Uptown

A vital book on a vital issue
Suzette Mayr's accomplished fourth novel, Monoceros, tells the tale of a tormented gay teenager who takes his own life

by Quentin Mills-Fenn

With her fourth novel, Monoceros (Coach House Books), Suzette Mayr tackles gay teen bullying and suicide. It's an accomplished and sensitive take on a vital issue. It should be very widely read.

Susan Holbrook claims that Joy is So Exhausting, at least according to the title of her new collection of poems (Coach House Books). I don't know about that. When I finished the book, I was exhilarated.

These are poems about things such as motherhood, breakups and chocolate. The results are clever and dizzying. One poem blenderizes a guide to writing essays by Constance Rooke with notes written by her home-inspection consultant, leavened with excerpts from Leaves of Grass.

Troubled (Coach House Books), by Toronto's RM Vaughan, is a memoir, in verse, of a therapeutic relationship gone very bad. The protagonist seeks counselling from a psychiatrist, but the doctor is manipulative and controlling, and the two begin a sexual relationship.

Vaughan is brutally honest with himself ('Kitten stupid, I take the bait.') and scathing in describing his former doctor.

Oprah this ain't

In this book club, members not only discuss their books - they live them

Quentin Mills-Fenn

In The Girls Who Saw Everything, by writer/actor Sean Dixon, an all-women book club ends up in a war zone.

You see, the girls not only discuss their books, they like to act them out. They want to live great books; a replication from In the Skin of the Lion, for example, results in the near-hanging of one of the members.

From lyrics to prose

Hot Little Rocket frontman's first novel a look into small-town Alberta

Quentin Mills-Fenn

The Milk Chicken Bomb is a secret. It's a weapon whose mysteries are known to very few.

It's also the title of the deceptively ambitious new book by Andrew Wedderburn, of the Calgary band Hot Little Rocket.

Set in Toronto in the 1930s, The City Man offers romance, crime and plenty of atmosphere .... The book is written in staccato sentences – hell, staccato paragraphs ... I love stuff like that. Incidentally, much of the slang is taken from the work of a linguistics professor and smacks of authenticity. The City Man is packed with the sound of the times. It beautifully evokes a lost era, some other place, and a love that can never work.