Book review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time
By Matt Haig
(Published in Great Britain by Canon Gate, In Canada: 2018 from HarperAvenue)

Whenever I travel to the English-speaking world, I always check out the bestseller lists and the bookstores. My favourite place to travel (and to find books) is London. I was there this summer and I discovered a new author – Matt Haig.
He’s got a new book out in the United Kingdom called How to Stop Time. It’s not being released in Canada until next February, but I highly recommend it.
I was stopped short by the title. Who hasn’t wished they could stop time? I certainly have. I wish it almost every day when I’m plowed under by deadlines and emails I have to return and tasks I have to complete. I also wish it whenever I am struck by happiness and how things are good in the moment. Could things just stay like this forever?
So, based on the title, I had to buy this book. I’m glad I did. It’s about a man who ages slowly – very slowly. The book opens like this: “I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong. I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old. To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents’ room, on the third floor of a small French chateau that used to be my home.”
So it’s a fun book, based on a fanciful idea, that allows the author to play with a storyline that spans several centuries and a narrator that has seen it all. It’s also a love story, although the narrator’s love died in the time of Shakespeare. But they had a daughter, a daughter like him, who ages slowly, and who is probably still alive. They’ve lost each other, but his quest to find her is the heart of this story.
Haig is an interesting writer. He’s down to Earth and tells a quick, catchy story, but at the same time, he quotes Sartre and Montaigne and includes Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald as bit players in his novel to magical effect.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere

Everything I've Never Told You
Celeste Ng
Penguin
I’ve discovered a new author to love, something that always makes me smile.
Her name is Celeste Ng and I’ve just power-read her two novels over Christmas.
The first, published in 2014, is Everything I’ve Never Told You. It’s about a mixed-race family – the father is Chinese, the mother is white – whose teenage daughter goes missing.
The second is Little Fires Everywhere, which is about the upper middle class Richardson family living in the utopian suburban American community of Shaker Heights. A single mother and her teenage daughter move to town, serving as the catalyst for all kinds of shenanigans in the life of the four Richardson teenagers. A sub-plot deals with a wealthy white family who is trying to adopt an Asian baby who was abandoned by her mother, but who now wants her back.
Both novels are excellent. They are pitch perfect stories about today’s American families – the secrets they keep, the tensions they feel and the pressures that abound.
Ng is a talented writer, with on-the-mark pace, taut suspense, unforgettable characters and realistic situations that will get under readers’ skins.
She is adept a keeping the present-day story going, while filling the reader in on the back stories which are full of historical and modern contexts ripped from the headlines.
Ng grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a planned community, so she’s familiar with her setting. She graduated from Harvard University and studied writing at the University of Michigan. Both books have been lauded as best books of the year by many publications and have received other awards, all well deserved.
I’m looking forward to Ng’s next novel, and expect readers will be too.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

The Rules of Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Simon and Schuster
Alice Hoffman is an amazing author – if you haven’t read her, you should. She is a lovely writer, whose books balance magic and reality and the special mix of the two that is real life.
The Rules of Magic is a prequel to her 1995 book Practical Magic, which was made into a 1998 movie of the same name starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Practical Magic is perhaps Alice Hoffman’s best-known book, but she has written more than 30 others. It’s a testament to her longevity and persistence as an author that she has now written a prequel more than 20 years after the original book.
The books in between are nearly all stunners. I’ve read most of them and loved them all. My favourites are The Red Garden – a sweeping family saga that spans more than 300 years written in 2011 – and Blue Diary – another family story about lies and hidden pasts that was written in 2001. The Dovekeepers, also written in 2011, gets honorable mention for its treatment of the siege of Masada 2000 years ago, as told from the women’s perspective.
The Rules of Magic is the backstory to Practical Magic – it tells the story one generation earlier. In Practical Magic, Jet and Frances are elderly aunties; in The Rules of Magic, they are children.
Their family – the Owens family – has been cursed since 1620, when an ancestor was charged with being a witch. Jet and Frances (and their brother Vincent) are children of the 1960s and their story mostly takes place in New York city.
All three children have special talents. Frances can draw birds to her hands with her mind, Jet reads people’s thoughts and Vincent has all sorts of hidden skills. When Frances turns 17, all three children spend the summer with their Aunt Isabelle, who lives in the same Massachusetts small-town house where Practical Magic is set. Isabelle teaches them “the rules of magic.”
I can’t give away much more without spoiling the story. Suffice it to say, if you trust Alice Hoffman to take you away with her words to a brilliant world where anything is possible, you will enjoy the ride.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach
By Jennifer Egan
Scribner

