The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: reading

  • Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House

    I’m musing about whether this memoir–an experimental, genre-blurring, fantastical, brilliantly written account of emotional abuse in a lesbian relationship–could be placed in the True Crime section of a bookstore. As I start an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, my reading is shifting to be roughly half and half CNF and crime fiction, and that can make…

  • Sad Girls: Paula Hawkins’s First Thriller

    I’m re-visiting Paula Hawkins’s 2015 Girl on the Train, which was adapted as a slightly shaky film starring Emily Blunt. Blunt is perfectly cast and holds most of the movie on her very capable shoulders, but the film version exposes a few weaknesses in the novel’s plotting while flattening out Hawkins’s more nuanced characterizations of…

  • Messy Middles: Maria Semple’s Go Gentle and Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct

    “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” Epictetus While I usually finish reading novels before I write about them, I’m in the midst of a Big Edit of my own mystery novel, and that has me thinking about the…