This is a topic that has been cropping up in my life in unexpected areas. Physician-assisted suicide has been recently legalized in Canada, I taught about assisted suicide when I completed my ESL practicum last fall, and now I’ve unintentionally read three books on aging and dying that complement each other. I also remember being fascinated by this article (‘Why Doctors Die Differently’; I think it’s behind a paywall now) […]
When people look at George, they think they see a boy. But she knows she’s not a boy. She knows she’s a girl. George thinks she’ll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be performing Charlotte’s Web George really, really, REALLY wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can’t even try out for the part . . […]
Blogger’s autosave ate my full review (which I was quite pleased with) of this book 🙁 I am reminded of why I draft locally in Word… There’s nothing I hate more than rewriting, but I’m going to try to recall as many of my thoughts as possible and share them here. At least I made a few notes while reading… Quite by accident, September has been crowned as Queen of […]
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods tells the story of a newly married couple who take up a lonely existence in the title’s mythical location.In this blank and barren plot, far from the world they’ve known, they mean to start a family. But every pregnancy fails, and as their grief swells, the husband – a hot-tempered and impatient fisherman and trapper – attempts to […]
This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school. Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government- funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of “aggressive assimilation.” As Augie Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children […]