The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to the Stars That Made Me

Catherine Hernandez is an award-winning author and activist who has dedicated her career to promoting, capturing, and performing the stories of women of colour. The Femme Playlist & I Cannot Lie to The Stars That Made Me, the plays that make up this collection, explore female empowerment, growth, and sexuality within the LGBTQ communities. Hernandez offers a focused commentary on vulnerability that arises from the imbalance of power in a hetero- and cis-normative society. The discourses surrounding abuse, love, and survival are made accessible to the audience through the breakdown of the “fourth wall” of literature, with there being no limiting descriptions of the main character. This technique is typical of Brechtian theatre as Hernandez is encouraging the audience to be active participants in the experience. They are immersed in the story while being reminded that this is a dialogue that must be voiced.

An Ocean of Minutes

In Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes, Polly Nader time-travels to the future to work off medical debts for her boyfriend, Frank, who needs a life-saving treatment. She plans to reunite with him after her work as a bonded labourer is done. However, Polly is rerouted an additional five years, and the book alternates between Polly’s relationship with Frank in the past and her present search for him. While the prose is gorgeous, it covers reflections on remembrance far better than it does Polly’s predicament, which lacks a strong sense of place and urgency. Dreamlike yet occasionally dreary, Lim’s novel explores love’s vitality in a world where time creates as many wounds as it heals.

Sludge Utopia
By Catherine Fatima

In Sludge Utopia, Catherine Fatima captivates readers with an auto-fictional take of a woman’s journey discovering her place within the world’s definition of love and desire. Protagonist Catherine’s life seems typical of millennial Torontonians—studying, pursuing romances, and trying to keep grounded while maintaining friendships and social networks. However, she is simultaneously struggling to understand her dependence on sex and intimacy while moving through tumultuous relationships with close friends and new partners. Readers will be hypnotized by Catherine’s enigmatic observations about herself as she explores her frustrations. Fatima’s disjointed portrayal of her characters leaves you questioning your own definitions of fulfilling personal relationships throughout the entire novel.

Adjacentland

“Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day.” Adjacentland is a twisted story of a man’s journey to discover who he is after waking up in an institution with no memory and only odd clues within letters and drawings to guide his way. As each “stage” of the story unfolds, the main character’s repeated bouts of amnesia will make readers hungry to piece together what’s real and what’s not. In this scary futuristic landscape where imagination has been rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence, readers will enjoy the challenging questions Maharaj poses about the soul and human mind.

Sodom Road Exit

Returning to Ontario’s Crystal Beach after dropping out of university and accumulating a fair amount of debt in Toronto, Starla Mia Martin doesn’t plan on sticking around her birthplace forever. Her viewpoint quickly changes when she encounters Etta, the paranormal product of a tragic death at the recently closed and charred Crystal Beach Amusement Park. Together, they try to peel away at each other’s pasts and salvage what’s left of their personal ruins.

In a time where survivors’ stories are at the forefront of discussions surrounding sexual abuse, violence, and harassment, Sodom Road Exit speaks about the realities of trauma with honesty. Much like the ghost that is interested in Starla, trauma attaches itself to survivors and is with them every step of the way. In the book, the intimacy gained from sharing stories of trauma acts as a step toward confronting pain and healing. The friendships that are formed come from a sense of characters wanting each other to be whole—to be the versions of themselves that “could have been if pain didn’t happen.” At every opportunity Amber Dawn reminds us that Starla, as well as her newfound friends, are messy human beings. She also reminds us that in order to be a mess, one, at some point, must have been tidy.

The stream of consciousness Starla loses herself in is both terrifying and wonderful. When her thoughts mingle with Etta’s, it’s clear that Starla needs something to hold on to when things get tough. However, Amber Dawn clearly illustrates in her “lesbian supernatural thriller” that relying on others can only get you so far when it comes to your own well-being.

Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming – In Alberta, and in Ottawa

The disturbingly incestuous movement of fossil fuel executives between government, academia, and industry is a rotted and oil-slicked family tree. In Oil’s Deep State, former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft explores the seedy ways that Canada’s fossil fuel industry has captured democratic institutions in Ottawa and across the Prairies. The result, he writes, is the seamless ability of climate-altering industries to parasitize one pillar of our democracy after another, all in a never-ending drive to push pipelines and tar sands expansion. But this democratic stranglehold isn’t preordained. Deep states cement their power in darkness, Taft writes; shine a light and they recoil. Exposing how the sector undermines the environment to further corporate greed, he notes, can restore public faith that energy regulators and governments work for us—not big oil.

Tale of a Boon’s Wife

Facing tribalism, sexism, and love in the years prior to and during the 1991 civil war in Somalia, a member of the Bliss tribe, Idil, elopes with Sidow of the Boon tribe. Knowingly marrying beneath her, Idil is adamant that her love for Sidow is right, despite the chaos that the union brings. Fartumo Kusow’s debut English novel understands the consequences of thinking freely in a space where doing so could result in death. The sorrow, anger, and shame experienced by Kusow’s characters creates a haunting narrative of what it means to be selfish and selfless in a society that heavily condemns the unravelling of convention.

In the Cage
By Kevin Hardcastle

In the Cage, the first novel by Kevin Hardcastle, follows his award-winning 2015 short story collection, Debris. Like his previous work, In the Cage concerns petty organized crime, rural poverty, and the hard-knock life of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. This time, it features Daniel, whose career-ending injury forces him to keep his family afloat through organized crime. When he tries to go straight, he finds himself up against a returning criminal with a vendetta that promises to take the little Daniel has. Through precise descriptions, In the Cage introduces readers to a memorable character who treads life’s waters just trying to keep his head above the current.

The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science

The Technoscientific Witness of Rape by Andrea Quinlan is a thoughtful and brave analysis of the long and complex history of the Sexual Assault Evidence Kit (SAEK). Quinlan, an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Trent University, breaks down how the SAEK was molded by the legal, medical, technological, and societal influences of the last 30 years. Through 62 interviews with professionals in legal and medical fields, police, and most importantly, survivors, Quinlan meticulously documents how sexism, classism, ageism, and racism have affected the usage of the SAEK since its inception. The author raises the thought-provoking, yet controversial, question: To whose benefit does the SAEK actually serve?

It’s easy to assume that technology has evolved to help survivors of sexual violence—but through personal accounts of the aftermath of sexual assault, Quinlan suggests the contrary. The author’s first-hand interviews inject research with frightening stories from survivors, making readers doubt the presence of any justice in sexual assault cases. Her investigation shows that, despite the evolution of technology and changing attitudes toward sexual violence, survivors are still reluctant to come forward out of fear of being distrusted and re-victimized. Despite the fact the SAEK was initially made out to be the “ultimate witness,” it still holds the capacity to re-traumatize and cast doubt on survivors.

After more than 30 years of a broken system that has, by and large, not encouraged women to come forward or even bring about more arrests, Quinlan explores if things could ever change. The book is difficult to read, but it is vitally important to understanding the flaws standing in the way of justice for survivors.