Singing the Body Electric

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Figures Without Facial Features on the Cover
✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Set at a School/University

The Whole Truth by Kit Pearson and its sequel And Nothing but the Truth are a pair of middle grade historical novels set in British Columbia in the 1930s.

The main character is Polly Brown, who begins the story age ten, relocating from Winnipeg to the Gulf Islands to live with her grandmother following the death of her father—an event that's the subject of secrecy between her and her older sister Maud. Shortly after arriving at their grandmother's, Maud leaves for boarding school, leaving Polly to adjust alone to her new life on a small island and deal with the carrying the secret by herself. The second book picks up a couple of years later, when Polly also needs to leave the island for secondary schooling and struggles to adjust to being away while more big changes come to her family.

I read a few of Kit Pearson's books as a kid, and when she came up in conversation recently with a friend, I decided to check out some of her more recent novels. I don't know how her older books would hold up to a re-read for me, but I ended up having a mixed reaction to these two.

They were largely pleasant reads. They're well-written, and if spending time in upper middle-class circles in 1930s western Canada appeals, there are a lot of detailed descriptions of clothes, food, and rural seaside life to enjoy. As someone with an interest in that part of the world but who doesn't have family history there, I appreciated this look into the period.

These books feel like they're in the tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, A Little Princess, Heidi, etc.—stories I associate with girls changing the world around them, whether through action or because of their positivity. But that's not really the deal with Polly, who's a very passive character and doesn't seem to bring anything unexpected to her new community. It's also not a Secret Garden or Goodnight, Mr. Tom situation where it felt like Polly herself was changed by her new home, aside from benefiting from more money and opportunities. Things just kind of work out for her while the least dramatic version of eventful situations unfold around her.

I think what particularly didn't land for me was this sense of complacency with regard to the arc of the moral universe. Polly is shown recognizing injustice and then just...never does anything about it. Her grandmother racially discriminates against a neighbour, and Polly disagrees but then lets it lie. We don't see her ever interacting with the neighbour, or even with the neighbour's son, who's a schoolmate. She has the instinct to give money to a homeless man, but then stops when her teacher scolds her and doesn't help anyone again. She never takes a stand or makes any sacrifice, aside from the one time when it's strongly self-serving, but other characters praise her for seeing the world clearly with her artist's eye, in a way that implies that just seeing is enough and that things will work themselves out over time (at least for those who happen to be the loved one of someone with money and property).

While I was reading, I often found myself thinking how glad I was that the author was avoiding the most predictable conflicts I kept thinking were coming, but by the end of the second book, I looked back and felt like something critical was missing. I don't need big culminating moments in historical coming-of-age novels—I absolutely love A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and could write a whole essay on how it shares a sliver of the same flaw but how all of its positives outweigh that for me—but I needed just a little something more to care about these characters and their fortunes.

( An Excerpt )

ETA: Spoilers in the comments

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: First Person POV

The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson is a 2019 crime novella (with a touch of magical realism) about a bylaw enforcement officer, M, who finds a body while investigating an abandoned chesterfield. The incident leaves M shaken and drawn into more than one mystery as the chesterfield keeps appearing and a regular on M's route disappears. But the book is less interested in answering "whodunnit" than it is with looking at characters' decisions about getting involved in crime and drama and how priorities around family, romantic relationships, career, community, truth and justice can shift the usual narrative shape of the genre.

This is one of those books that I want to take apart with a little eyeglass screwdriver to see how it works. It's an absolute marvel of efficiency. It's only 99 pages (that exact number being by design, I suspect) with large text and several half-page chapters, but it's packed with story. It covers a lot of ground without feeling like it's moving as fast as it is. We get to know so much about who M is as a person but from a deep enough position that we skip a lot of high-level markers or exposition. This story is built on implication and inference, and the reader's principally assigned to solving the protagonist rather than the plot.

I really enjoyed this one, and I'm looking forward to checking out the author's other work.

( An Excerpt )

Mitji—Let's Eat: Mi'kmaq Recipes from Sikniktuk by Margaret Augustine and Lauren Beck, copyright held by the Elsipogtog First Nation, is a 2024 collection of recipes and foodways from the Sikniktuk region of what's colonially known as New Brunswick in Canada.

Normally, a cookbook wouldn't be something I read cover to cover, but this book takes a storytelling approach and has features on community members and information on Mi'kmaq foodways throughout it. The recipes are a mix of nostalgic for me (a lot of it similar to my grandmother's cooking) and brand new (rooted in ingredients or preparations specific to the region). They're all straightforward to prepare, and while some feature country meat that not everyone might have access to, the usual substitutions are easy to make.

Like the last book I read, this is divided into sections by season. If you're in spitting distance on the east coast of North America, this should feature some relevant in-season recipes. If you're not, there are still a lot of recipes based around staples available in many parts of the world—or they might just provide a glimpse into food traditions interestingly different from your own.

( An Excerpt - Blueberry Cake )

(I made a half-batch of this, and it was really good!)

