Toby Ménard is a television presenter who has a tastefully decorated condo, drives a BMW, and has a beautiful girlfriend who is equally ambitious. His face gracing a billboard for his televised etiquette segment, Toby: a gentleman, Toby seems to be invincible until an on-air meltdown leaves him virtually unemployable. A chance meeting with a woman named Catherine results in unexpectedly parenting a 2 year old in addition to the indignity of living in his parents’ basement in the suburbs. Toby continues to wear well-made suits with real handkerchiefs throughout the chaos that envelops his formerly dignified and tidy life as his father’s behaviour becomes increasingly alarming and he finds himself in more and more situations where there doesn’t seem to be a proper thing to do.

Babiak creates a light picture of Montreal with this endearing, funny social satire whose tone reminds me of Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series.  Toby: a man manages to be light in a thoughtful way with plenty of detail to entertain the reader.

If you enjoy Toby: a man, you will likely also enjoy Babiak’s The Garneau Block.

As someone who has recently purchased a reusable plastic-wrap substitute made of cloth and bee’s wax, this documentary seemed like a must-see. Plastics both make our current lives possible and are inescapable. They are often used to make things tidy and manageable, but the consequences of our plastic habit are anything but. I was surprised to hear that they have been around for about 100 years. And they stay around: plastics, with a few exceptions, do not biodegrade and only break into smaller physical pieces.

The film starts with a look at a section of ocean near a great gyre (a water current that swirls downward like a drain, pulling things in with it). It was amazing to see the pristine longshots of the water compared with the endless amount of plastic waste the researchers pulled out of the water, and this was only representative of the surface. High plastics levels in the ocean are poisoning sea creatures as they ingest them either directly or through the prey they eat.

The film continues its exploration of how we have doomed ourselves on land as well, but, surprisingly, not in a way that is overly preachy or dark. We are shown people dedicated to cleaning this mess up, my favourite being those who talk about the potential to use the energy buried in landfills as we do with oil.

In a time when the zeitgeist is “green” and too often “being green” means putting your bottles in the right bin, this film does an effective job of giving us a big-picture view of plastics and their place in our lives that is realistic without being paralyzingly depressing.

“My sins.

A plan. Books. And a boy.”

I picked this one up because it looked like it would read well on the plane and looked a bit creepy. More adults should read the odd YA novel: they’re not too long and many have compelling stories with broad age appeal. They are often suitable for ELL readers as well.

The reviewers on the back cover were right: it was a compulsive read.  Thirteen year old Kyra has grown up in a fundamentalist Mormon community with 3 mothers and over 20 young siblings (the setting sounds like one of the twin cities that straddle the border of Utah and Arizona).  She loves to play piano and secretly reads books she gets from the county’s mobile library and hides in a tree near the trailer that is her home.  But there are endless babies and Kyra takes care of her mother’s children in their squalid trailer in the dessert, steals from her other mothers to feed her own ill and pregnant one so she has time to read.  She seems to have carved out some happiness for herself, but that little hope is crushed by The Prophet’s vision of Kyra marrying her 66 year old uncle.  She is forced to decide which fears are to be faced and how she is to live.

I liked how Williams doesn’t artificially go into the multitude of horrors that exist in these closed fundamentalist society, keeping with what Kyra would know and think in her situation.  The novel has a lot of intense fear to it: armed Apostles in black SUVs make an appearance and parents can’t really protect their children even when they want to.

After devouring this book, I was motivated to read more in the form of Daphne Bramham’s The Secret Lives of Saints: child brides and lost boys in a polygamous Mormon sect (2008), which has been making me realize how much research Williams must have done and then stepped back to approach it from within -difficult stuff for an enraging situation!

Shelley Hrdlitschka‘s Sister Wife (2008) is another YA title about Mormon fundamentalists.

A note on the book/library worker as savior:

As a librarian who has read a lot of YA lit in which the librarian figure is somewhat glorified, I found the bookmobile plot line to be at least worthy of a second thought. You can practically see the Light of Knowledge emanating from the van. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of reading or what personal revelations it can bring about but I am definitely suspicious that books paint an overly rosy picture of the impact of libraries and books. They are, after all, written by people who have been welcomed into the world of print. Not everyone is. What if the bookmobile driver in this story had demanded government issued ID and proof of address?

