just anywhere, but up mountains. They will hike “a peak a week” and thereby restore Katie’s confidence. Why mountain hikes Abdou, like many of us, finds nature healing. Quickly, however, the bulk of the emotional energy in the book shifts to Abdou’s coming to terms with the criticism, on social media and in person, of her two recent books. She briefly broaches a connection between her response to the online fiasco that left her in a months-long depression and Katie’s fear, but, as with many interesting subjects she raises, only briefly.

The reader piggybacks on some family hikes, a few mother–daughter hikes (spoiler: Katie doesn’t love hiking), an enviable long solo hike, and, finally, the mother of all hikes with a friend that ends in a helicopter rescue. On the trail we partake in family life—some of it uncomfortable, some of it funny, thanks in part to Abdou’s wisecracker husband—interspersed with fragments of what Abdou reads to make sense of life. But the things that haunt us are not easily left behind; even in the wild, the online world tugs relentlessly.

As with hiking, writing is healing—to a point. “The page,” Abdou writes, “is always the place I go to figure out life.” She is conscious of how writers “decide what to include, what to exclude, what interpretive spin will work best,” of how she fictionalizes her daughter and even herself. Yet when she hikes alone, “I sink into the experience…. Hiking by myself introduces me to a world outside words and story.” Best of all, the mountains’ “indifference [is] calming.” In writing the wordless walk, she reaches deepest into what she’s trying for.

Hiking is something Abdou needs but her daughter does not. In the final pages we meet a 10-year-old whose confidence is increasing, perhaps from Abdou seeing her for who she is. The “peak a week” is abandoned, but mother and daughter are trying (to recall Murakami) other ways of knowing each other.

Astrid Blodgett is an Edmonton short-story writer and editor.

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by Vivek Shraya
ECW Press
2020/$32.95/248 pp.

It’s easy to read the two main characters of Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet as archetypes. On one hand, we have Neela, the capital-A artist who cares more about authenticity than popularity. On the other hand, we have Rukmini, the Neela superfan who becomes unexpectedly famous when she posts a YouTube cover of one of Neela’s songs, transforming the raw, personal track into a crowd-pleasing pop song. The jaded professional and the bubbly newbie, the long-struggling artist and the instant celebrity—these archetypes create a recognizable dynamic that lets readers jump into the story without delay.

But what makes The Subtweet an absorbing, can’t-put-it-down read is that the conventions of this dynamic immediately start to unravel. Rather than succumbing to a predictable rivalry, Neela and Rukmini form a deep and genuine friendship. As the novel progresses, Shraya lovingly develops this unlikely friendship, then nukes it into oblivion with a single sentence.

To those unfamiliar with Twitter, a subtweet is a post that obliquely criticizes someone without mentioning them by name. The subtweet in question comes from Neela as Rukmini’s star rises around the world and hers remains resolutely confined to cramped Toronto bars: “Pandering to white people will get you everything #hegemony.”

The Subtweet is as much a critical reflection on the way artists of colour are racialized as it is a meditation on creative integrity and jealousy. Calgary author Shraya skewers the performative wokeness of self-conscious progressives and highlights the tightrope that artists of colour have to walk: trying to stay true to their art and achieve professional success (and financial security) without being transformed into politically neutered token minorities by a creative-industrial power system that seeks to package them as palatable commodities for white consumers.

After the subtweet (and Rukmini’s subsequent cancellation) the sudden shift to Neela’s first-person narration is an inventive choice—as is Rukmini’s disappearance from the rest of the book. Shraya is not afraid to take bold swings, and her willingness to break conventional forms adds interesting angles to her story.

It’s ironic that The Subtweet’s gorgeous cover art (by Manjit Thapp) depicts a woman talking on the phone (a landline, no less). Much of the book’s drama comes from the fact that its two main characters communicate largely through text messages. Although Shraya ends her book with a wry poke at “calling in” (as opposed to calling out online), one can’t help but wonder how things would’ve been different if Neela and Rukmini had simply spoken to each other. But ultimately The Subtweet is more than a cautionary tale about social media; it’s a damn good book.

—Bruce Cinnamon is the author of The Melting Queen (NeWest).

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