BOOKWORM
A CRY IN THE DARK
Help! I’m Alive by Gurjinder Basran, ECW Press, $22.95. Help! I’m alive! One normally associates the call for help from those caught in desperate situations. Like miners trapped in a collapsed mine or people buried under debris in a bombed building.
In Gurjinder Basran’s book, this is a cry for help from people caught in the aftermath of a teen’s death as they try to make sense of what happened and whether this was an accident or a suicide.
After footage of Jay’s death is shared on social media, four people are confronted with who they have been and how they should be. Help! I’m Alive delves into teenage male grief, which is not explored often.
His former best friend Ash wonders what happened to their friendship. That’s the thing about getting older, everything that was just drifts away and a best friend becomes someone you used to know.
His troubled girlfriend Winona struggles with guilt and wonders if there were signs she didn’t pay attention to. They’d talked about killing themselves but maybe he always knew she wasn’t serious because sometimes he talked about the future – hers, not his.
Anik, Ash’s older brother, is on a search for the meaning of life but hasn’t left his parents’ basement for months. He devoured all of his mother’s self-help books, “from the classics like Man’s Search for Meaning to the dumbed-down Chicken Soup for the Soul Series.”
And Pavan, Ash and Anik’s mother, finds Jay’s death lays bare all her personal and maternal anxieties. She had once stood on a bridge herself, but a stranger intervened, with a request that she take his family’s photograph. We take it for granted that life finds a way despite our best attempts at ending it.
The peripheral characters are finely etched. Like the immigrant cabbie studying for his citizenship test who lists all the Canadian prime ministers’ names and accomplishments. Don’t all Canadians know these things, he asks. “It’s hard to know what you are when it’s all you’ve ever been,” he concludes.
Gurjinder Basran sensitively and authentically explores the challenges of death and of living on.
DEAR DAUGHTER
Fathers, Letters of Note, Compiled by Shaun Usher, McClelland & Stewart, $14.94. A collection of letters from fathers to their children – or about their children – and from children to their fathers.
Filled with words of love, sage advice, exasperation, and evoking every emotion from devotion and duty to laughter and memories of encounters of the filial kind.
“A letter is a time bomb, a message in a bottle, a spell, a cry for help, a story, an expression of concern, a ladle of love, a way to connect through words,” writes Shaun Usher.
In this collection he has put together letters from, among many others, Che Guevara to his children, Jawaharlal Nehru to his daughter Indira, Mahatma Gandhi to his son Manilal and Groucho Marx to his daughter Miriam. You will also find Anne Frank’s letter to her father Otto and Arthur Conan Doyle’s letter to his mother announcing the birth of his daughter.
LIFE CHANGING
From Women to The World by Elizabeth Filippouli, I. B. Tauris. Journalist, activist and social entrepreneur Elizabeth Filippouli has had the opportunity to interact with some of the most amazing women from across the globe. In each of them, she discovered a common thread, a very human and exceptionally powerful side that they rarely reveal in their public personas.
She decided to invite these trailblazing women to open up their hearts and share who or what made them who they are. The result is a collection of letters from women to women they admire – from their mothers and sisters to daughters and other powerful women, past and present. The writers stem from across 19 countries, and include award-winning novelist, screenwriter and film director Shamim Sarif.
Sarif’s epistle is to her wife Hanan Kattan. “Not for us to complete each other, as if we were both unfinished without the other. But to find the better parts of ourselves and bring them, gleaming, to the surface.”
Acclaimed writer Elif Shafak writes to Jacinda Arden, the prime minister of New Zealand; actress Yasmine Al Massri pens a poem about war for her mother; and activist and TV presenter June Sarpong addresses designer Diane Von Furstenberg.
Basma Alawee writes to “her sister in humanity Angelina Jolie”, about how reading a report on Jolie’s $1 million donation to a refugee camp changed the course of her life.
Grazia Giuliani addresses hers to the homeless woman she sees at the corner of Green Park station in London.
Moving and insightful, these letters show a new model of leadership based on emotional intelligence and demonstrates how women have the wisdom to inspire, motivate and reinvent our world.
