Book Reviews – 2025 Authors
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John Vaillant | Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast
Reviewed by: Howard StewartDenman is lucky to have John Vaillant back with us for this year’s Readers and Writers Festival (July 18-20). A superb writer of non-fiction and fiction, John was last with us in 2016. This time he’ll talk about his latest book, Fire Weather – The Making of a Beast.
“Fire Weather” is a compelling page turner though its story is not easy to digest. For most of us, reading “Fire Weather” is akin to being a heavy smoker in 1958 and reading warnings from exasperated medical professionals. Doctors were pulling their hair out, giving people ever greater detail about the disastrous health effects of smoking. But they couldn’t complete with the endless slick ads about the charms of smoking. Big tobacco also worked hard to impede government efforts to interfere with their lucrative industry. The profits rolled in for decades more. Yet this astute rearguard action by the North American tobacco industry look quaint, artisanal, in comparison with the campaign waged by hydrocarbon producers to keep the good times rolling, despite overwhelming evidence of the devastating climate change their industry is driving. Evidence the industry itself has been aware of for a very long time. But Vaillant doesn’t get to this part of the story until the second half of his book. The first half is a gripping moment by moment account of the unstoppable wildfire that gutted much of Fort McMurray in May 2016.
Notwithstanding his account of the damage being wrought by the hydrocarbon industry, Vaillant ensures we sympathize with the citizens of Fort McMurray. Working at the epicenter of Canada’s heavy oil industry and one of the world’s most prolific sources of CO2, Fort Mac’s people waxed rich on the proceeds of the destructive, CO2-intensive tarsands operations. But in May 2016, they were caught in a nightmare, just more names on the rapidly growing list of climate change victims and refugees. Unlike many such victims and refugees though, they were eventually well taken care of.
It’s the juxtaposition of Fort Mac, victim of accelerating climate change, with Fort Mac, heart of the tarsands, that makes this book extraordinary. This and Vaillant’s skill as a writer and researcher. Both explain the acclaim the book has received.
Timothy Taylor | The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf
Reviewed by: Brad HornickThere is something sacramental in the offering of a lovingly prepared meal. Beyond nutrition and artistry, beyond even taste, lies a kind of communion. A dish made with patience and plated with intention can nourish more than the body; it can feed deeper hungers: for connection, for meaning, for a fleeting sense of being whole.
Think of the movie, Babette’s Feast, where a table of austere villagers, long resigned to emotional self-denial, find themselves quietly undone by the opulence of a single meal. Bitterness gives way to butter; regret is tempered by wine. Generosity becomes redemption. Babette offers no explanation, but through her culinary artistry, her guests rediscover grace.
Timothy Taylor’s The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf unfolds on this same terrain of lavish descriptions of food as transformation, but here the feast is laced with ambition, rivalry, and the corrosive pressures of fame. Like Babette, Taylor’s chefs conjure dishes that border on the sublime, pulling their diners into moments of raw intensity. But unlike Babette, their artistry is not anonymous nor freely given. It’s transactional, performed under the glare of social media, driven by ego, and steeped in a culture that both exalts and consumes its creators.
At the centre of the novel is the volatile triangle of Teo, Magnus, and Frankie, three men bound by shared history and entangled in a web of lust, loyalty, betrayal, and ambition. Their dynamic forms the emotional core of the novel, each orbit colliding in increasingly combustible ways. Friendship is strained by competition; sex becomes both intimacy and leverage; betrayal arrives under the guise of care, journalism, or self-preservation.
Taylor writes with the precision of a master chef carving through sinew, each chapter exposing the layered tensions between substance and spectacle, love and exploitation. Around the main trio is a constellation of lovers, rivals, influencers, and journalists, each marked, often scorched, by proximity to the flame. These are people hungry not just for food, but to be seen, to matter, to be redeemed. In a world where careers hinge on viral moments, those desires mutate into insatiable appetites.
