The List of Last Chances by Christina Myers (Caitlin Press)

I requested this book after seeing it on a list at the 49th Shelf – one made by Ali Bryan, author of Coq and The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships. A list of “Summer books to read when your flight’s been cancelled, you dropped your phone in the pool, your air mattress has a leak or the potato salad’s gone bad.”

Ruthie is a mess after finding her boyfriend with another woman several months ago. Losing her boyfriend after 5 years and at the age of 38 makes her feel like a loser. So she acts like one by losing her job, sleeping on her friend’s couch, and drinking a lot of wine. When the perfect job for her comes along, she applies, hoping it will be just the thing.

I didn’t want this job. I desperately wanted this job. I didn’t care if my resume wasn’t good enough. I prayed that my resume would shine. I didn’t want to leave the island. I wanted to get so far away that I couldn’t remember what had happened here.

Ruthie’s new job is to help 71-year-old Kay pack up her home in Prince Edward Island and drive her across the country to her son’s house in Vancouver. David is very concerned about his mother’s safety. Very concerned. But he has his reasons. Reasons or not, Kay has her own ideas about what she wants to do on this–as she sees it–last hurrah before she’s no longer free and independent.

Kay has a list of 20+ things to do before getting to Vancouver. Ruthie is hesitant about it at first, because David is so rigid about the itinerary and checking in at all hours of the day, but she finally agrees to do her best to help Kay get her things checked off. She even joins in for some of the fun. But, as you can imagine, things don’t always go smoothly. Kay’s list includes: read 3 Canadian novels and don’t cry when driving over the Confederation Bridge, but it also includes: get drunk, steal something, and have great sex.

Once Ruthie and Kay got on the road, I couldn’t put them down. I could think of a few things of my own to add to their list. The List of Last Chances is a fun ride across the country – there are secrets, laughs, adventures, friendship, and even some romance.

It was equal parts sightseeing tour and sin-seeking, with a dash down memory lane.

We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan (ECW Press)

We Meant Well was longlisted for the Giller Prize this year.

By way of a plot that involves a charitable organization in a less-developed country, a man accused of sexual assault with no witnesses, and a woman called from her comfortable home in LA to handle the situation, this book asks some tough questions. Are the villagers Maya’s priority, or are the staff and organization? How do you bring about justice when there is no proof of anything? And who gets to be the one to decide?

Maya works for a charitable organization that operates several orphanages, one of which is in Likanni – a place Maya has been working for many years. Maya has become close with the villagers and they have come to trust her. So, when a staff member–Marc–is accused of rape by Lele (Maya’s former protégé and the chief’s daughter), she is feeling the pressure from both sides. At the same time, she has to keep in mind that her job is to save the face of the company.

Alongside Maya’s worries and responsibilities about Marc and Lele and the job she is there to do, she’s also unhappy in her marriage at home in LA and feels the need to make some big changes in her life. The story is tense and becomes more so as the book goes on. How is Maya going to sort out this mess, save the face of the company, and keep herself together while doing it all? All while questioning why they are all there in the first place? Is “help” from another part of the world really the best thing for the villagers?

I started this career wanting to heal the world of its ills. I’ve since learned that when you make a career out of helping the starved, you somehow become part of whatever is starving them. It’s impossible not to–being the one with air-conditioning and safe drinking water, laughing with fellow first-worlders, only screwing first-worlders, while the ones you want to save live in the periphery. You take their photographs, dramatic close-ups, catching every crease of their foreheads, every bead of sweat, every expression of desperation, but you’re the one holding the camera. You empathize in the moment. You feel their pain, in the moment. You interview them, talk about them, maybe you write their stories, in the moment. Then you get up and walk back into your own life, abandoning their pain like orphans.

So many men and boys have entered this region, plucked the rawest nerve of this society. They have broken mothers, young girls, injuring communities at their deepest, for it’s the mothers and sisters who march these parts forward, who take people from day to night and to day again. It’s the women who make poverty palatable, make it a game for their children to survive. They tell stories, yell and laugh, provide breastmilk, plan marriages, organize funerals, and cook, keeping the adrenaline gushing, the blood running in the young ones, so that they have something to live for. When the women break, entire strains of culture, tradition, and love wither.

The Adversary by Michael Crummey (Knopf Canada)

What can I possibly say about The Adversary that will add to what others have already said or will say? Everyone in Canada will be reading this book – or, at least, they should. In my opinion, everything Crummey writes is gold.

The Adversary is set in the same time as The Innocents, in the time of early establishments of fishing villages up and down the coast of Newfoundland. There is no need to have read The Innocents to read this one, but the book does refer to the children from Orphan Cove a couple of times, and includes the characters of Mary Oram and The Beadle.

The only pillar of their days that had not shifted was the Beadle, their punctilious, sanctimonious prig of a master. They did not like the man and to judge by his manner the Beadle thought little of the people who worked under him and the Christian souls he served. But there was a comfort even in the cold attention he offered and they lived in awe of his North Star steadiness. They tied themselves to the mast of his certainty and sailed on, delivering their dry goods with the news of Elias Caines’s passing and the other deaths in Mockbeggar, collecting stories of sickness and loss the length of the coast.

The Adversary tells the story of the power struggle between two siblings–one male, one female–who own much of the business along the coast and who want to bring the other down. On the surface, there is an obvious good guy/bad guy scenario, but the underlying motives and strategy tells a different story, and many of the villagers are used, unknowingly, as pawns.

Brother and sister circling each other, that corkscrew tightening every season since their father’s death. And himself helpless finally to direct it, to slow or alter its grim, unflinching directory.

What I like best about this book is the surprising and colourful language he uses to tell his story. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even know what he’s saying if it weren’t for the context. In his acknowledgments, he lists the books from which there was “shameless pillaging,” including A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which is very entertaining to browse through. It even distracted my son from a football game he was watching one night.

A couple of examples…

“We should all’ve bought a brush and loped in Bogland. Weeks we been in bad bread here, banged up in a pannery with the bleating cheats and cacklers and black cattle when we could have binged avast in a darkmans.”

“We would happily blot the skrip and jar it to be shot of this stall whimper. He’s the biggest coward ever shat a turd.”

A few of many noted passages…

He wanted to murder the world that jilted him, to stand over its grave and curse the faithless shrew to eternity. And that childish, apocalyptic ambition was the ocean on which he sailed ever after.

She seemed every moment about to announce something a person would be happier not knowing.

The girl stared at the expensive beaver muff as she waited, raising the fur to her face now and then to wipe at the clear line of snot on her upper lip.

There wasn’t a soul moving in the little village, the rocks and hills showing black through the snow, so it seemed she was passing through a world without colour, without life… There was nowhere a stretch of level ground, the fishing rooms and warehouses and outbuildings and houses propped on higgledy stilts, looking like wooden insects perched on hillsides and out over the beach rocks and the harbour shallows. It made the entire accretion seem inadvertent and temporary, one decent storm from being swept into the ocean.

Light, heavy, or dark… Which book are you in the mood for right now? What would you put on your “last chance” list?

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