Transformation: A Review of Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky

As our resident Elm is tussled by rainy wind, I have been contemplating the process of transformation. When I quit my nine to fiver, announcing publicly that my time was now my own, I focused intensely on the present. That first summer before the little one entered school stretches out into one long sunny joy bubble. It was a celebration of life one unbothered by schedules or boxed into quick week-end activities. My decision to quit was less a knee-jerk response to an unhappy work-life, rather it was the fulcrum of a life plan the hubby and I embarked on the moment we became naive parents. When the child entered school I would  be home. It wasn't a secret, I voiced it loudly, yet the moment it became a reality shock, fear and even anger started to whisper about me. The corporate reactions were generally easy to unravel, and as I dropped that last bundle of files off at my director's office I felt unhinged with happiness.

And then the questions started to bounce around me from all corners of my social sphere - But what do you do all day? 

Bewilderingly, being a Mom wasn't an adequate reply. Passively aggressive, that query haunted my thoughts, undermining my sense of self. I spun stories of writing ambitions, quickly adding the tagline that I used to work. Walks home from the playground, grateful for the time invested with my son were tinged with embarrassment. What did, I do all day?

As those first few months piled up into a year, and that year has now become three, I know not only who I am, but why being a Mom will always be enough. The moment I realized that the answer I sought was an impossibility, I was released. Margaret Atwood while being interviewed on the CBC radio program, Q discussed how once a novel is published, it's no longer in the writer's hands but in the hands of the reader's, subjective to a myriad of interpretations. How I spend my day, or even navigate my way through motherhood has little to do with anyone but those within my family capsule. I write my own life, how you wish to value it is completely within your own realm. 

Navigating the writing world, I marvel at how far I had to emotionally go to finally become myself. High-school defined me as the resident poet, shipped off to day camps to hone my skills, crafting essays stamped with acceptance by all my teachers. Weaving together words to create a tapestry of stories is my concept of art. I agonize in word choice, despair in trite sentiments, ponder better ways to connect my life to that spider book I just read. My complete adoration of the written word manifests itself through Thank the Maker, it was time to accept who I am, a writer.  

First crack at the SF genre, and Adrian Tchaikovsky walks away in 2016 with the Arthur C. Clarke - Britain's premier SF award for Children in Time. The hubby has voiced his wonder how I connect motherhood to sci-fi, admittedly it can be an interesting process. By page 58, Children of Time had traipsed me across two thousand years, destroying Earth, marooning my thoughts with a lone scientist above a terraformed planet that consequentially is crawling with spiders budding into sentience. The obvious connections seemed lacking as I woke, overwhelmed with spider societal dreams, pondering the transformation of living nightmares into accepting images of alien speciation. 

Earth is a husk - pulverized by war, no longer a safe harbour for humanity. Those who have survived the ice age, try to glean information from ancient technology that highlighted homo sapiens progressive golden age. The spaceships follow star charts, desperate in the belief that a new home will be found. And a new home is found, unfortunately it is occupied.

Children of Time is a master work of science fiction. A hefty tome, it seamlessly navigates from spiders to humans, mirroring each species transformations of survival. Adrian Tchaikovsky has tackled evolution successfully, wrapping it all up in a neat bow with eight legs. Of late, I have come to love a well-written Arc book - human expansion aboard multi-generational space ships designed solely for species longevity. What with the spiders, and a desperate ship of Earth's children trying to survive, you have a juggernaut of a novel. It will turn your perceptions of intelligence on end, revealing the wonders of life, the need to protect our only home. Children of Time is unapologetically science fiction. It is fun, easily readable, highly engaging, a good read for any long weekend. 

Friends: A Review of All The Birds In The Sky, Charlie Jane Anders

Operatic singing meanders down the staircase from my child's room as he negotiates his world through lego, all while the hubby smugly slumbers. As the house dances with the rhythms of Tuesday morning, my thoughts slip to friendship. My particular slant to friend bonding is a response to the giggles; if you can follow my joke, and even better, best it, I am yours. While I accumulate new peeps, and meander out of the lives of others, only a few have ever been like-minded readers. Not that someone I adore must shine their geek light as brightly as I, but it is rather odd that my overarching passion for SF books has always been a solo pursuit. 

Always is so defiant in it's absoluteness that as I finish All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, I realize that my proclivity to fantastical tales is thanks in large part to a teacher friend. The life of an ELS instructor is an odd bag of crazy; the love affair with the place fluctuates from intensely hateful to achingly glorious. Self-perceived as the outsider, colleagues become fast friends, even family within weeks of meeting. Hence my clandestine friendship with a punk-ass girl from Portland, who brought the fun to a small, Japanese rice-village but a wide appreciation for American surrealistic lit. 

