Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

Is there anything worse for a reader than finishing the last book in a beloved series? We wouldn't mind so much, if only more books for young readers showed the same care and attention to words and pictures that Monika Bang-Campbell and Molly Bang do together in  Little Rat . After all the big sighs, Daughter Number Two still had a few questions about our new favourite furry heroine. So, with a little help, she posed them in an email to the author herself. Here is what we heard back.  Why did Pee Wee chase the cat? Pee Wee does NOT chase cats, he is scared of cats. All horses are scared of sudden movements they don't understand, because they are "prey" animals - in other words, they don't chase after other animals to eat them but instead are eaten by creatures like wolves and coyotes and jaguars and lions and bears and . . . So they are scared by things we feel are very safe, like a running little cat or an umbrella suddenly opening  up. Was Pee Wee a...

June 21, 2012 Never underestimate the power of a pageant promise. Especially when the world is watching. If you ask Wikipedia the meaning of the name “Nazanin” you will find it cited as a common Persian female first name, meaning “lovely”, “beautiful” and the like. And below this definition are listed, by way of example, three Nazanins: Nazanin Boniadi, an actress and spokesperson for Amnesty International, Nazanin Afshin-Jam , a human rights activist and Miss World Canada in 2003 and Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi a 17 year-old girl sentenced to death for stabbing a man in self-defense. It is the latter two Nazanins who form, in alternating chapters, The Tale of Two Nazanins by Nazanin Afshin-Jam and Susan McLellan. “Nazanin” is a fitting, perhaps even prophetic, name for a Canadian beauty queen with a close and loving family and a host of freedoms and possibilities before her. But “Nazanin” is a woefully ironic choice for an impoverished, Khurdish–Iranian ...

Like the characters in Helen Simonsen's outstanding first novel, sometimes you have to leave your senses to come to them. I rashly abandoned the 14-day loan to linger over a copy of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand from the library, and am unrepentent. This, and Middlemarch , are the best books I have read all year. I lived in Middlemarch for summer vacation; Pettigrew was with me for the Christmas holidays. For everyone who loves England, a cure-all cup of tea, and believes simple happy endings are as possible as people are complicated. http://majorpettigrew.com/

"I felt a keen sense of responsibility to only use material that I felt was illuminating, but not damaging. As my father always said, be honest, but be kind." --Kari Herbert, author of Polar Wives

North and South meets A Visit from the Goon Squad Kindly step aside, Mr. Darcy, for Mr. John Thornton of Middleton. Sorry, John Who? If Jane Austen's Darcy marks the measure of romantic hero, Elizabeth Gaskell’s John Thornton may well be his superior: a self-made, socially-conscious business leader with a mind for higher learning and a true, unwavering heart. His lower profile is a little ironic, since Gaskell orginally wrote him into a serial for Charles Dicken's Household Words . But perhaps Darcy is just a little less complex and easier to adore—nobly-born and not caught up in the mess of tensions between working class men, and those who employed them, that is Thornton’s reality in 1855. “Master” was the word in Gaskell’s day, and is Thornton’s role as a cotton mill owner in the city of Middleton--Gaskell’s fictional interpretation of Manchester at the time.  The romantic tension between Thornton and Miss Margaret Hale, newly arrived in Middleton from the bucolic So...

Let's be honest here. There are times, when helping a seven-year-old practice her reading, that you just long for the book to be over. It can be a long, slow ordeal with more than a few mix-ups on the way to the last page, and a sigh of relief when you finally arrive at the end. Not so with Harley , Star Livingstone's tribute to a llama in eastern Massachusetts with a knack for shepherding and a mind of his own. Livingstone's simple sentences and vocabulary knit together a series of episodes in the life of Harley the guard llama--from chasing off coyotes to making friends with a gristley old ram--that has one wishing for a sequel. If a Grade Two reader takes her time with Harley , it's for good reason, Molly Bang's illustrations of long-lashed Harley, and the gentle sheep he guards are lovely to look at and breath contentment into a story of a once ornery animal who finds his true calling and his rightful place in the farm field.

There are no Candidos named in Lynne Bowen's historical tribute to the first generations of Italians who helped build Canada. But they are there all the same. In the smelters of Trail, in the dry grasslands of Kamloops, in the burgeoning days of early Vancouver...  Whoever Gives Us Bread  traces the trails of Italian Canadians and in doing so,  fills in the sketches we have of part of my family's early history in Canada. "Among the Italians who were offending the sensibilites of middle-class Vancouverites," writes Bowen, "were men from Friuli, a region that had exported over fifty thousand of its people in that one year of 1913." My great grandfather, around about that time, was one of them. Leaving the slow starvation of a country that couldn't afford to feed them, Canada offered opportunity for those willing to get their hands, and their lungs, dirty. My great grandfather made his first stop in Trail, to work in the smelter. As my father says: ...

In My Heart by Molly Bang This is the time of year when I recommend to every working mother I know In My Heart by Molly Bang. It sits on our living room shelf year round, but if one has need for the ultimate Valentine, then this would be it. "Hearts abound" wrote one reviewer, and they are all full to bursting.