If there is a tragedy at the heart of Magic Wolf, it’s less about a chef’s fall from grace and more about the quiet devastation of human connection, how love bends under the weight of image, how loyalty is eroded by ambition. Taylor’s characters are not judged for their flaws; rather, they are rendered with psychological realism. Their contradictions are treated with dignity: capable of tenderness and cruelty, shame and bravado, they navigate a culture where the personal and performative are indistinguishable.
It is fitting, then, that the novel closes not with another elaborate dish, but with Teo walking the Camino de Compostela. The prose shifts, pared down, stripped of ornamentation as Teo submits to the long physical ritual of reckoning. In place of culinary artifice is something ascetic: silence, fatigue, the sober repetition of steps across Spain. After so much indulgence, he walks. That’s all. And in that quiet act of movement, something deeper stirs, a slow unmaking of ego, a stubborn claim on selfhood.
Here, redemption is not theatrical. It is not found in confession, or even forgiveness. It arrives in the form of endurance, atonement without audience, pain without spectacle. As one passage reflects:
“Nobody talked about religion, faith, metaphysics. None of that. Nobody said because they slept with a good friend’s wife and then their father died and then the friend killed himself when he was accused of rape… People didn’t say this kind of thing because it would suggest the pilgrimage was not really your own doing… That you were somehow forced to do it… driven across the land with no idea if you’d end up anywhere better than wherever you’d been when you lost control of your own affairs.”
In Babette’s Feast, healing comes through beauty shared. In Magic Wolf, it comes, if at all, through stripping away illusion. Both stories orbit the same aching question: What does it take to move from ruin to renewal? From isolation to connection?
Whether by spoon or by step, both Babette and Teo offer an answer. To give without expectation. To endure without applause. To rediscover, in the quiet aftermath of ambition, something that tastes like grace.
Drew Hayden Taylor | Cold
Reviewed by: Jane EdwardsCold is a thoroughly enjoyable read written by Drew Hayden Taylor. Part horror, part mystery and much dry humour, this is a book that was hard to put down.
The tale opens inside a Cessna airplane carrying three people, the pilot, Merle, a journalist, Fabiola and a young teen, over Northern Ontario. The plane has mechanical trouble and crashes down in the northern wilderness, killing the teen boy, badly breaking Fabiola’s leg and leaving only Merle able to search for help.
After their rescue, Fabiola sets out to tell and sell the book of her story of survival in a tour to cities across Canada.
The reader meets several other seemly disconnected characters along the way. There is Paul North a professional hockey player and a right winger for the Indigenous Hockey League. Once a talented player, his career is faltering due to age, drink and heavy partying.
Elmore Trent, is a tenured university professor of Indigenous Literature in Toronto. Married to Sarah and carrying on an affair with student, Katie, Elmore has lost the drive for his work and has disconnected from his past. Only a few times has he visited the Indigenous community where his parents’ house is located as his world of academia has seemly pulled him back from his childhood roots.
The horrific attack and brutal dismemberment of a student in the city starts the mystery. It is difficult to imagine such a vicious attack made by a human. Could it be a wild animal or is it something beyond the natural world?
I highly recommend Cold. Drew Hayden Taylor’s has written a well-crafted and entertaining read that intertwines a modern tale with Indigenous mythology.
Drew is one of the Readers and Writers Festival’s invited authors for 2025. He has written numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, is a journalist and an award-winning playwright. The festival looks forward to welcoming and meeting Drew to Denman this summer.
Adam Shoalts | Where the Falcon Flies
Reviewed by: Jane EdwardsTake a modern-day explorer, a Nova Craft canoe and the sighting of a peregrine falcon and what you get is the start of 3400 kilometre adventure journey to the Arctic Ocean in search of the nesting cliffs of the falcon.
One spring morning, from his home near Long Point on the shores of Lake Erie, Adam Shoalts spied a peregrine falcon flying overhead. The graceful bird was on its spring migration to its nesting site on the steep cliffs of the Torngat Mountains of northern Labrador. Adam was fascinated by the spectacle of a Southern Ontario bird heading thousands of miles north to its breeding locale. The metaphorical link between those of us living in Canada’s south to the Canadian arctic, in spite of the distance between the two, was striking.