This latest from Jennifer Egan is an entirely different kettle of fish from her last novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
That’s not to say Manhattan Beach isn’t good – it is – but only to say don’t expect more like the Goon Squad with its time shifting and groovy alternative story forms.
Manhattan Beach is a more straightforward novel; time is quite firmly rooted here.
It is the story of Anna Kerrigan, who grows up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. The novel begins when she is 12 years old and carries readers through her young adult years during the Second World War.
In the beginning, Anna lives in a workaday apartment with her mother, father and disabled sister Lydia. She often accompanies her dad when he goes to work – his work appears to be as some sort of messenger for a union. They visit the homes of other men, who often invite him in for a drink while Anna plays with their children. On one memorable evening, they visit the home of Dexter Styles, a mysterious man Anna learns more about as the story progresses.
Insights into the lives of New York gangsters, showgirls and nightclubs play a starring role in this novel, as does the research Egan did about the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the pursuit of diving.
The Second World War opened up opportunities for women to work in jobs previously occupied only by men and deep sea diving to repair ships in the navy yard was one of them. Anna, who finds work sorting through bits and pieces of ship hardware, longs to be a diver herself.
The story and the setting are interesting, but it’s Egan’s thought processes and turns of phrase that make Manhattan Beach a standout.
Here’s a passage told from Dexter’s perspective, about how his respectable father-in-law convinced Dexter to marry his pregnant daughter, and managed to get Dexter to make concessions.
“And later … Dexter could only marvel at the sleight of hand whereby his father-in-law had jimmied himself out of a straitjacket with enough leverage to extract promises. Houdini couldn’t have topped it: his daughter was knocked up and refused to have it taken care of. Had Arthur withheld his consent, she’d have run away with Dexter: a disgrace. The old man hadn’t had enough room to scratch his nose, yet he’d bargained as if the advantage were all his – intuiting with eerie perspicacity that, although criminal, Dexter was a man of his word.”
The details, the visuals, the emotions and the intensity is Egan’s calling card.
Egan, as well as writing A Visit From the Goon Squad, has written four other books, including The Keep, Emerald City, Look at Me and The Invisible Circus.
This is a beautifully written novel, with a solid plot to back it up.
Jennifer Egan will be appearing at the Vancouver Writers Fest in a special event on October 25.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Vancouver school trustee candidates get a chance to speak out Oct. 3

Candidates vying for one of nine spots on the Vancouver School Board will be able to speak out on Oct. 3.
I'm going to be hosting a candidates' forum on Tuesday evening from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at John Oliver secondary school, 530 E. 41st Ave.
Candidates will be answering questions posed by parents, who want to know trustees' views on everything from school closures to support for students with special needs. There will be short answers, yes/no questions, multiple choice questions and longer form questions, and every candidate will get a chance to speak out.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Metro’s 2017 Homeless Count shows many homeless people grew up in foster care

Metro Vancouver’s 2017 Homeless Count asked homeless people whether they had been in ministry care in their childhood. It is the first time this question has been asked and the results are astounding.
One-fifth of all of the homeless people said they had either previously been in ministry care or were in care when the survey was held. Of the people surveyed who were younger than 19, nearly one-quarter said they were currently in care, while one-fifth said they had previously been in care. Fully 38 per cent of the people aged 19 to 24 said they had been in ministry care.
In British Columbia, foster children and other young people in government “age out” when they are 19 and their supports are cut off.
As the Vancouver Sun found in its 2014 series, From Care to Where, when children in care are cut off at 19, they face high rates of homelessness, unemployment, poverty, substance abuse and incarceration.
The B.C. government has pledged to create a “comprehensive program” of supports for children aging out of foster care. To date, it has created a program to ensure all young people who have been in the care of the government for more than two years will be able to attend one of B.C.’s 25 public colleges and universities tuition-free.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Education minister speaks out on funding, staffing, school space

B.C.'s new education minister Rob Fleming was the education critic for several years before taking over the portfolio in July. With just over a month on the job, he talked about funding to meet the new contract requirements, challenges hiring new teachers and space concerns.