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: YA/Children's

Wildwood is a 2011 children's novel by Colin Meloy, also known for his work as frontman for the Decemberists, with illustrations by Carson Ellis. It follows the adventures of two pretty much contemporary American children, Prue and Curtis, as they set off into the woods to rescue Prue's baby brother (who was carried off by crows) and discover a secret civilization of people and talking animals who have lived in the Impassable Wilderness for centuries and are now locked in a brewing war for control over it.

Things that would have made me love this when I was a kid:

• The world-within-a-world element. A magical society living just outside a regular city? Hell, yeah.
• Rich and vivid language, with an appealing narrative voice.
• Its worldbuilding (although I'm going to put a pin in this), which generally walks a nice line between whimsy and grit, with rules that establish themselves with a light touch.
• The length. This is a brick by children's book standards. It's well-paced and the sort of a thing that could keep a voracious reader busy all the way to their next trip to the library.
• Its sensibility about the independence of kid protagonists in the real world.
• The nomadic society of bandits and their king.
• The illustrations, particularly the full-colour inserts.

This didn't quite hit for me as an adult, but I'm glad I finally checked it out after years of meaning to.

I think the main thing that kept me from really loving it was wanting a little more interiority for the main characters. I get that the book is aiming for more of a fairy tale and Narnia vibe, but: 1) some of the characters' important choices really do hinge on personal decisions and relationships, and 2) this is a 540-page book. Fairy tales aren't built to run for 500+ pages, and it's longer than the first two Narnia books put together. I found myself craving more depth and emotional weight, especially as it went on.

( For example... (Cut for Moderate Spoilers) )
Getting back to that asterisk next to the worldbuilding, I also found the story's decisions about diversity (or the relative lack thereof) occasionally distracting. I get it. Portland's pretty white, by design, and was even more so fifteen years ago. There are really only two characters from the real world and their direct relatives, and it wouldn't necessarily land well to be like, "All the characters of colour in this story are people lost in time, living in the woods."

But at the same time, among the predominantly 19th and 20th century settler-coded residents of the woods, you get these moments of groups with Indigenous coding who are either talking animals or white people—with the stereotypical two stripes of war paint and feathers in hair showing up in a picture of the latter. The text takes pains to characterize this group as Celtic, but that raises its own questions when a reference is made that seems to place them there before that territory's colonization, positioning a "since time immemorial" Irish population in the Oregon wilderness.

I often found myself looking at the aesthetics and thinking about those musical festivals full of severed pieces of Indigenous, Roma, and Celtic cosplay and felt like the fantasy here might be coming from a similar place.

The overall whiteness (and straightness, for that matter) of the book kept standing out because it's such a long story with such a huge cast. I did quite like large swathes of this book, but I think the length worked against it because the text kept offering more without necessarily offering more, if that makes sense.

This is the first book in a trilogy, and I have no idea if the subsequent books address or change any of this. I'm not racing to pick up the next one, but I might flip through it at the library sometime to see what it's like.

( An Excerpt )

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Free Space - Indigenous Author

A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer is a 2016 autobiography that covers writer/activist/artist Ma-Nee Chacaby's life from 1950 to 2014, from her birth in a tuberculosis sanatorium, to her childhood in Ombabika, through her adulthood in Thunder Bay where she's become a community elder and helped lead the city's first Pride parade.

This was the fifth of this year's Canada Reads nominees that I've read, and I saved it for last, feeling like it was a sure thing in terms of something I'd want to read. I wasn't wrong, and I was happy to see it win in the debates, championed by Shayla Stonechild.

The book is very candid, frank, and factually self-reflective, with a conversational tone that feels like sitting in on the friendly interviews that brought these stories forward. The author has lived through a lot of violence, as well as discrimination, addiction, disability and economic hardship. She is also someone who loves truly and deeply, gathers family, and builds community in a way that I really needed to read about right now.

I also really appreciated the book's afterword, which provides a lot of transparency on the writing process, which was assisted by social scientist and friend Mary Louisa Plummer due to Ma-Nee Chacaby being low-vision and speaking English as a fourth language.

( An Excerpt )

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Female Author

Ghost Wall is a 2018 period suspense novella by Sarah Moss set in Northumberland in the 1970s. It tells the story of Silvie, a sheltered seventeen year old brought along by her amateur historian father on a two-week Iron Age re-enactment study being put on by an archaeology professor and a handful of his students.

Where the professor and students approach the study with a certain good-natured ambivalence, Sylvie's father's racist and sexist idealization of the ancient past both comes into conflict with the reality of the endeavour and is emboldened by it, bringing his abusive behaviour out in the open. Meanwhile, Sylvie's identity outside of the prescribed social order begins to define itself as she recognizes her own capability and intelligence amidst the classist clash of living with a group of southern academics, sees her father's tyrannical authority challenged, and has a sexual awakening prompted by one of the female students. (I see you, OCLC, cataloguing this as "female friendship".)

