18 Canadian books to read for Pride Month cbc.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbc.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Woodcut by unknown artist, 1720. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
I like the small things in fantasy, by which I mean I like germs and figuring out if the characters know about them. People in the real world didn’t know about germs for a long time, either (though many people put forth theories about spores, contagions, and small bodies and how to prevent their spread). Our previous theories and treatments made sense given what we could observe, and many fantasies draw from the centuries before we put names to the things that cause and spread illness.
There’s a terrifying tinge of dramatic irony to injuries in fantasy, especially when the reader knows the limits of the world’s medicine and magic. It is easy to cast aside the scientific history of a fantasy world when the focus of the story isn’t medical in nature, but good books still hint at their world’s medical knowledge. This part of world building can be so small that it’s nearly imperceptible, but as in medi
If you want to truly embrace the terror and beauty of winter, a Russian-inflected modern folktale should do the trick. In Katherine Arden’s
The Bear and the Nightingale we meet Vasilisa Petrovna, who has no wish to marry. She grew up on tales of Frost Demons, rusalka, all that is wild and magical in the dark and frozen forests including the great Bear, who is gathering his power in the darkness beyond the village. Enter the stepmother, who agrees with the village priests that following the ancient ways will lead to Hell; she wants to see her new daughters packed off to convents, where devotion to God will cure them, or wed, where lives as wives will keep them too busy to bother with uncanny spirits and old lore. When a blizzard freezes the village, everyone Vasya loves faces certain starvation. The young woman will have to defy her stepmother and the priest to ally with every “demonic” force who’s willing to help her before the Bear destroys them all.
Everything Miles, Tristan, Grace, and Avia have worked toward comes to a head in
Soulstar, the third and final book in C. L. Polk’s thrilling Kingston Cycle trilogy. The witches are free, but the damage has been done, both to Aeland and its people. With the true evil of Queen Constantina’s asylums now revealed, Robin Thorpe steps in to help out and to rescue her own spouse, Zelind, a nonbinary witch who has been imprisoned for the last two decades. Robin brings Zelind back to Clan Thorpe, a large compound housing sixty-odd Thorpes, and there the two try to figure out how to continue a marriage that never had a chance to start.
(Tor 978-1-250-17466-6, $25.99, 256pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, Feb 16, 2021)
Near-future thriller/SF novel. Scientist Evelyn Caldwell’s husband is having an affair with her own cloned replica.
Clones don’t seem quite as popular these days as they were back in the 1970s and ’80s, when we were treated on a fairly regular basis to stories about celebrity clones, spare-parts clones, hazardous-duty clones, doppelganger clones, identity-crisis clones, cheap-labor clones, ominous replacement clones, survivalist clones, posthuman clones,
tabula-rasa clones, and, inevitably, murder-mystery clones. Sarah Gailey touches upon that last in some ingenious ways in
The Echo Wife, a solidly written novel that gains more of its strength from the voice and conflicted character of its narrator than from its rather plot-contrived version of cloning technology.