(If you didn’t see them, here are part 1, part 2, and part 3)
Since last working on this reading list, I’ve read an additional Heather O’Neill’s book and a handful more of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill is unlike her other books, as it’s set in a Victorian Montreal. It tells the tales of wealthy anglophones, and is an odd mix of novel, revenge tale, melodrama, and allegory (featuring a narcissist factory owner named Marie Antoine and her impoverished bastard sister Mary Robespierre who eventually runs a cake shop). I disliked it initially, but was fully onboard by the end.
I’ve been plowing through more of Louise Penny’s mysteries. April is the Cruelest Month, A Fatal Grace, A Rule Against Murder, The Hangman, and Bury your Dead, thus far. They’re entertaining and a little frustrating. Penny loves describing food as if we’re reading a menu, and a lot of the plot twists and turns are pretty far out. But they’re comfortable and full of familiar characters. I guess that’s why we have the phrase “cosy mystery.”
The last book I’ll include for now is Suzanne, by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. The author never knew her grandmother, who abandoned her family to live as part of a rebellious artist movement. This book is the author telling her imagined version of her grandmother’s story. It is epic, covering eighty-five years of history, and giving a human view of big events like world wars, the Quiet Revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, in Montreal and New York. But more than an epic history, it’s a quietly sad story of loss, disappointment, dreams abandoned, rejection, pain, and hearts broken. It finds some beauty among the melancholy, and is beautifully written.
That’s it for now. If I read any more good Montreal or Quebec books, I may add to this series.