Remarkably there was a time that I had not read Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, John Kennedy Toole's posthumous delight,  A Confederacy of Dunces, or the poetic compactness of Lewis Nordan's, Lightening Song. Transecting my life for less than a year, this friend directed me down a path of reading that honed my appreciation of novels like All The Birds In The Sky.

Informed she is a witch at a young age, Patricia progresses through the humiliations of teenage-hood despairing in her inability to unlock her full potential. Was that night she was lost in the woods talking to the birds real, or was it her imagination trying to escape her tragic childhood? Lawrence in the meantime lives a life of constant degradation, the classic nerd, he is bullied relentlessly, eventually creating a portable time machine that pushes him into the future by 2 seconds. The small victory of avoiding the moment the egg was too spatter provides his only respite. Reluctant friends, Patricia and Lawrence move through their high school days trying to salvage some dignity from the vitriol that is slung their way. 

The harbinger of the apocalypse, All The Birds In The Sky masquerades as a coming of age story. Patricia and Lawrence shall bring forth the end of days and so they most die. Charlie Jane Anders has the talented ability to weave words into a tapestry of images. This novel ensnarled me, reluctantly unfolding, inspiring my imagination, even questioning my perceptions, all the while firmly entertaining me. It should be rightly shelved with all the fantastically mundane American lit that I have come to love. There is something quite satisfying reading a novel that puts the reader slightly on edge, slightly unhinged as the story begins to reveal itself. All The Birds In The Sky dystopian message is akin to Margaret Atwood's deeply disturbing MaddAddam trilogy, simply offered in a softer package.

Fairy Tales: A Review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman

I come from a long line of readers, it is just how this family roles, we read, we read and oh yes of course, we read. Funny enough though we do not expound on our readings, choosing to pile the books up high around our houses, quietly enjoying our self-created book fortresses.  This all came to pass when I found myself a mom with a slight, so slight barely there, emotionally groundbreaking (once again, every so slight) identity crisis.  Not to go into the mom thing because Thank the Maker is not at all about the mom thing and all about what this mom is reading thing but the mom thing is really the catalyst of this entire thing. 

With newborn in tow, and book consumption down to an all-time low I realized that being a mom does not equate just being a mom and started to freak-out on what exactly I was/am/and going to be. Raising a child is not for the faint of heart, and if someone says it's a piece of cake, they are a dirty, dirty liar. That being said, this blog and this post is not about being a mom but in a convoluted way it is. And as with all things Neil Gaiman, his new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is about one thing but really so much more. 

As with Margaret Atwood, I have shockingly discovered quite a few people who are not into Gaiman's writings. The hubby, who should be acknowledged for his awesome foresight of taking the sonny swimming today, giving this mommy time to do some sci-fi geeking (writing) did not find The Ocean at the End of the Lane his thing. I still find this surprising as he cruises the deep corners of the web keeping informed of the latest UFO dramatic occurrence but couldn't stretch his level of disbelief to dip into a fairy tale. Not that I am saying that UFOs are hullabaloo and that buying a generator for the inevitable invasion is a waste of our savings, I am not saying that, I am just saying....you know, I am saying nothing, I like being married.

Whether you consider this a fairy tale or a story about the perceptions of reality, I found it to be an inquisitively magical novel that left me wondering what parts of our memories are accurate or fabrications of what we perceive accuracy to be. A warning, this is a fairy tale with demons, darkness and levels of emotional and physical dangers that accompany the lives of the children within the tale. It is not a romp of a novel, it won't leave you feeling blessed but it will leave you feeling touched with the magic of the unknown. This book delivers, keeping to what Gaiman does best, spinning the mundane into a supernatural package of questions.

Yesterday, maybe tomorrow: A Review of MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood

The preschooler living in my house has two references for time, tomorrow and yesterday. Both signify all time in the past and future, including what we the 'grown-ups" in the house would use those terms to denote. We are in a constant time vortex at home, watching space fold as we talk about events or things to come. And so with this in mind, yesterday I finished the third of Atwood's rather dramatically intense, at times funny, mostly not, MaddAddam series. 

As you know, I rather like Margaret Atwood, to the point that by liking her I feel as if I have earned my patriotic Girl Guide badge for being as Canadian as Canadian possible.  Can Lit at university was far more entertaining than any other type of English 300 level course I had to take to round out my English degree. Did I just hear my father, 2000 kms away yell, "What English degree?" Granted I do not actually hold such a discipline, somehow my trek through the halls of wisdom resulted in my leaving with two separates bachelor degrees: geography and anthropology.  I took  the financially irresponsible, let's try it all approach, and leave eventually with degrees never designed to find secure employment. Okay, I use them occasionally, I am extremely knowledgeable in aquifers, moraines and oceanic currents with a surprising in-depth relationship with religious symbols.

