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Please note that this review may include spoilers. As a general rule I do not share the SF/F community’s aversion to that sort of thing (it quite frankly gets in the way of a critic being able to give a full and honest assessment), so I’m not going to be careful about it. This is your one and only warning. If you’re into media—any kind of media, be it books, music, film, whatever—there is a term you will eventually hear thrown around: crossover success. A crossover success is when a work or artist from one genre, say, a rapper, achieves success with the fans of another genre, like indie rockers, or even better, with mainstream audiences. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are massive examples from the book world. Before King, horror had largely been relegated to the third tier of the genre fiction ghetto (although to be fair, aside from… Continue Reading →

Some weeks ago I was at the Toronto launch for Robert J. Wiersema’s sort-of memoir, Walk Like A Man. Because I know Rob in the let’s-grab-a-beer kind of way, I was part of the entourage that wound up shuffling with him to some late night diner/bar combo down near The Esplanade, and there I found myself seated next to author Adrienne Kress. Kress, it turns out, is more fun than eight separate monkey barrels, and so I got her to write down the titles of her books so that I could look them up at the library. And look them up I did. The obvious place for me to start was Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, as it’s her first novel, and, based on the last page of the book, introduces characters that appear in her follow-up, Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate. Now, I don’t generally write about books for… Continue Reading →

David, the narrator of Five Days Apart, is described on the dust jacket as “bright but tongue-tied,” but I think that’s a little optimistic. For most of the first half of the book it seems more like David has some sort of disorder, like a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome. His awkwardness isn’t just outward facing; it’s internalized as depression and paranoia. David meets Camille at a party and falls for her pretty much instantly, but he doesn’t have the confidence or the social skills to engage with her, so he asks his charismatic friend Alex to help break the ice. The ice is broken, but not for David, and Alex and Camille begin what turns out to be the first serious romantic relationship of Alex’s life. A devastated David can’t cope, and breaks off the friendship, throwing himself into his work. So here’s the thing: Alex getting involved with… Continue Reading →

There are books that are so good you find it nearly impossible to put them down. You stay up late, take extra trips to the washroom at work, and even when you do finally manage to put them down for a while, they are easy to slide back into when you do pick them up again. And then there are books that are every bit as good, but are also dense or difficult or not very fast paced, and even though they are amazing and hard to put down, they’re also very hard to pick back up again because of that density or what have you. The Ambassador is the second kind of book; absolutely brilliant, but it makes demands on the reader, and can be difficult to get into again once you actually manage to tear yourself away so you can go to work or what have you. Which,… Continue Reading →