All posts by Alyssia

About Alyssia

Alyssia is an Adult Services Librarian at the Vaughan Public Libraries. Nothing makes her happier than a great book and a great cup of coffee. She loves fiction in all formats - books, movies, television, you name it - and is always on the lookout for awesome new music.  |  Meet the team

Escape the Ordinary – Wanderlust

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As a girl, Gloria Steinem’s life was filled with cross-country travel, a search for adventure, and exposure to the lives of all types of people across the United States. Now, as an adult and a world-renowned activist, Steinem recounts how her life of travel, conversations with strangers, and desire for change led to a life of activism and leadership. Along with her own growth, Steinem details the growth of a movement for equality that’s still being fought today.

I admit I didn’t know much about Gloria Steinem before picking up My Life on the Road. I knew her name was synonymous with the 70s feminist movement and women’s rights advocacy, but that was pretty much where my knowledge ended. After finishing her latest novel, my impression is: Gloria Steinem was—and, at the age of 82, still is—a force to be reckoned with.

My Life on the Road is a retelling of Steinem’s life of activism, a story that she weaves using the motif of travel. In this book she acknowledges the influence that her nomadic childhood had on the rest of her life; her father was a larger-than-life character who refused to put down roots anywhere, packing his family up often and moving across the United States. Steinem found herself mimicking this restless wandering, despite yearning for a solid home as a child. But she credits her father for instilling the love of travel in her, which allowed her to lead the proactive life she has led.

Steinem’s life of travel is so extensive that it seems almost unbelievable at times. Never settling in one place allowed Steinem to organize the National Women’s Conference in 1977, ride in a cab with (and be insulted by) Saul Bellows, witness Martin Luther King Jr’s famous speech first-hand, and wave goodbye to John F. Kennedy the day before he was shot.

Steinem did not fight solely for feminism, as I had previously thought, but for equality across genders, races, sexualities, etc. Her writing is insightful and challenging. She offers alternate ways of looking at well-worn social issues, making them still topical in 2016 despite being cultivated in the 1970s. For example, her meditations on the lack of diverse representation in women’s rights are what we call “intersectional feminism” today. Steinem encourages everyone—male and female—to travel as much as they can, to experience the world for what it is and not for how it’s presented in the media. After all, being in new places and meeting new people breaks the “supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.”

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Share your thoughts in the comments! Some questions to consider are:

1. Steinem writes “[The road] leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories…” Have you ever been on a trip that changed the way you saw something? Has an experience with travel ever opened your eyes to something new?

2. “Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” Do you think this is true? Have you ever used a book, movie, television show, etc. to satisfy a craving for travel and experience?

3. Steinem is of the opinion that meeting in person always trumps gatherings on the Internet. In an increasingly digital world, is her dismissal of the Internet’s power fair? Or do you think it should be given more credit for its ability to bring people together?

Escape the Ordinary – Staff Pick

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Will’s life consists of two worlds: Outside and Inside. Raised by an eccentric and fiercely agoraphobic mother, Will has never stepped foot Outside—that is, until he can no longer contain his curiosity. Armed with only a helmet, Will finally steps out of the house and winds up befriending Jonah, who teaches him the thrills of skateboarding. But life Outside turns threatening when a boy goes missing, and Jonah and Will decide to investigate the mystery themselves. Suddenly Will finds himself thrown into a dangerous underworld, leaving his mother to face her greatest fear: will she be brave enough to save her son?

Thunder Bay is a long, long way from southern Ontario. Almost 1000 km sit between it and Toronto, and the difference between the two is something author Michael Christie is very familiar with. Christie was born and raised in Thunder Bay, and his portrait of it always feels entirely authentic, if quite unflattering. The city is not the focal point of If I Fall, If I Die but it permeates every chapter, every scene: the abandoned grain silos that punctuate the city’s geography, the seedy bars and strip malls, the concrete and empty streets that serve as a skateboarder’s playground, the list goes on. The economic decline of the city sits like an oppressive weight over everything, like the heavy snow that falls and hardens into a layer of ice.

Facing all of this for the first time in his life is Will, who has spent all of his eleven years living “Inside”, what he calls the interior of his house. Will is believably innocent for a boy who’s never stepped Outside, and he forms a quick attachment to the first peer he meets when he steps out of the house. The friendships Will makes highlight the tensions between First Nations citizens and everyone else, as he befriends first Marcus and then Jonah, both First Nations boys. Will is brazen in his newfound freedom, and wants Jonah to be too, but everything Jonah does is tempered with the knowledge that the cops are just waiting for him to mess up. At school and around authority, Jonah stays silent, refusing to give anyone fuel for discrimination.

