National Post

There is a photograph you should see of an archaeological dig from the summer of 2006; four men and two women recline together on the side of a dirt hill. It is a summer day and by the shadows it looks about noon. Something about their pose suggests Whitman, or Vishnu dreaming the universe. Everyone is smiling in that recognizably genuine way from which we may infer that either someone has succeeded in deploying a joke, or that everyone is just, in this moment, actually happy. A little placard lies beneath them and reads BAWK-13 Class of 2006.

Suzette Mayr stomps all over cherished myths about the innate niceness and world-class tolerance of Canadians in her spellbinding and playful tragicomic novel Monoceros. A stylistic tour de force that depicts fuming volcanic emotions — rage, grief, regret — Monoceros is unsettling and harsh, a compelling dark vision of human nature that nevertheless tentatively points to the possibility of redemption.

A fire-breathing, tattooed flaneur takes the title of Sean Dixon’s second novel, but the eponymous character of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn feels like a MacGuffin for the real hero here: Toronto, but in the more general sense, cities, in all their messy, mixed-up glory. Nothing in the novel is as alive as the setting; like an aimless walk down a bustling street, the scenery is more interesting than where you end up.

As coming-of-age novels go, Cordelia Strube’s vivid portrayal of a teenage girl searching for her true mother places the genre firmly in the peculiar times in which we live. In their initiation into the world of adults, the literary adolescents created in what we like to think of as simpler times — the Holden Caulfields, Scout Finches and Huck Finns — moved from innocence to experience and from youthful idealism to budding pragmatism. The denouement became the tenuous reconciliation of disillusionment with hope, a fine balance that is necessary to sustain us all.