"I have learned to tell a story, without telling a lie." Author/biographer Michael Holroyd, in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel for Writers and Company

It must be winter (and raining) if I’m reading memoir. Last year’s great January escape was Keith Richard’s Life and, for a revelry of perfect contrast, the Duchess of Devonshire’s Wait for Me! This year, I spent the dwindling of 2011 reading Debo’s newest book -- All in One Basket , the compilation of two earlier collections of her essays, written over half a century. Though she can make a gardening book sound enticing to a brown thumb, the Duchess proclaims herself to be not much of a reader. One of her fondest anecdotes of her father is his “review” of Jack London’s White Fang . He read it through and declared himself done with books. So perfect was Fang, in his estimation, that any other book would most certainly fall short. The Duchess herself famously struggled in a column (revived for readers as part of All in One Basket ) to come up with 10 books of recommended reading on Trans Siberian railway adventure. Were her father still of this earth, no doubt he would glad...

The Orchard Up until yesterday, I couldn't remember the last time I read a book in one day. So when I had the chance, I wasn't expecting it to be a memoir of a marriage, apple trees and the beginning of a writing life that is The Orchard . But, as it turns out, this is a page-turning combination. Theresa Weir pares down to the core of her life as an outsider, a wife and mother on a farm that is as beautiful as it is betraying. There are no lectures here, just a lingering love and life experience that must have begged Weir to become a book. The narrative is so spare and strong that it comes as a disappointment in the publishing industry to learn, at the end of the book, how difficult it was for The Orchard to find a home. Fortunately, Weir had perseverence--something she surely cultivated on the farm.

Arghh but Pirates have all the fun! At least Mary Quattlebaum's do. When Mean Mo and Blustery Bart meet in the middle of the sea, a fair fight full of shark racin', mast climbin', treasure countin', cannonball throwin' and gift givin' ensues. This be a match made in pirate heaven -- a treasure to read aloud to a wee listenin' landlubber.

Infidel If I had to muster my courage to read Infidel , imagine how it must have been for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to have lived it. Let alone write it. Let absolutely alone publish it. First released in 2007 to both international acclaim and angry denunciation, it's taken me four years to finally open a copy. From Hirsi Ali's earliest memories of the punishing wrath of her grandmother, to her brave perseverence in building a life out from under the bounds of submission, in the end, her story is perhaps the best reason to believe in the power of women's voices to all those who value the here and now.

There's no denying anyone who spends any time boating the West Coast has a little Captain Vancouver in them, and it's Vancouver who provides Grant Lawrence's Adventures in Solitude  with numerous woeful observations of Desolation Sound. Through his spyglass looking landward, the Captain saw: "not a single prospect that was pleasing to the eye" and thusly marked on his map the part of the northern end of the Strait of Georgia with one downer of a moniker. So the Captain wasn't one to accentuate the positive in his memoirs. But Lawrence, who first hated, then loved, then loathed and has since come to love again his family's little part of this paradise sees both the fair weather and the foul. Not to mention all the people inbetween the Sound's sea and sky. Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolution Sound comes   complete with a cast of characters that include a motley assortment of root 'em/ shoot ...

Dahanu Road Prepare for your senses to be overwhelmed. Anosh Irani's storytelling powers are many, and he brings them to bear in this tragic love story.

The Red Garden For as long as I can remember, I've loved a good bear story. And, for almost as long, the writing of Alice Hoffman. In The Red Garden, Hoffman weaves generations of Blackwellians with the bears on the outskirts of their lives. A totem animal, a creature of myth and reality, the bear shadows the stories of Hoffman's human characters, and creates an unbroken thread down through the centuries of the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts—that twins to the ties of love, courage and family connecting her characters.

"Wait for Me!" There is a bittersweet and precious perspective that comes from being by far the youngest sibling in an extraordinary family. In the case of the Mitfords, that place belongs to Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and she has done it justice in her memoirs "Wait for Me!". At 91, the Duchess is today the last surviving member of "all those Mitford brains" (back-handed by the "brittle" Wallis Simpson in referring once to Deborah and her sisters). "Wait for Me!" is a captivating credit to the Duchess' share of "those brains" and the many extraordinary people who have been part of her remarkable life. Ticklish nicknames pepper the pages: "Muv", "Farve", "Decca", "Weenie", "Kick"... are among those fondly remembered by the Duchess, who herself was known to her family as "Debo", "Stubbo", and "Stublow" since the days when her ch...

I have never heard a more moving tribute to the great life experience that is the elementary school track meet, than the one by Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting . You can listen to it now, as read by MacLeod, on the July 8th, 2011 podcast edition of "Ideas" titled "Footprints" rebroadcast in July as a segment of CBC Radio's "Listener's Choice". Find it at cbc.ca/podcasting and be prepared to be uplifted.

A wryly observant handmaiden to the Empress Sadako in ancient Japan (Sei Shonagon). An Englishwoman with an encyclopedic knowledge of housekeeping (Isabella Beeton). An adventurer who dined on hippo and hunted African beetles (Mary Kingsley). The wife of a whaler who spent a year at sea (Mary Hayden Russell). A former slave, cruelly treated for many years, who devoted the free years of her life to helping others (Harriet Ann Jacobs). Curious? I know. These five are just a few of Marthe Jocelyn's Scribbling Women . Jocelyn's nimble writing and smart selection of unique lives and telling details creates an utterly engaging read for twelve-and-ups. My copy is going straight to Daughter Number One when I'm done. Which won't be long-- Scribbling Women is a true page-turner.

"The urge to build, to transform nature, to make something out of nothing is universal. But to conserve, to protect, to care for the past is something we have to learn..." --from Reef by Romesh Gunesekera