Jocelyn Parr

Dec 30, 2023 | mtlreviewofbooks.ca | JB Staniforth |Aishwarya Singh |Connor Harrison |Jocelyn Parr

In mid-2018, as Canada counted down toward that October’s adult-use cannabis legalization, reports emerged that licensed cannabis producers had already bought up enough commercial cultivation property to produce some 50% more than the amount of cannabis Canadians were estimated to be able to consume annually. This was bad news, since cannabis could not be commercially exported.

Dec 21, 2023 | mtlreviewofbooks.ca | Aishwarya Singh |Connor Harrison |Jocelyn Parr

Furniture Music is Montreal-based poet Gail Scott’s experimental prose memoir about her time living and working in New York City between 2008 and 2012. While it traverses several historical milestones – the Obama presidency, Occupy Wall Street, the 2012 Quebec student strikes, and Hurricane Sandy – the narrative is articulated through Scott’s observations, conversations, and musings.

Nov 30, 2023 | mtlreviewofbooks.ca | Connor Harrison |Jocelyn Parr |JB Staniforth

Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?, Chris Oliveros’ new graphic novel on the emergence of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), begins in 1963 with a Belgian immigrant. A World War II veteran and protégé of Fidel Castro who’s sick of daily Francophobia from English Canada, Georges Schoeters decides to organize. In the tiny basement apartment he shares with his wife and two children, Schoeters and his fellow FLQ founders write their manifesto.

Nov 16, 2023 | mtlreviewofbooks.ca | Jocelyn Parr |JB Staniforth |Nived Dharmaraj

Elizabeth Abbott's book fictionalizes Dr. Maude Abbott’s life, revealing how she defied the bounds set for women ... Wayne Ng's novel teaches us that family certainly provides us with the fuel for our own growth, although this ... Norman Nawrocki's “fictional chronicle” of the seven-month 2012 Quebec student strike is a love letter to a ...

Nov 1, 2023 | mtlreviewofbooks.ca | Jocelyn Parr |Ian McGillis |Nadia Trudel |Alexandra Trnka

As I read Elizabeth L. Abbott’s An Inner Grace: The Life Story of Dr. Maude Abbott and the Advent of Heart Surgery, I was simultaneously reading Howard Adams’ Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View. Adams’ book is now almost fifty years old, but when it came out, it rewrote white supremacist narratives about Indigenous governance and the history of nation-building in Canada.