Reviews and Comments

I'm not really sure what about listening to a book focused on death and full of descriptions of dead bodies and decomposition and whatnot was calming, but it somehow was. I think in my case it helped that I listen to the book narrated by the author, so I could have all of her personality while I was experiencing everything, but I'm still impressed by how compelling this book was.

And I'm even prouder that I only gagged and had to pause so that I didn't throw up a few times! Descriptions about embalming are disgusting.

Anyway this was a great book that had a lot of nice tidbits of information from various cultures and regions across the world, along with a pretty critical view of how people deal with death in North America these days. I think the author's on to something with her thesis of the book--which I believe for any readers of my review to discover by reading the book!

I think this is the first book that I've read about an indigenous elder before and I'm so glad that it won Canada Reads this year, or I would have never read it at all or even known it existed.

The title alone does a great job of summarizing what this book is trying to do and I think it really does that. The narrative is told chronologically from the childhood of the author's grandmother until present (at the time of publication). The sections are broken down carefully and an easy to understand ways and there's also a very informative acknowledgment and afterward at the end from the scholar who helped the author write the book.

That being said, this book has a content warning list that is pretty extensive. The descriptions aren't incredibly graphic, but Ma-Nee dealt with domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism, drug abuse, homophobia, etc etc etc. there's also more than one mention of child death. If any of those things or the combination of them is going to be too much for you, I think you should probably sit this one out or do it in very small chunks--very doable because of the easy to understand structure of the narrative.

While I wish that the author hadn't had to go through any of these terrible things throughout her life, I am in awe of the extent of her resilience and the efforts she put into herself. It gives me so much joy that she found love and happiness more than once and seems to live a very fulfilling life. That being said, her experiences are a reminder that while everything takes hard work, hard work alone often isn't enough. We need the support of our community and the people who care about us.

Thanks for the lessons, Elder.

It's my understanding that samurai novels are very popular in Japan and rather overlooked in English translation. As a Japanese to English translator I'm a bit embarrassed to say this, but I've never actually read a samurai novel before because I tend to read works that take place in more contemporary time periods when I read in Japanese. So this book was really cool.

There's a lot of action, but at the same time the pacing is really slow and casual? I didn't feel a lot of nervousness or anticipation while reading because the main character, whose perspective the story is told in, is just so calm about everything and the descriptions of him even when he's angry are extremely calm.

That being said it's still a samurai novel. There are swords and people are murdered and executed and all of that kind of stuff happens. It's just not really intense when it does. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I thought this book was really cool and it would be super awesome if more of this kind of stuff got translated into English for people to read.

I started reading this book on a whim because it was brought to my attention when skimming through the digital collection of my library--I think in an unlimited copies type of promotion. I'm really glad I decided to read it.

Yet I find it hard to put into words what exactly I'm feeling about this novel. I think the fact that I was reading it at the same time as I was reading transgender nonfiction and the fact that, by virtue of the fact that the book is autofiction, the author herself feels more viscerally present then maybe the case in other types of novels.

The difficulties of trans life and the joys are mixed together with a dystopian future that isn't so hard to imagine in the current global climate of anything (economics, politics, etc etc).

Somehow I feel as if David is breathing down my neck as I write this review. I'm shaken. This book was so powerful and I feel all the stronger for it. We all deserve to be who we are without others dictating what we need to be.

While I already knew a fair bit about this topic before starting the book, I thought reading it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the vocabulary used in Japanese to talk about these topics and also learn about specific to Japan issues and understandings of certain topics--I was right about that.

The way this book is designed is really easy to understand and also really easy to just pick up for 5 minutes here and there. The chapters are all broken down into much smaller sections and a lot of the information gets repeated again and again as you read through the book.

That being said, the book does have a pretty heavy focus on, I'm not really sure how to describe this, more binary aspects of being transgender? While there are small sections on nonbinary experience and hopes for the future, the way the topics were explored felt pretty binary, which was admittedly a bit underwhelming even if the authors do recognize and discuss briefly how nonbinary views of gender would actually be extremely beneficial for everyone.

Despite that, I still really enjoyed reading the book and I'll probably pick up other books by the authors when I get the chance. Definitely a good book to read in Japanese if you don't know so much about transgender experience or specifically transgender experience in Japan.