Q. When schools let out in June, some districts said they didn’t have adequate funding to hire the teachers needed to implement the restored contracts. What has been done to address this?
A. We have worked out arrangements where we now have a common understanding of what the language means in terms of a monetary commitment. There were a couple of districts that were reluctant to hire because they had not had confirmation during the time we had the Liberal government and then no government for a period of time.
I can’t make a funding announcement today, but I can tell you that additional money will be included in the budget we table in September. That budget has enhancements in it that will fully fund the memorandum of agreement and that has made a commitment on new enrolment, which was a grey area under the previous government.
Q. So there will definitely be new money for education in this budget?
A. Yes. There will be the resources to properly fund all the commitments, whether they’re by court order or because it’s the right thing to do. We take the Supreme Court decision very seriously and we also see it as a great opportunity to fund some of the priorities we have around more one-on-one time for kids and for making classes smaller in the early grades.
Q. Some districts are struggling to hire enough teachers. What will happen if they can’t get people in place for September?
A. We are hoping districts will have the teaching staff they need. Some of them are going to be depleting their teacher on call list to do that. It’s really uneven out there. Some districts have expressed a high degree of confidence that they have met their hiring requirements and that what has been quite a Herculean task has been made manageable, but there are other districts that are struggling to meet that.
Q. What happens if they can’t get teachers in place?
A. Where hiring cannot happen, there is a process where a teacher and the teachers’ association can reach an agreement with the school board to apply a remedy. They will find local solutions that work for the student and the teacher.
Q. Will the remedies all be funded?
A. Yes. We realize there is a funding risk attached to grievances and remedies that need to be provided. We think we have arrived at some additional funding that will cover those contingencies.
Q. Were any childcare centres in B.C. displaced by the new smaller class sizes?
A. Yes, there are four districts reporting space pressures on childcare facilities based in their schools – Vancouver, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, Coquitlam and Greater Victoria. The restored contract requires 550 more classrooms across the province and perhaps up to one-third of those will be in portables. Not all of those are new portables, some will be renovated.
School districts are aware of how valuable childcare centres are, but where they face extreme space pressures, they have had to pursue relocation. I think this happened to 14 centres in the entire province.
There are two of the 14 in Maple Ridge- Pitt Meadows that are still looking for space at this time, but they are working with the school district or they may have been sold or amalgamated.
Q. The planned $10-a-day childcare program will require many more spaces, correct?
A. We’re going to have to create a whole bunch of new spaces, some maybe on school district property or municipal property. We will look for free land from all levels of government.
When new schools are constructed, we will be looking at neighbourhood learning centres with childcare spaces in them. It makes sense, when you’re building a new school – and there are a number of them that have already been approved – that we make sure where there is a demonstrated need for childcare spaces that (we capitalize on the) opportunity.
Q. How do you like your new role so far?
A. It’s way better than being in opposition, I can tell you that. We get to do a lot more. They left us some crazy messes, there is no doubt about that. I thought I was quite reasonably aware of the broken commitments they made on seismic upgrades, but really the new school construction and the poor facility asset conditions in so many districts are going to require a lot more of my attention on the capital side.
Obviously, any minister of education wants to keep their attention on student outcomes and how students are doing and sharing the successes of districts that are doing innovative things. But overcrowded schools are really up close and personal. I visited Surrey last Friday and saw a couple of schools I hadn’t seen before. It’s hard to catch up when very little has been done over a 15-year period. We can do it, if everybody is going to be prepared to move a lot quicker.
Q. So I guess we can expect lots of capital funding announcements?
A. Yes, you can. A big part of it is just the ministry following through. They’ve often approved things and then pulled them back. They’ve underspent their capital budgets, meagre as they were compared to previous decades, in some cases by 30 to 40 per cent per year. As lots of experienced people who have worked in the civil service or at the political level have told me, it’s not so much the budget, but getting things out the door. So that’s got a lot of my attention.