A powerful anthology of letters written by women to women who have had a profound impact in their lives.
DREAM ON
Such Big Dreams by Reema Patel, McClelland & Stewart, $24.95. Rakhi (who used to be Bansari) is a former street child working a low-grade job in a human rights office.
Alex, a privileged Harvard-bound Canadian intern, offers to help further her dreams of joining a hotel management course in exchange for showing him the “real India”. He wants to visit the slum where she lives, ride the overcrowded train with “regular people” and is fascinated by her stories of survival on the streets. Battling haunting memories of her former life and struggling to build a path forward, Rakhi accepts his offer. The exchange seems harmless at first, but soon Rakhi comes face-to-face with the difficult choices and moral compromises people must make in order to survive, no matter the costs.
Reema Patel, a lawyer for the City of Toronto, brings her experience of working in Mumbai in the youth non-profit sector and in human rights advocacy to each character she describes. From the people who inhabit Behrampada to the ladies who make their househelp iron a dozen outfits because they can’t be bothered to decide which one they will wear. From the poorly paid lawyers and activists struggling to keep their NGO afloat to the stars and wealthy builders who rule the city. And the “interns who always justify overspending in India by converting the price of things back into their home currency”.
Those familiar with the city will enjoy mention of familiar landmarks such as Rhythm House and Leopold Cafe in the narrative. Except that Rhythm House is long since defunct.
Hindi cuss words and a sprinkling of other words in Hindi would be meaningless to those who don’t speak the language – particularly so in the absence of a glossary – and the song quoted in the book is actually Yeh hai Bombay meri jan, not Mumbai meri jaan, but that doesn’t take away from an engrossing tale that does a slow burn to the unexpected climax.
Such Big Dreams is moving, smart, and arrestingly funny as it traces the arc of Rakhi’s life back to Bansari.
Not everyone who lives in the shadow of gigantic billboards of movie stars wants to be a star – being in control of her own destiny is good.
TWISTS IN THE TALE
Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult, Simon & Schuster, $12.99. When pieces of your past have gone missing, can you recover?
Delia Hopkins tracks missing persons with her own search-and-rescue bloodhound. Life is good and on even keel until a police officer knocks on her door and reveals a secret that changes everything.
Jodi Picoult, a New York Times Bestselling author, hunts for a woman’s memories as she deals with troubling flashbacks of a life she can’t recall.
THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES
Small Days And Nights by Tishani Doshi, Norton, $22.95. Escaping her failing marriage in the US, Grace Marisola returns to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives an unexpected inheritance – a house on the beach. And learns she has an older sister she never knew about – Lucia, who has spent her life at a residential facility.
Small Days is bursting at the seams with chaos and tenderness.
LIGHTS! CAMERA! BOOK!
Eureka! Camera, by Laura Driscoll, illustrated by Hector Borlasca, Kane Press, $23.99. This book is all about cameras. Starting from the Chinese teacher Mozi who noticed the effect of light coming in through a tiny hole in a wall to tips on special effects one can incorporate into photos taken by the ubiquitous phone cameras, it’s a fun journey.
BRAMPTON LIBRARY TEEN REVIEW
By KRUPA DAVE
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Penguin Random House, $17.95. The story follows the Igbo people of South-East Nigeria in the late nineteenth century.
The main character Okonkwo is a man of great pride and masculinity, yet has a fear of weakness that leads to his downfall. Readers learn of the unique traditions and customs of the village of Umuofia and how they differ from today’s understanding of society and gender roles and how Western culture/tradition impacted traditional Igbo life.
This novel unveils themes and morals behind Igbo proverbs, and it takes some effort to fully grasp the book. Achebe wanted to convey things that no documentary or movie could capture – the essence of an unheard of Umuofian tribe, written by a man with lived experiences.
I found the book quite interesting and marveled at how many different cultures/traditions there are around the world, and how little we truly know about them all. It made me think of all of the things that society often assumes about another cultures/people, and how dangerous those assumptions and misinterpretations can be. Achebe describes how Western colonial settlement tore the Umuofian clan apart, and how the traditions that they once strongly believed in were crushed and belittled.
• Krupa Dave is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.