Every time I pick up one of Margaret's books (can I call her Margaret, seems so imposing of me) I marvel how she comes up with all the crazy stuff she writes. Stuff is crazy in the MaddAddam series, and by crazy I refer to violently disturbingly descriptive scenes of the world imploding upon itself with the eventual rebuilding from the ruins that was humanity. Such drama peaks in The Year of the Flood that to this day and probably for the rest of my natural life will sit darkly in a corner of my brain to resurface at the most inopportune times forcing me to find some type of religious artifact to grab onto while reciting the Litany Against Fear. 

Ah, the dystopian novel, looking to haunt your dreams? Look no further than these gems of broken civilizations, global decimation with the healing touch of grass-roots redemption. For someone who refuses to watch Game of Thrones, it does not escape me the irony of my personal fandom of this sub-genre. Recent Sundays at our house, my husband sits on the edge of our bed struggling to describe that night's GOT episode using my requested G-rated guidelines. some nights he doesn't even attempt and quickly moves the subject to kittens with glittery names like Dazzle Princess and Love Love Love. 

Maybe it is my grounding in anthropological perspective, but there is nothing more fascinating then the adaptation of the Noah story, horrors and all. Should you read this series, is it Atwood at her best? Yes and no. The real question is, why haven't you read any Atwood and why are you still reading this post when you could be reading The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace (personal fave!), The Handmaid's Tale, or Oryx and Crake?

This Girl's Wish List 2013

Many a night was spent sprawled out on my family's living room coiled rag rug dog-earring pages from the annual Sears Christmas Wish Book.  That puppy by the time good ole' St. Nick made it's trek to our Christmas Tree, was in tatters, with the Barbie/Star Wars pages blurred unrecognizable by sticky little frantic fingers. Like most Canadian children, my brother and I set our lists and future play happiness from what we discovered in that tome of wonder. The Big Guy and Sears must have had quite the partnership, I wonder who received the royalties, Santa or Sears? Either way, hands down, it was a win-win.

Now that I am grown, less in mind than in body (forever 8 at heart) I wish I could flip through an adult version of the Wish Book and obviously (NOT booze, but good guess) tag my books for the coming year. Once completed would then leave the book lying haphazardly in the path (draped over his face while sleeping should do the trick) of a certain gift buying husband. Like Sears and Santa, a win win for our family too. With the internet and the ability to shop, gift, share, wish, harass and ship any single thing you could desire the Wish Book has become a child-hood tangible memory. With the memory looping in my head like an earworm, I can't help but post my Wish Book List and maybe influence a certain hubby and even yourself. You too must have a list and or have a list you need to buy for.

Is it necessary for me to qualify why this is on my reading list?  The Ocean At The End Of The Lane is by Neil Gaiman. Although I have yet to explore his highly acclaimed Sandman graphic novel series (one of my many skeletons in the closet) I am a huge fan of his novels. American Gods, coming first to mind is an exploration into the workings of religion and it's place in current times. American Gods is the baby that Twin Peaks and Fifth Business would have procreated. Weird, full of allegories and am hoping when I read The Ocean At The End of The Lane I it too takes me into a world that wraps me in mysticism.

I purchased Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for my Mom the year it came out, leaving it with her in a Mexican, sea-side RV park never to see again. I regret to this day not reading it before gifting it to her. Of all the books on my little list it is this one that I expect to cherish the most. Not the smartest knife in the draw at times, it is only this past year that I figured out that I really, really like space opera and really, really, really like books about magic. Funny how you don't know a person, especially when that person is yourself.


I don't know about you, but there is nothing like a six- hundred page historical account to make you feel all cosy inside. Having pined after and yet to squeeze the time in to read Paris 1919:  Six Months that Changed the World, I feel I am now significantly rested and ready to take on both. Plus, when done, I have the perfect books to press summer flowers in. Margaret MacMillan, renowned history prof, dives into the melee that is pre-war Europe trying to uncover and properly express the quagmire that resulted in WWI, the war that to this day, shapes our world for the better and the worse in her new book The War That Ended Peace. I cannot wait.