This raptor sighting was the spark of an idea. “Why not get out my canoe, grab my back pack and follow the falcon all the way to the Arctic?” The result of this was a 3400 km journey and the telling of Shoalts’ story, Where the Falcon Flies.
Shoalts chronicles his four month long adventure in detail, describing the terrain, wildlife observations and ecosystems he travels through. He shares his knowledge of Canada’s history as he paddles through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. The reader imagines the dangers as he describes hair-raising near misses with freighters on the St. Lawrence and massive boulders in the whitewater rapids on the St. George River. He tells of his frequent of lack of food and fresh water but also of the generosity of strangers he encounters who offered food and aid. His story is told in fascinating detail and humour.
I followed his journey on Google Maps, zeroing in on the rivers, lakes and landmarks mentioned plus the paths of the rivers he paddled. I was mentally with him on his trip and so grateful to be reading this book from the comfort of an armchair.
Where the Falcon Flies is a fascinating story of the vastness of our country, a man, his canoe and a peregrine falcon.
The Readers and Writers Festival is delighted to welcome Adam Shoalts to this year’s festival.
Janika Oza | A History of Burning
Reviewed by: Jane EdwardsJanika Oza’s first novel tells the story of four generations of an Indo/Ugandan family. Based on her own family’s history along with stories from other community members, she tells a story of hardship, resilience and the human need for a home and a community of peace and security.
The novel opens in 1898 in Porbandar, India where we meet 14 year old Pirbhai as he searches for work to provide for his widowed mother and poverty-stricken siblings. With one life changing decision in response to an unscrupulous recruiter, he finds himself in Mombasa, Kenya working as a labourer in the building of a railway for a colonial British company. Eventually Pirbhai finds his way to work in a small shop in Mombasa, and through quick learning and intelligence wins the trust of the owner and marries into the family. The young couple move to Kampala, Uganda where the story of the family continues for two generations until 1972 and Idi Amin’s brutal forced migration of Indo/Ugandans.
There are many protagonists in this story as the reader meets each generation. Each family member has their own goals and dreams and we hear the stories and thoughts of each member, their struggles to find a safe home and to belong.
This novel is a page turner. I felt a strong relationship with many of the characters while reading their thoughts and dreams. Like people everywhere, this family yearns not only to survive but to belong, to find community and a home of peace. Janika Oza has written a powerful story of the effects of racism, colonialism leading to forced migration. This is a book well worth reading for both the individual stories of each family member and how major historical events affected the family.
The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival is delighted that Janika Oza is coming to the 2025 festival this coming July. She will be here to present her novel and join other invited Canadian authors to be part of a Main Stage discussion group. We are all looking forward to welcoming her to Denman Island.
Lenore Newman | Lost Feast – Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food
Reviewed by: Melanie HewsonThe cover of Lenore Newman’s 2019 book, “Lost Feast”, says it’s “an informed and witty look at foods we have literally loved to death and what that might mean for the future of food”. I love it when the cover notes are exactly what I find in reading it!
Lenore’s writing style and personal notes on what she calls her ‘extinction dinners’, along with lots of history about where different foods originate, keep a tough topic “easy to digest” (sorry, couldn’t help myself).
The book covers meat, fish, dairy, grains, vegetables, fruits and even spices. Newman talks about how we can manage the bounty of foods still available to us, and put an end to the “culinary extinction” of the foods we love. Her delightful footnotes are a bonus.
While the focus of “Lost Feast” is mostly on modern North American food habits and food security, the author also takes us back through history and to other locations to look at the origins of meat, dairy and food crops. She gives just the right amount of statistics to bring home the impact we have on the species we eat, and even on the insects involved in our food production. At the same time, it’s not Chicken Little. There’s lots of good information on how we can learn from our history and what technology can do for us.