I really liked this one. It was intense and insightful, especially in its exploration of people's mental disconnect between a romanticized or academicized past and "modern ills"—not just in the oversight and erasure of what it really took for ancient communities to survive, but in the blind spots where the rituals and cultural practices of our ancestors are assigned a purity of psychology without the possibility of sadism, sociopathy, selfishness, or abusive actions. The ending didn't entirely land for me, but that was more in the way of pacing and depth rather than content. Either move a bit of the ending further back and then cut it off sooner, or maybe have more of an epilogue, and this would have knocked it out of the park for me.

( An Excerpt )

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: POC Author

Dandelion is a 2022 contemporary novel by Jamie Chai Yun Liew that tells the story of Lily, a second-generation Canadian born in British Columbia to Chinese parents from Brunei. The novel is split into two parts. The first takes place in the 1980s as Lily is growing up in a mining town and navigating racism within the small community, as well as the carryover complexities of ethnicity and class within the diaspora, and the conflict between her previously stateless father's determination to make Canada their home and her mother's nostalgia for Southeast Asia and the sense of belonging she had there—a conflict that eventually causes Lily's mother to leave the family. The second half of the novel picks up when Lily is grown and has just had her first child. Struggling with the new identity of "mother" thrust upon her and assumptions about the cultural identity she will be building for her daughter, Lily becomes driven to finally find out what happened to her mother after she disappeared.

This was the third of this year's Canada Reads nominees that I've read, and I enjoyed it. The author, like the main character, is an immigration lawyer who grew up as the child of a stateless parent, and there are definitely moments that feel like "Okay, I am going to teach you about the immigration system," but it was genuinely something I wanted to learn more about, and it was accomplished through characters who always felt fully formed and believable even when their narrative purpose was standing out. The frustration of inheriting both the cultural expectations of your parents and the doors they unilaterally closed for you was something that hit home for me, and I thought the themes and family dynamics were really well depicted.

I've never been to Sparwood, but I recognized a lot of my own childhood in an imminently-busting mining town in it, and the specificity of the scenes in Ottawa and Calgary were a big draw for me. Overall, this was a thoughtful/thought-provoking short read that admirably balanced some tough subject matter with a grounded but effective approach. I'll definitely be checking out the author's more recent non-fiction book, Ghost Citizens: decolonial apparitions of stateless, foreign and wayward figures in law, as I think her clear and well-structured writing style will make it accessible even to a layperson like me.

I also want to put out some general appreciation for Arsenal Pulp Press, the publisher of this book. Arsenal Pulp Press operates out of Vancouver (Canada) and works with a lot of new authors, particularly with stories about experiences in marginalized identities that don't necessarily fit into the marketable "#OwnVoice" category that larger mainstream publishers have set. If you're ever looking for indie Canadian reads (usually nonfiction and literary fiction) from authors of colour and/or queer authors, they're worth checking out.

( An Excerpt )

✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Name in the Title

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is a 2015 literary novel by Emma Hooper that tells the story of Etta (an 82-year-old woman with memory issues of a sort who decides to walk from Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia to see the ocean), Otto (Etta's husband, who's left behind to find himself in her absence), Russell (the third member of their former youthful love triangle, who sets off to find Etta out of worry and finds something else instead), and James (the 'talking' coyote who accompanies Etta on her journey). The narrative frequently switches and blurs between the present and the 1930s and 1940s, when Etta was a teacher and the love interest of both young serviceman Otto who's writing to her while serving in Europe and his unofficially adopted brother Russell, who's left behind on the home front due to a childhood injury.

This was less whimsical and less of a travelogue than I was expecting from the description of "elderly woman walks across the country with a talking coyote" and the first few pages. That's not at all a bad thing, but it just made for a less accessible door into the story for me personally. I liked a lot of what I read. I really liked the style, I liked the way the story plays with memory through the concept of letters unsent and redacted and by having recollections blur between two halves of a couple, I liked what it had to say about how identities form within relationships, and I found a lot of the sad and disturbing moments very effective. But I ultimately felt like I was reading high concept fanfic for a canon I wasn't familiar with.

That's fully on me for skipping out on a lot of mainstream genres and then expecting to jump in when someone's doing something different with one of them. I know from cultural osmosis that there's a lot of fiction set in the Depression and WWII that this book is building on, and that there's probably baseline knowledge of the het love triangles in them that I was supposed to bring to this as a foundation for the places this goes with it. I'm not sure but I'd also guess there's potentially some Pilgrim's Progress references in here that I didn't get because I've never read it, but which an author writing this sort of book is more than justified in assuming an ideal reader would. But not having those pieces, I couldn't quite put the full picture together, and I wasn't quite hooked enough by the characters or plot to do the research to fill in the blanks.

(Also, I did not love that amidst the "of course everyone will understand these heterosexual love stories" sensibility, there was one gay side character just treading the cliched path of being jealous and loathsome-pitiable in his attraction to a straight character and then dying because of it.)

Still, this is one of the shortlisted Canada Reads books this year, and I'll be interested to hear the panel discuss this one.

( An Excerpt )