The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood The Testaments, Atwood’s long awaited sequel to her famous The Handmaid’s Tale, sheds further light on Gilead––the United States in the near future, after its transformation into a Christian theocracy. The story is comprised of multiple viewpoints: a Canadian outsider, the daughter of one of Gilead’s elite, and one privy to its…
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Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro When reading, I tend to explore everything laid out on and within the copy of the book at hand before getting into the story proper––you know, synopses, blurbs, forewords, introductions. And I’m aware of vast differences of opinion about how you should and should not proceed in this respect, especially with regard…
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Moon of the Crusted Snow

by Waubgeshig Rice Moon of the Crusted Snow explores an apocalypse from the viewpoint of a secluded Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario. As it’s already only loosely attached to metropolitan Canada in the south––cell and internet service is relatively new and patchy, at best; the recent connection to the Hydro grid is just as reliable,…
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The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer I find it interesting to consider what influences your opinion of a book while reading. The big thing that spurred this thought along was a passage in The Amateurs where the protagonist, Marie, realizes how starkly unique she is just before discussing architecture influenced by architecture influenced by architecture. (I won’t directly…
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The Handmaid’s Tale

by Margaret Atwood It’s interesting to me when similar techniques employed by different authors elicit vastly different responses from me. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is reminiscent of one such technique I loved from Omar El Akkad’s American War, in that the whole final chapter reads like a transcript from a…
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Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley In the future, everybody’s happy except Bernard Marx. Despite the selective breeding and the constant conditioning throughout his entire life, he doesn’t seem to fit in. (He prefers solitude to company, and he’s hardly promiscuous, so he’s quite a weirdo in this “ideal” society. People gossip that his problems stem from alcohol…
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American War

by Omar El Akkad In a story like American War, you can see how an author’s experience comes out in the narrative, adding a sense of legitimacy to the whole thing. And who could be better than El Akkad, an award-winning journalist reporting on war, terror, and civil unrest, to tell the story of the…
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