By Gareth Hinds, based on the play by William Shakespeare, 2008.

As someone who took several Shakespeare courses in my undergrad and has volunteered for a few years at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach theater, I approached this version of Merchant of Venice with an edge of skepticism. How could a graphic novel, while a worthy medium for many stories, capture the complexity of theme and language of the original? How could it not pale in comparison? I also questioned why it was created (likely, I thought, to tempt teens to like Shakespeare by transparently pandering to a format perceived as irresistible to them).

The side of me that loves how adaptable Shakespeare plays are won out over my skeptical side very quickly and I found myself thoroughly engrossed after just a few pages. This version of Merchant combines the advantages of reading the play with those of seeing it performed: you can go at your own pace in reading both the words and expressions. Plays are also meant to be watched and enjoyed, not reluctantly read for homework; the graphic novel format of Merchant helps resolve this contradiction that comes with studying performance on paper.

The Merchant of Venice as a graphic novel has some wonderful features lacking in a straight reading of the original text. Hinds’ Merchant is likely a much better option for most in getting a good overall feel of the story simply because readers do not have to struggle to understand the physical orientation of the characters and plot, freeing them up to think about how and why the story unfolds as it does. The characters’ motivations in this “problem play” were more apparent and seemed more contemporary because of the modern Venetian setting and simplified dialogue. Hinds preserves key speeches and the original essence of the story, presenting an elegant and well-told Merchant of Venice complete with a thoughtful Author’s Note at the end.

The author has also adapted King Lear, Beowulf, and The Odyssey to the graphic novel format.

Gareth Hinds author site

Created by Kurt Kuenne, 2008.

I watch a lot of documentaries. Not all of them are well made but I normally learn something anyway. Dear Zachary never feels like one of those “well, it was at least educational” films and even managed to stop my incessant channel surfing one night –it is an amazing portrayal of a very compelling story and possibly the best documentary I’ve seen. The film follows from Andrew Bagby’s murder by his girlfriend, to her pregnancy and the birth of baby Zachary, through the maddening process of two countries’ justice systems, and then to grandparents who move themselves to Newfoundland to be near their grandchild and their son’s murderer.  Along with sorrow and outrage for the people whose lives were devastated by Shirley Turner and inadequate justice procedure,  I was left with a profound feeling of respect for the Bagbys and their dedication to their grandson and their son’s memory.
I won’t be forgetting this one.

Official site for Dear Zachary (includes information about their fight for bail reform)

By Dale Peck, 2009.

Sprout Bradford has secrets, and not that he’s gay either. (Isn’t it nice when that’s not the big secret that drives the entire narrative?) He’ll admit that his mom is dead, that his dad’s an alcoholic, and that his alcoholic writing coach/teacher is dating his alcoholic dad. Formerly of Long Island, NY, Sprout lives with his father in Hutchinson, Kansas (population, 65) in a trailer surrounded by upturned stumps and vines of varying degrees of poisonousness and has had green hair for over half of his life. His Dad lets him use the car on Saturdays. He also carries a dictionary nearly everywhere and is constantly using words usually left out of regular conversation. And then there are those janitor’s closet moments…

Hilariously quirky and still complex, Sprout contains a delicious mix of sweetness and sorrow from first loves and carving a life out of what you’ve been dealt. I like how Peck deals with serious issues in a way that keeps characters from being passive victims. There are also healthy doses of humour and literary references as Sprout is preparing for the state essay competition, though I was never bothered much by not fully understanding everything Sprout says as nobody else really does either.

Official Dale Peck site

By Douglas Coupland, 2009.

“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May8, 1994

Zack, Julien, Samantha, Harj, and Diana are five people from different parts of the world who are stung by bees. This is a big deal because bees are believed to be extinct and the authorities are all over it, but also because video footage related to the stings goes viral on youtube, making them “The Wonka Children”.