This book is a great read for both the environmentally concerned and the food lovers among us. Newman gives us clear explanations of the science and history while respecting the reader’s intelligence. It is well researched and clearly laid out, with just the right blend of information and wit. I am looking forward to hearing what this author has to say at our Readers and Writers festival this summer.
Sarah Leavitt | Something, Not Nothing
Reviewed by: Jo ClarkSarah Leavitt’s book Something Not Nothing, is as intimate as reading someone’s diary, albeit with their permission. It is a beautiful and gut-wrenching pictorial and verse of the depths of love, grief and a semblance of recovery, or life 2.0.
At the beginning of the book, Leavitt, an artist and cartoonist, states in the last weeks before her partner Donimo’s death that the multitude of questions and sought answers could only be recorded in small booklets of folded scrap paper.
The notion of all the forbidden thoughts, darkness, distress and yearning in one bound book was overwhelming. Thankfully for readers Leavitt used art to document the journey over the two years post death to come to the realization that both Sarah and partner Donimo both began their solitary journeys at the time of Donimo’s death “to lands that neither of us knew about.”
At the beginning of the book the panel boxes of the comics are black and white, separate and distanced from each other with very distinct and heavy lines containing each box. Like the individual pieces of folded scrap paper, each box tightly containing one image, one overwhelming thought.
Through the course of this beautiful book, Leavitt’s journey, healing is witnessed in the introduction of colour, animals, nature and loved ones. The containing lines of the panels soften, panels bump up against each other, images cross panels and grow into pages. Readers heal with Leavitt on this journey of creativity and love.
We are lucky that Sarah will be joining us at this year’s Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival, July 18-20.
Fiona Tinwei Lam | Odes and Laments
Reviewed by: Helen MasonAbout the Author: Fiona Tinwei Lam has written three collections of poetry, a children’s book and is co-editor of two collections of non-fiction. Her work appears in over forty anthologies. She has recently finished a three-year term as Vancouver’s sixth poet laureate. Her award-winning poetry videos, made in collaboration with others, have appeared in festivals internationally. She teaches at SFU’s Continuing Studies.
About the Book: One of the themes in Fiona’s book that sticks out for me are the beauty to be found in everyday objects, such as Pencil, Utility Pole, Lemon, Matches. In her poem Chopsticks, Fiona describes her grandfather teaching her, in her childhood, to use chopsticks by picking marbles, one by one, out of a bowl … not easy, I tried.
Another theme – and this is where the title word Laments comes in – is the ubiquity of plastic in our modern world. Many of her plastic poems are graphic, such as Consumery, Mountains, Swallow and Quench. Her use of typography in these poems gives the reader visual as well as verbal imagery.
PS: Each year our Readers and Writers Festival invites a prominent Canadian poet. We are delighted that Fiona will be this year’s poet.
Caroline Adderson | A Way to Be Happy
Reviewed by: Janice HaywardAbout the Author: Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels and three collections of short stories, as well as many books for young readers. Her work has received numerous award nominations and her awards include three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, the Marion Engel award for mid-career achievement and a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. She teaches in the Writing and Publishing Program at SFU.
About the Book: For one week I read one story a day from “A Way To Be Happy” by Caroline Adderson. It wasn’t a plan. I started, thinking the book would be my weekend read. The first story was layered, disturbing but humane, with characters that lingered in the mind. I put the book aside to ponder. Short stories are mostly too short for me, and I didn’t want to move on from these characters too quickly.
Picking up the book next day, I read the second story. It was centered around a hospital test/experience, with family memories fragmenting and kaleidoscoping back through a lifetime. Lots to think about there. And so it went, throughout a slightly extended week.
Each day I admired Caroline’s skillful story telling, presenting of unusual perspectives, and engaging, varied characters, but also profoundly appreciated her evocation of times and places of this amazing west coast I am lucky to call home.
PS: Caroline has led our “Writers Week” at the Readers and Writers Festival a few times in past years. We are lucky to have her back at this year’s festival, where she will talk about her writing and lead one of our half day writing workshops.