What Christie does best is weave his nuanced characters into a firm sense of place. Will is slightly too fearless to be fully believable—for someone who’s never experienced danger, he’s remarkably calm after being attacked by a wolf—although Christie makes it work for the story. Jonah, elegant and careful, feels more real. But it’s Diane, the agoraphobic mother of Will, that really stands out. Christie chronicles her growing anxiety that keeps her locked in her home, and he does it honestly.  Diane never seems pathetic (except through her son’s eyes) because Christie makes her fear seem real.

Personally, I wish Christie would have stuck with this character-driven mode of storytelling, but halfway through he switches the focus onto the disappearance of Marcus, and the book loses much of its depth in favour of a contrived mystery, like a darker version of the Hardy Boys. There are gangsters and presumed-dead uncles and trained wolves, and suddenly the book feels less like an exploration of mental illness, race relations and economic despair and more like a Hollywood movie. The mystery didn’t grip me as much as the characters did. I liked the novel, but I think I would have loved it had the mystery stayed in the background.

If you enjoy Christie’s writing, check out his previous work of short stories, The Beggar’s Garden.

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Some questions to consider about If I Fall, If I Die are:

1. The Irish Times calls the novel “an allegory of the rampant anxiety of the modern age.” Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

2. Will encounters serious criminals, wild animals, and has his life threatened several times. But at the end of the novel, he “still loved the Outside so intensely that he worried he could die of it.” Is this realistic?

3. Consider the skateboarding motif. Will describes the activity as “mastery — a seizure of control, not a loss. That the board did their bidding — danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them — afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives.” How is this true for Will? For Jonah?

Escape the Ordinary – Books to Movies/Shows

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After a motorcycle accident, Will Traynor’s life is turned upside down: no more travelling, no more extreme sports. He’s wheel-chair bound and miserable. When Louisa Clark–simple, ordinary, and Will’s complete opposite–takes a job working for him, tensions arise from Will’s sour mood and Lou’s tough love. But when Lou learns about Will’s plans, she decides to prove to him that life is still worth living, and soon the two find themselves falling into a heartbreaking romance.

There’s a lot to be said for hype; in most cases, it’s better to experience a novel with a fresh mind and a blank slate. Waiting until the book is already a blockbuster and has a film adaptation might lessen its impact, once you already know other opinions and—in my case—the ending. This is what happened to me with Me Before You, a hugely beloved book that I finally got around to reading. So, did I cry? Well, no, but I can see why people did.

Me Before You explores the changes two vastly different people can encourage in each other. Will and Louisa’s crossed paths spark something in both of them: Will wants Louisa to experience life beyond their little town, and Louisa wants to pull Will out of his depression. Their commitment to improving each other’s lives leads them in a sweet progression from lukewarm acquaintances to friends to something more. This description might make it seem like Me Before You is a paint-by-numbers love story, but the relationship never feels forced, and Moyes gives both characters such a solid background that the story never veers into cheesy Nicholas Sparks territory.

One of the best aspects of the novel is author Moyes’s treatment of Will. It would be easy to make the wheelchair-bound protagonist a martyr or a saint, making his disability his defining quality. Instead, Will is a fully realized man who happens to be in a wheelchair. It’s because of this treatment that Will naturally feels like a viable love interest for Lou, even without the use of most of his body. Will isn’t a pet project for her to fix; he’s her equal and she wants to see him happy. Hopefully this novel marks a trend towards a new way of seeing disability.

That said, the topic of disability is a tricky one in Will’s case. As a quadriplegic, Will has no use of his limbs except for some minor movement in his hands. He requires almost 24 hour care. As a thrill-seeking, high rolling adult man, this sudden change of circumstances is unbearable to Will. In fact, as Louisa notes, he is essentially on suicide watch. There are some seriously sensitive issues brought up, particularly euthanasia and the right to die. Will believes that choosing to end his life is the last bit of control he has left. But despite Moyes’ fair representation of disability, some readers might glean a rather pessimistic message from Will’s struggle. It’s a subject that’s highly debatable and highly subjective; Moyes handles all sides of the argument deftly, not necessarily settling on any side of it but presenting it fairly and realistically. At the very least, Moyes rejects the “love conquers all” romantic fantasy in favour of opening up a dialogue about euthanasia, disability, and trauma. And it’s a dialogue that is ripe for discussion!

If you’d like to keep reading about Louisa Clark, pick up a copy of After You at your local branch!

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Share your thoughts on the novel in the comments! Some questions to consider:

1. Discuss the various reactions to Will’s decision to go to Dignitas. Do you think they were fair? Do you agree with Lou’s mother’s reaction to Lou’s involvement?

2. How do you feel about the ending? Would you have been more satisfied with a happily-ever-after? Or do you prefer the one Moyes wrote in the novel?

3. If you’ve seen the movie, how does it compare to the novel? What changes did you like or dislike? What did you think of the casting?