A GOOD WORD

A few Christmases back, our family’s elder statesman decreed any and all seasonal gifts should be consumable: food, drink and books. If consumption has become the order of the day, we’d consume it right back, gobbling up flavours, sensations, thoughts, talk and time.

It was tempting to stick with food because books can be dangerous gifts — a billboard proclaiming, “This is what I think of you.” I once got a book about how to age gracefully at a time I was not feeling at all aged and it threw me off my holiday stride — well-meaning as the gift was. It also encouraged me to lean towards bookstore certificates for my own gift purchases.

But, in the end, the temptation to share books proved irresistible. Now, part of our holiday celebration is finding a brand new mystery series for our elder statesman, the beginning of a new chronicle, something we can all talk over at the dining room table, a complement to the food and drink. The characters! The writing! The setting! So much to talk about. So much to contribute. So much to take in.

Here are a few offerings with a Kingston connection that may provide fodder for discussion around your table:


The Soldier King
Violette Malan

One thing I will certainly be telling my family this year (over and over until they are tired of it) is how, a few years back, Elgin author Violette Malan (co-founder of Wolfe Island’s Scene of the Crime Festival) and I were critiquing each other’s short stories. She was working on a piece of fantasy short fiction about two mercenaries with special powers and their own code, and you could easily tell that these characters had book-length potential. So I am tickled with Malan’s third book, The Soldier King (Daw), in which Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane, members of the Mercenary Brotherhood, are on their way to the Seers Shrine at Delmara. There is sword fighting, horses, magic, betrayal and loyalty, and the real search is the search for self.

The River Palace
Rick Neilson and Walter Lewis

In 1855, the iron steamboat The Kingston first appeared in the Great Lakes. After serving as a floating palace for royalty and surviving a couple of spectacular fires, she was finally scrapped near one of Kingston’s ship graveyards. There she remained, her final resting place a mystery, until diver Rick Neilson discovered her in 1989.

Kingston’s Neilson and fellow diver and historian Walter Lewis have penned The River Palace (Dundurn) about this merchant ship, now an underwater “museum,” popular dive site and tourist attraction. The detailed surviving documentation about the ship makes for a meticulously researched book. As the authors note, The Kingston remains one of the most historically significant vessels to lie beneath the waters of the Great Lakes.

Gravity
Leanne Lieberman

Kingston writer Leanne Lieberman has written an intense, thought-provoking book for teens 12 and older. Reviewers have declared Gravity (Orca) a work that allows readers to draw their own conclusions about whether orthodoxy and homosexuality can coexist. It’s the story of a distinctively unorthodox Jewish teenager who is faced with denying her sexuality or abandoning her community. The winner of So You think You Can Write, the Orca Book Publishers novel contest, the judges described Gravity as “a daring and honest exploration of a young girl both coming out as a lesbian and sorting out her spiritual beliefs. The writing is smooth and rich in detail; the dialogue is zesty; the plot, suspenseful, and all the characters are well-rounded.”

Pathologies
Susan Olding

The poetry and prose of Susan Olding, who works at the Queen’s University Writing Centre, has appeared widely in North American literary journals and anthologies, and she has made her mark as a finalist for several prestigious Canadian writing awards. Now, she has launched her debut book, Pathologies (Freehand), 15 personal essays, each dissecting an aspect of her life.

It’s a personal self-portrait that ranges from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. The emotional climax of the book is the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and her difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved.

Coventry
Helen Humphreys

Sitting on several national bestseller lists is Coventry by well-known Kingston poet and novelist Helen Humphreys (HarperCollins). No stranger to bestseller lists or the New York Times Notable Books section, Humphreys’ previous work has won both the Toronto Book Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

A lot happens in Coventry’s lean 175 pages. History repeats itself. Humanity endures the merciless, inexorable, horrific off-shoots of war. Not a word is wasted. It is a poetically brutal depiction of the 12 devastating consecutive hours during which the Luftwaffe bombed the English city of Coventry during the early years of the Second World War.

The plot centres on three characters: Harriet, two decades a widow, her husband dying at the beginning of the First World War; Maeve, an artist who rejected a life of comfort and privilege to raise her son; and that son, Jeremy, 22, whose colour blindness has kept him from active service.

Here’s what the Globe and Mail said about Coventry: “Humphreys’ prose is enhanced by her poetic precision, along with a flair for indelible images . . . simple, declarative sentences reel us into the novel and never let us go. She captures, most alluringly, the joyful and solitary nature of the human heart, which she renders as a swallow flying above the cathedral: swooping, soaring, untethered, free.”