Generation A is a very contemporary novel that explores the cultures of reading and storytelling that are supposed to be at odds with the digital lives portrayed. It is lovely to read a novel that engages in a real way with technology and how it changes us instead of portraying it as the end of culture or showing a dystopian future, never mind a novel that manages to be smart, intellectual, funny, serious, and trivial all at once … a mash-up in print!

I love that Douglas Coupland writes about generations after him in a way that is fair and truly engaged (he was born in 1961). He is also an artist, screenwriter, playwright, actor, and New York Times blogger who lives in West Vancouver.

Official Site of Douglas Coupland

Skim and her friend Lisa are working on becoming witches when a classmate’s boyfriend dumps her and then commits suicide. The GCL (Girls Celebrate Life!) Club is formed in response and begins a vapidly tyrannical reign over how the school should feel and behave in the wake of the event, paying particular attention to Skim who is falling into a deepening depression. (In a class “self-love” exercise, one girl writes that unhappiness makes her sad, while Skim writes that ignorance makes her sad. Agreed!)  As if navigating the demented dynamics of her school’s grief isn’t enough, Skim ends up falling in love and having to figure out how she feels about this constrained first of hers that she can’t talk about and that doesn’t seem to fit into the world around her.

I forgot how lyrical this graphic novel is, especially when you take the time to look at the pictures properly along with the text.

Skim has won several awards and was short listed for a Governor General’s Literary Award in the Fall of 2008. This first time nomination of a graphic novel for the prestigious award only included Mariko Tamaki and not her cousin and the illustrator, Jillian, creating contorversy over the recognition of illustration and text sharing equal importance in graphic novels.

By Christy Goerzen, 2009.

To avoid going to juvenile detention for his part in a break in, Mike Longridge has to spend 10 months outside with a group of Granolas in Gore-Tex and polar fleece as part of the Explore program. (Granolas are a type of person who are outdoorsy and generally wholesome, and tend to eat organic foods including granola. Many examples are found in BC.) New in town, Mike doesn’t seem to belong in Explore and struggles to fit the different expectations of everyone around him. Having a crush on a Granola named Lisa at least makes Explore worth going to, though his dad falls back into old habits and it looks like Mike may fit there more than he thought in the face of being moved yet again.

Explore is a short and worthwhile read with a fast-moving plot. I really liked that it was set in the Okanagan, mentions MEC, and feels like something that could actually happen in the schools that I went to (especially Outdoor School). The descriptions of the other kids in Explore are pretty funny and it also feels really contemporary. Mike is capable of more than he thinks, despite what he and others tend to think about his unsettled home situation and the label of “damaged goods”.

This book is part of the Orca Currents series, which is aimed at kids aged 10-14 with lower reading levels. They are designed to be contemporary and rewarding for those who find reading to be challenging.

Also noteworthy is that this is a coworker’s first book.

This is a book whose shadow lingers after you close it and you are glad that it does.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is a creative and genre-defying work made up of a series of 15 stories told in an array of pictures, words, and pastiches that run on the theme of suburbia. Tan’s particular suburbia is one from Australia but the book manages to have a quality of anywhere and nowhere to it while still coming across as intimate. One segment, “Alert But Not Alarmed”, explores a reality in which every yard has an intercontinental ballistic missile in it to protect neighbourhoods from harm, but overtime the missiles become banal objects serving as decorating projects instead of objects of fear. Even in his use of humour, Tan is very perceptive and contemplative.

I was personally tempted to rush through the stories in my utter rapture with this work, but ended up limiting myself to reading one or two segments at a time to fully savour the brilliant storytelling and incredibly detailed illustrations that often contain more of the narrative than the words do.

This book is classified and marketed as a YA (young adult) title, but it has definite appeal to an older audience (my father was intrigued) as well who will be able to understand more of the nuances than younger children. It also offers an opportunity to slow down your reading and pay attention to the pictures and reminds us that pictures are certainly not always indicative of simplistic content. Check out Tan’s The Arrival if you like the illustration style.