This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tracy Sherlock writes about education and social issues. She can be reached at tracy.sherlock@gmail.com.

Book Review: Someone You Love is Gone

Someone You Love is Gone
By Gurjinder Basran
Penguin Random House

Gurjinder Basran grew up in North Delta, British Columbia. Her first novel, Everything was Good-bye, was the winner of both the Great BC Novel Search, in 2010, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award, in 2011.
Everything Was Good-bye was the story of a young woman raised in Metro Vancouver in a family that immigrated to Canada from India. Her rebellion from her family’s traditional ways was the heart of the novel, which was in many ways a classic coming-of-age story.
In Someone You Love is Gone, Basran goes deeper. This time around, the main character is Simran, the mother of a grown daughter whose own mother has just died. Simran is struggling to cope with the loss of her mother, particularly because there are family secrets. And Simran may be the only person left who remembers those secrets.
The secret concerns her brother, who is estranged from her family, and who may or may not remember a past life.
Simran’s marriage is in trouble, perhaps only because of the death of her mother, but perhaps for deeper reasons.
Basran has done a really nice job with this novel – she has captured a culture and a tone that Canadians will recognize, but that they would also do well to learn more about. But that’s just an added bonus in a story that would resonate if it were about any culture.
The story is split into three timelines – the present, Simran’s childhood, and her mother’s early adulthood — and set in both Canada and India, This heartbreaking and haunting story includes love, loss, family honour and family rejection; it will make you both laugh and cry.
Someone You Love is Gone is a quick read – I read it in a single afternoon, but it stayed with me much longer.
Basran is going to be talking about her book at the Vancouver Writers Festival this fall, in two events, one about marriages the other about ghosts.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor

Sycamore
By Bryn Chancellor
HarperCollins Canada

Sycamore is an instant classic. It's a whodunnit/coming-of-age/rural Americana novel that breaks your heart and keeps you turning pages.

The story opens with the discovery of human bones in a dry desert ravine in rural Arizona in a town called Sycamore.

Everyone realizes immediately that the bones must belong to Jess Winters, a 17-year-old girl who disappeared 18 years before.

The story bounces back and forth between the time surrounding Winters' disappearance and the present day as her long-suffering mother waits for confirmation that the bones belong to her daughter.

Readers are taken on a journey that includes themes like teenage friendship, forbidden love, broken families and more.

This is a first novel for Bryn Chancellor, who is a teacher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She previously wrote a story collection called When Are You Coming Home.

Throughout Sycamore, the characters are relatable and accurate -- the relationships ring true in both their joy and their despair. Readers will keep hoping for a different ending for Winters, even as they can see the tragedy about to unfold.

tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan

Saints for All Occasions
By J. Courtney Sullivan
Alfred A. Knopf

I read Saints for All Occasions in a single day.

It's 335 pages and I was shocked and saddened to find I had reached the end.

That says something about the story -- it captured me and I couldn't put it down.

The story starts with a mother getting a phone call in 2009 that her 50-year-old son has died in a car accident.

Next, it backtracks to 1957, when two young girls, Nora and Theresa Flynn, are leaving Ireland to emigrate to the United States. They've grown up on a farm in the west of Ireland, where people are poor and there isn't a lot of hope for the future. They're leaving to find a better life in America; Nora is also to be married to Charlie, her Irish neighbour, who moved to Boston before her.

From there on, the book alternates timelines and switches perspective, from Nora to Theresa and between all four of Nora's grown children.
There are subplots about adoption, homosexuality and Catholicism, but at its heart this is a book about secrets and the love between a mother and her children.

J. Courtney Sullivan also wrote the bestselling novels Commencement, Maine and The Engagements. The Engagements is soon to be made into a movie and was named a Best Book of the Year by Time Magazine and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn.
This is a beautiful novel that captures late 20th-century Ireland and Boston and reveals how much life has changed in the past 50 years. Sullivan captures perfectly the dynamics of the family and how what we don't know can affect reality.

tracy.sherlock@gmail.com