If there's one time and place I wish I could travel to, it's Moorish Spain; al-Andalus has long had a strange fascination for me, with its extraordinarily developed culture—architecture which continues to amaze us today, some of the greatest thinkers of the time, flourishing literature and music—set against the stunning backdrop of the Spanish landscape.
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Monique Proulx's narrative is saturated with a gorgeous combination of words and images making up foliage as dense as a Canadian forest. Ants and mosquitoes bite at her prose while wild mushrooms tempt the reader's emotions, but not without their hidden poisons.
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Prospective readers may not choose to read a novel reviewed as harrowing, sometimes depressing, difficult to read (without a box of tissues to wipe away tears), with a protagonist who is at times drawn unsympathetically. However, for readers who are willing to cast this aside, Come Sunday is a rewarding and beautifully written book.
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I'll confess that when I read short stories, I often feel as if I'm having a snack, when what I want is a full meal. Not so with Toni Jensen's dazzling collection, From the Hilltop. In just a few pages, she manages to fill in the past, present and enough of the future to leave a reader satisfied. After I finished these stories, the only thing I was hungry for was more Toni Jensen. She's that good.
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This lyrical novella invites you into the world of an observant little girl who lives with her parents and eight sisters in current-day Palestine. She is the littlest one in the family, and one gets the sense that she is loved, but is a tad neglected. Everyone is always busy, so she escapes into a private space where she observes the things that make up her everyday world: colors, silence, movement, and language.
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