Pages As Planes: Canada

We’re off on another trip in today’s Pages As Planes to a highly requested destination: Canada! I went to college on the border in Canada, so I have many fond memories of the country and hope to explore more when it’s safe for us to cross the border again!

I love these posts and always appreciate your feedback. I’d love to know where you think we should travel next!

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery—A classic story that I have admittingly never read. Maybe I’ll make it a priority this summer!

The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede—This book obviously deals with 9/11 but it also inspired the musical Come From Away, which is absolutely love. It’s a difficult story but has themes of beauty and hope.

The Brightest of Dreams Susan Anne Mason—”Quinten Aspinall is determined to fulfill a promise he made to his deceased father to keep his family together. To do so, he must travel to Canada to find his younger siblings, who were sent there as indentured workers while Quinn was away at war. He is also solicited by his employer to look for the man's niece who ran off with a Canadian soldier. If Quinn can bring Julia back, he will receive his own tenant farm, enabling him to provide a home for his ailing mother and siblings.
Julia Holloway's decision to come to Toronto has been met with disaster. When her uncle's employee rescues her from a bad situation, she fears she can never repay Quinn's kindness. So when he asks her to help find his sister, she agrees. Soon after, however, Julia receives some devastating news that changes everything.
Torn between reuniting his family and protecting Julia, will Quinn have to sacrifice his chance at happiness to finally keep his promise?”

The Boat People by Sharon Bala—”When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and 500 fellow refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father is overcome with relief: he and his six-year-old son can finally put Sri Lanka's bloody civil war behind them and begin new lives. Instead, the group is thrown into prison, with government officials and news headlines speculating that hidden among the "boat people" are members of a terrorist militia. As suspicion swirls and interrogation mounts, Mahindan fears the desperate actions he took to survive and escape Sri Lanka now jeopardize his and his son's chances for asylum. Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya, who reluctantly represents the migrants; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate, The Boat People is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Inspired by real events, with vivid scenes that move between the eerie beauty of northern Sri Lanka and combative refugee hearings in Vancouver, where life and death decisions are made, Sharon Bala's stunning debut is an unforgettable and necessary story for our times.” —From the publisher

Late Night’s on Air by Elizabeth Hay—”Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North form the center. One summer, on a canoe trip the four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.” —From the publisher

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel—One of my favorite books of all time! But I will say it does take place during a pandemic (though much more severe than our current one) and was a big reason why I was so nervous about Covid last year. It’s a beautiful story of resilience and the vitality of the arts.

Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu—I have been meaning to read these graphic novels for months! "

“Eric Bittle may be a former junior figure skating champion, vlogger extraordinaire, and very talented amateur pâtissier, but being a freshman on the Samwell University hockey team is a whole new challenge. It is nothing like co-ed club hockey back in Georgia! First of all? There’s checking (anything that hinders the player with possession of the puck, ranging from a stick check all the way to a physical sweep). And then, there is Jack―his very attractive but moody captain.” —From the publisher

What We All Long For by Dionne Brand—”Dionne Brand's multicultural infusion follows the stories of a close circle of twenty-something second-generations living in downtown Toronto―and the secrets they hide from their families.

Tuyen is a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends―each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.

Tuyen is love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknowst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of college. He is tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hiphop clothing store.

Meanwhile, Tuyen's lost brother, Quy―now a criminal in the Thai underworld―sets out for Toronto to find his long-lost family.

Gripping at times, heart-wrenching at others, Dionne Brand's What We all Long For is a story of identity, love and loss―the universal experience of being human, and discovering the nature of our longing.” —From the publisher

Broken Strings by Eric Walters and Kathy Kacer—”It's 2002. In the aftermath of the Twin Towers - and the death of her beloved grandmother - Shirli Berman is intent on moving forward. The best singer in her junior high, she auditions for the lead role in Fiddler on the Roof but is crushed to learn that she's been given the part of the old Jewish mother in the musical rather than the coveted part of the sister. But there is an upside: Her "husband" is none other than Ben Morgan, the cutest and most popular boy in the school. 

Deciding to throw herself into the role, she rummages in her grandfather's attic for some props. There, she discovers an old violin in the corner - strange, since her Zayde has never seemed to like music, never even going to any of her recitals. Showing it to her grandfather unleashes an anger in him she has never seen before, and while she is frightened of what it might mean, Shirli keeps trying to connect with her Zayde and discover the awful reason behind his anger. A long-kept family secret spills out, and Shirli learns the true power of music, both terrible and wonderful.” —From the publisher

Break in Case of Emergency by Brian Francis—Life has been a struggle for Toby Goodman. Her mother died by suicide five years ago, and her father left before Toby was born. Now a teenager living on her grandparents' dairy farm, Toby has trouble letting people in. Convinced that she is destined to follow her mother's path, she creates a plan to escape her pain.

But with the news that her father is coming home and finally wants to meet her, Toby learns the truth of her parents' story. Her father is gay and a world-famous female impersonator - in a time when these facts are a source of small-town whispers and secrets, and not something anyone had dared talk with her about before.

As her careful plans go awry, Toby must rebuild her life from the ground up. While she might not follow an expected path, with the support of a quirky but lovable circle of friends and family, Toby will finally put together the many different pieces that make up her past, her present and her future.” —From the publisher

Have you read any of these titles? Where’s your favorite place in Canada? I want to visit Banff so badly!