It’s the start of another I Love to Read Month, and who better to usher in the month than the good folks over at McNally Robinson Booksellers. Chris Hall and Kathleen Friesen stopped by the Classic 107 studios to share selections for all ages!
Bea Mullins Takes a Shot by Emily Deibert
The debut novel from Toronto author Emily Deibert is about a seventh-grade girl taking to a beloved Canadian pastime for the first time. “Her best friend ends up convincing her to join the girl's hockey team,” says Friesen, who’s the children's book buyer at McNally Robinson. “She kind of reluctantly signs up and kind of works through her fears of she feels like she's going to fail. She has to work through all that and learn some lessons along the way. She also experiences her first crush, so it’s a lovely, age-appropriate middle school romance in there, too. It’s super sweet.”
Your Farm, Your Forest, and Your Island by Jon Klassen
Friesen’s other pick is for younger audiences, a set of three board books by Winnipeg author Jon Klassen. “He’s a store favourite,” Friesen smiles. “They’re basically early concept books, very simple text, but his signature, kind of quirky illustrations and basically, he’s setting up a scene either in a forest, a farm or an island, naming all the things that you’d find in these settings and then allowing space for the reader to imagine what they could get up to in these environments.”
One line at the beginning of each of these books stands out for Friesen. “’This is your sun. It is coming up for you.'"
Gliff by Ali Smith
Chris Hall’s first pick for I Love to Read Month certainly has an intriguing title. “Gliff” is a Scottish word that refers to a transient moment or a faint glimpse. “I think what [author Ali Smith] is doing with this is saying, you know, it’s hard to capture beyond a kind of glimpse of things,” says Hall, noting that this word is very much in keeping with her writing style. “It’s always ambiguous, not going to be easy to know exactly what’s going on,” he notes, pointing to a tricky plot where two children are dropped off by their mother’s partner in an abandoned house in a strange city where they meet a horse (which they name “Gliff”).
For Hall, this type of plot is only part of Smith’s appeal. “It’s mostly this weaving kind of narrative that offers insights but also offers the kind of confusion and maybe anxiety that is part of our everyday these days, but also an ability to kind of sit down and wrestle with it a little bit.”
The Riveter by Jack Wang
Jack Wang first appeared on the scene back in 2020 with a collection of short stories. His latest offering is a historical fiction novel set in Vancouver in 1942. It centers on Josiah Chang, who wants to enlist in the Canadian Army, but can’t because of restrictions placed on Chinese Canadians. Chang takes a job in the shipyards instead, and falls in love with Poppy, a singer at a local club, despite their cultural differences.
Eventually, Chang is able to join the army and storms the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but for Hall, Chang’s battle is much bigger. “It’s really a novel about a man who has to fight through the battlefields of Europe, quite literally. He needs to fight for the woman he loves, but he also just needs to fight to belong to the country. He’s known no other country in his life, and yet he has to fight to belong.”
Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
One of Hall’s favourite books of 2024 was another one by the Icelandic author called Your Absence is Darkness. Heaven and Hell is a book from earlier in Stefánsson's career but has only now been translated into English. The plot follows a boy and his best friend who have to go out fishing on the ocean in a small boat. His friend is lost at sea, and the boy (who is unnamed) travels to a new village on a grief-inspired quest.
That quest is to return a copy of a book to its original owner, but it’s not just any book. Hall points out that John Milton’s Paradise Lost is meant to exist side-by-side with this story. “It’s set against this expanse of the world that is cruel, and it’s got all the big pictures, all the big ideas,” he explains. “Paradise Lost is about heaven and hell, so [Stefánsson] is not retelling it, but he is going back to those anxieties we have about what our lives mean, what are the value of our lives, who are we. These are the topics people have been grappling with since they first started to be able to talk to each other, when we give ourselves the time when we’re not distracting ourselves with the tiny things of life.”
McNally Robinson Booksellers stops by the Classic 107 studios for What to Read on Morning Light every first Friday of the month just after 8:30 a.m.