Trilogies are a bitch. Reading one, results in reading book two which results in reading book three. A scientific law, trilogies are one of the Laws of Physics or Thermodynamics or is it Gravity, quantified as a force of nature. It takes effort and commitment from readers, making us all impatient weirdos waiting for the next book to be published. With MaddAddam out, I find myself reluctantly ready. Atwood's trilogy is not a funny romp, it paints quite the disturbing post-apocalyptic future with chapters of violence that haunts me today. I am not really selling this, am I? My point is while this may not be the best book to read during the holidays, it is a triumph of a series, one that captures the brilliance that is Margaret Atwood.


Finally, Allegiant, the third (see what I mean, force of nature) in the Divergent series by Veronica Roth is here and apparently has raised quite a bit of hullabaloo. Being on a self-enforced library-only policy, I haven't been able to add this to my collection and thus am hoping to receive it as a gift. Dripping with heart-ache, first love drama that seems to accompany most YA (young adult) novels, The Divergent series takes the drama of teen-land, and places it firmly in an authoritarian future in which humanity is defined not by blood but factions. If you liked The Hunger Games, read this series, you will find a more original theme, controlled with better writing and tighter editing. 

For Greg's Pop: An Atwood Kind of Life

A friend emailed me inquiring on what to buy his Dad for the holidays. His goal, to introduce and successfully hook his Pop into the wonderful world of SF. Quite a mission and one that I soon jumped on but quickly found myself overwhelmed. After all, this is quite a heady decision; the book I recommend could either successfully draw someone to SF or disastrously push them away. Who am I to hold so much power in my little geek hands? I soon got over myself, realizing who better than a  hard-core self-proclaimed SF nerdlington to decide someone's future reading fate.

Being a proud maple-leaf wearing, 'sorry' expounding, 'eh' dropping Canadian there may be a few facts that might surprise you about my country. While winter does reign over most of this expansive land for a remarkable amount of time, a thawing does occur (sometimes, almost always) resulting in rather pleasant, even scorching summers. 

98% of Canadian fathers are 100% convinced that their child will be the next big hockey star and have either registered that little newborn into skating lessons their second day on Earth or have attempted to contact an NHL recruiter to come look at their child's massive newborn thighs (for those tight corners).  I may (or not) be referencing a husband (maybe mine) who purchased gloves, helmet and stick for a certain 2 year old last year.

You may be familiar with the French/English divide that sometimes exists (on slow news day), even aware of the frequent Quebec threat of divorcing itself from Canada. However what truly separates one Canadian from another is not Tim Horton doughnuts, or who wins the nice award (Nova Scotians, obviously), or whose mayor is more cracked out (really not a contest) but our stance on Atwood, Margaret Atwood. Yes, indeed it comes down to Atwood. She is either loved or despised and since I am one of the former my recommendations will be Atwoodian inspired.

Many a word has been written with regards to Atwood's reluctance to placing her books under the SF genre and while I may have sounded off on this very topic one too many times, I am

laying the debate to rest. Do you hear me world? Whether you wish to call The Handmaid's Tale, SF, speculative fiction, a horse's behind, is of no concern to me.  It is science fiction and it is good. And with this I say, read it for what it is, a truly harrowing tale of a future that may just come to pass, with all the horrors that are contained in a dystopian novel.  It is a classic and with all classics a must read whatever genre you choose to align with. In my opinion, The Handmaid's Tale is the perfect litmus test for Margaret Atwood, not for dipping ones toes into the big sea of science fiction.

If The Handmaid's Tale is more about Atwood's very "Atwoodian" style then what would be the best SF book for a non-SF reader? Why not a diaspora-laced tale of destruction and redemption: Oryx and Crake, book one of the MaddAddam trilogy? After all, if you are going to push someone's reading boundaries, you should at least recommend a writer who is able to weave together a world-developed story-line. I really like Atwood. I should buy some type of shirt or coffee-mug or something. 

It may seem a tad presumptuous to recommend a trilogy. What if the intended reader (Greg's Pop) doesn't like it? The great thing about this book is it can stand alone. If you love it, great, lucky you, there is The Year of the Flood an all-encompassing intense little nightmare that won't ever leave your thoughts (holy crap people it is INTENSE) and from there you can move onto MaddAddam (which I cannot comment on but am hoping I unwrap it under a tree this year). By recommending a trilogy you have a better outcome. If he loves it, then he reads more SF, resulting him wanting to read even MORE SF and then he is hooked, and you have a Dad who reads SF and that really is all you have, isn't it?  

Then again, if he doesn't like it, you have a Dad who didn't like it and well, he most likely will still be your Dad, just a Dad who thinks your choice in books are off the rocker. I realize I am of no help and most definitely not the best person for this insurmountable task. Have him read Dune.