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Reviewer: Cindy MacKenzie
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Dec 2002
Fighting to Surrender
by Cindy MacKenzie
Six years since his highly acclaimed award-winning novel, The Englishman's Boy, Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing hits the presses and readers are running to their bookstores in eager anticipation of a long-awaited reading experience. Read more...
| Nov 2002
 | Fetish
by Tara Moss
HarperCollins
306 pages $29.95 cloth
ISBN: 0002005190
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Killer Fetishist
by Cindy MacKenzie
I was tipped off about Tara Moss, a new Canadian author, by a bookseller in North Vancouver as someone I had to readůsomeone whose work was 'over the top.' As soon as I read the book and started researching the author, I realized what he meant. Born and raised in Victoria, B. C., Moss is a top international model who now resides in Australia. Read more...
| NovDec 2001
 | Clara Callan
by Richard B. Wright
HarperFlamingo Canada 2001
415 pages $32 cloth
ISBN: 0002005018
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Clara Callan, A Story of Two Sisters
by Cindy MacKenzie
Richard B. Wright wins the Giller Prize & the Governor's General Award
With eight highly acclaimed novels behind him including the Giller and Governor General-nominated The Age of Longing, Richard B.Wright has written yet another novel that has clearly marked him as a formidable presence in Canadian literature. Read more...
| SepOct 2001
Weathering Desire and Unrequited Love
by Cindy MacKenzie
"The sun is pouring down, the air is sweet with the smell of caragana in yellow blossom, and it occurs to her for the first time that her own unrequited love affair has always been nestled inside the larger one between Saskatchewan and Ontario. Saskatchewan so bitter, tenacious, aware. Ontario so careless and immune. An affair between two landscapes and two histories no less real, and no less ongoing than are certain romances between people Read more...
| Apr 2002
 | Jane Austen
by Carol Shields
Penguin Life Lipper/Viking
185 pages $28.99 cloth
ISBN: 0670894885
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The Life of Jane Austen
by Cindy MacKenzie
Consistently praised for his "inspired pairing of author and subject" James Atlas, editor of the acclaimed Penguin Lives Series, made one of his best matches when he paired Carol Shields with Jane Austen. Read more...
| Aug 2002
Emily Dickinson Alight Again
by Cindy MacKenzie
In the last few years, new life has been blown into Dickinson scholarship with the appearance of several primary reference texts and critical works. Beginning with the publication of a new variorum edition of the poetry edited by R.W. Read more...
| Sep 2002
Affairs Without Heart
by Cindy MacKenzie
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford has written a collection of ten short stories organized on the
theme of adulterous love that does not moralize about the “sin” of infidelity even though it tells the story
of such affairs over and over. The “sin” is found in the debasement of the spirit of love. Read more...
| Nov 2003
 | The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Vhps Trade $19.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0312243022
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A Review of: The Hours
by Cindy MacKenzie
As evidenced by the change in cover design that now features three
"superstar" actresses, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole
Kidman, the release of director Stephen Daldry's highly lauded 2002
film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours has promoted a
resurgence of interest in the 1998 Pulitzer-prize winning novel.
Unlike so many adaptations of book to film, the two forms of this
novel are, in fact, highly complementary in their sensitive and
beautifully-wrought treatment of the dark terrains of madness,
depression, and homoeroticism that inform the pervading theme of love.
... Read more...
| Mar 2005
 | Passion
by Jude Morgan
McArthur & Co / Headline Trade $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0755304020
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A Review of: Passion
by Cindy MacKenzie
In this weighty page-turner of a novel, British author Jude Morgan
plunges us into the tumultuous world of the Romantic Era. We learn of
the great poets of the period-Keats, Byron, and Shelley-from the
perspective of the four passionate, intelligent, and daring women who
loved them. The novel's extensive cast of characters also includes a
network of the intellectuals and artists of the period, from Coleridge
and Joseph Severn to Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. Passion is indeed an
appropriately descriptive title, for Morgan's compelling novel is an
account of the upheavals in life and love experienced by these
... Read more...
| May 2005
A Review of: South of the Border
by Cindy MacKenzie
Marlis Wesseler's second novel, South of the Border (after Elvis
Unplugged), takes us back to the hippie era of the '60s and '70s when
two Canadian friends, Arlene and Sheila, decide to travel to Mexico.
Far from their native Saskatchewan, they can behave with the
insouciant abandon that young tourists often adopt. In hot pursuit of
one of the most vaunted ideals of the era, "Experience", the young
women make reckless and often dangerous decisions about arranging
their accommodations, hitchhiking and engaging in first-time sexual
encounters.
... Read more...
| May 2005
A Review of: Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities
by Cindy MacKenzie
The persistent fascination of scholars and readers with Emily
Dickinson's preparation of forty fascicles'-those little booklets of
carefully stitched stationery sheets of about half of the over 1700
poems she wrote between 1856 and 1864-is central to an understanding
of the genius of this great nineteenth-century American poet. In
Eleanor Heginbotham's enthusiastic and thorough examination of the
fascicles, the primary focus is on demonstrating the "intentional
artistry" of the poet in compiling these booklets as a form of
self-publishing, and more interestingly, as a space where she can edit
... Read more...
| Oct 2003
 | Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart $37.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771008686
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Back to the Future-Atwood's New Dystopia
by Cindy MacKenzie
Following hard on the heels of her Booker prize winner, The Blind
Assassin (2000), Margaret Atwood's latest and most disturbing novel,
Oryx and Crake, has shaken readers and critics with its highly
dystopic view of the future. According to the author's essay found on
the website oryxandcrake.com, the novel is not science fiction, but
speculative fiction. Read more...
| Sep 2005
Brief Reviews
by Cindy MacKenzie
Choosing the symbol of the lilac, the distinctively common but beautiful flower with a potent fragrance, and the ever-changing presence of the moon in a big sky to evoke the prairie landscape, Sharon Butala provides a setting for her original and compelling history of the West in her latest work of non-fiction, Lilac Moon. Read more...
| Aug 2003
 | A Whistling Woman
by A.S. Byatt
Chatto and Windus
421 pages $38.95 cloth
ISBN: 0701173807
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Whistling Out of Chaos
by Cindy MacKenzie
A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt's latest novel, is, as the French say, a casse-tete. Opening it is to enter into a confusing and dream-like world, a cerebral space rich with a wide range of ideas as fully present as the novel's human characters and in fact, often "stronger than individuals," as "they twist, pull and mould" the reader's mind. Read more...
| May 2003
| A Whistling Woman
by A.S. Byatt
Chatto and Windus
421 pages $38.95 cloth
ISBN: 0701173807
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Whistling Out of Chaos
by Cindy MacKenzie
A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt's latest novel, is, as the French say, a casse-tete. Opening it is to enter into a confusing and dream-like world, a cerebral space rich with a wide range of ideas as fully present as the novel's human characters and in fact, often "stronger than individuals," as "they twist, pull and mould" the reader's mind. Read more...
| Mar 2004
A Review of: What IĆm Trying to Say is Goodbye
by Cindy MacKenzie
The deliciously ironic humor that infuses Lois Simmie's children's
books, short story collections and her highly-acclaimed novel, They
Shouldn't Make You Promise That, is equally at play in her latest
novel, What I'm Trying to Say is Goodbye. But the humor is matched by
a solid groundedness that prompts fellow Saskatchewan writer, Sharon
Butala to describe the book as "the funniest serious novel ever
written in Saskatchewan." Simmie's humour is never superfluous, but
dry, and necessary, an easy and integral part of the narrative and a
symptom of life, in the way that sensitive, intelligent people are
... Read more...
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