I grew up in Nova Scotia and I'm not Indigenous, but listening to Clayton's story was nonetheless empowering and healing for me. Within the not so linear narrative, there were many things that were familiar to me from reading other memoirs of Indigenous people who grew up in the same region, but this is the first of such books that I've listened to--narrated by the author himself!

I really enjoyed listening to him talk about his experiences as they were written in his book. The things he talks about are raw and difficult, yet the way he described these events and spoke in the narration somehow maintained a level of softness I wouldn't expect. But I guess that's where the healing comes in, and the product of the healing that he's been able to do so far in his life is that this book can exist and he can read it for us in that soft way that takes off the edge of the difficult bits somewhat.

I really liked this book and I'm really glad that it came up as a suggestion from my library. And I really hope that I can see at least the beginning of the world that he dreams of because it seems like a beautiful and wonderful place.

I recognize there are many people who are sensitive to depictions of Imperial Japan that attempt to recognize the humanity of the many Japanese soldiers who died.

I think the glorification of any war is nonsense and though I love and live in Japan, it and my homeland of Canada aren't excluded from that view. However, this book zooms in on a specific soldier in a very specific and narrow way. It's not glorifying anyone. It's just a young soldier alone with his thoughts and the death of his peers.

You don't need to glorify war to accept and portray the humanity of soldiers on any side. Foot soldiers aren't winning anything, even if their side "won" (which the Japanese side rather famously did not).

Avoid if you don't want to read about Japanese soldiers (fair enough honestly), but otherwise it's a solid and meaningful little book that zooms in closely and quietly on a single soldier.

As I mentioned in my last review, I ended up getting a little wild (lol) with my NetGalley requests earlier this year. More or less every single book I've requested so far has been on a complete whim and for a book I'd never heard of until seeing the listing on NetGalley—including A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway, who is also new to me as an author. And I can say without a doubt that my impulse pick here was absolutely correct.

A Song for Wildcats is a collection of five longer short stories (maybe some are novelette length?) that focus pretty heavily on the human, and in particular human relationships. Some are of a more romantic nature (and queer!) and others are more familial, and most have an air of magic about them. However, I don't mean magic as in witches on broomsticks (though there is some magic-magic) or necessarily in the whimsical sense. It's more like the people in these stories are living in-between and lack a certain concreteness—which is absolutely a good thing.

There are stories of abuse and trauma, of love and regrets, of need. My favourite story of the collection, the title story, manages to combine all of the above flawlessly. It takes place during the Vietnam War in a rural part of France during summer. The main character has been sent away from England after a particular incident and we watch as he tries to find himself in the heat of summer as student protests take hold in Paris. It is there that he meets a charming French-American protester as well. Given the nature of short stories being so short, I don't really want to go into it more than that, but I think this story represents the tone of the whole collection perfectly. I had to stop and just sit silently for a good ten minutes after finishing it. It's visceral, yet soft, and every story in the collection manages to give off that exact feeling while being about different people in different times and places... Reading back on what I wrote, "angst" is probably a good descriptor as well. I love angst (in stories).

It's hard to put into words, which is a bit ironic given the power these stories had over me while reading, but it felt as if each and every page was crawling beneath my skin and becoming a part of me. My own personal experiences bubbled forth unbidden as I read—it was a more immersive reading experience than I've had in a really long while. It was exactly what I needed to read in that moment. I just loved this collection so much. I hope it reaches a wide audience who love it as much as I did.

That all said, there are some content warnings I think are worth mentioning to anybody considering picking this up when its released. I won't reveal which stories contain which, but keep in mind that within the pages of the book, there will be talk of domestic and sexual violence, as well as death. If these topics make you unbearable uncomfortable or trigger you in ways that negatively affect your health, it may be in your best interests to avoid this one.

The title is basically how I described this book to a friend and I think it gives a pretty accurate impression of what the book is like--a criticism of our power structures and how the rich (largely men) move freely through society without facing any meaningful consequences for their actions.

The story is told through three different perspectives, which adds a lot of depth to the narrative because each perspective is told from a very different sphere of society.

Well there were aspects of the narrative that could have been more fleshed out and some people may find a certain aspects or actions of the story to be hypocritical, it's my opinion that this hypocrisy and seeming lack of depth is intentional. I think it adds a lot of value and intrigue to the narrative and asks readers to draw their own conclusions. You're supposed to think and not just be led to some easy answer--probably because there isn't one.

Anyway I thought this book was great. Hope the author writes more.