An intense psychological coming-of-age story, Secret Sky kept me flipping pages far into the night. Emelynn Taylor, a troubled and naive twenty-two-year-old woman, returns to the seaside cottage where she grew up. As idyllic as it sounds, something’s not quite right. Without warning, Em’s body begins to lose gravity and she finds herself floating into the sky, then crashing back down. She’s been given a gift but no instructions on how to use it. Though she’s made it through university, her floating bouts impact her ability to work, even with her pockets full of rocks. So, with the keys to the cottage and six-months living expenses courtesy of her mother, she returns to the romantic scene of her childhood. But that doesn’t seem to solve the problem.
Secret Sky is the first book in The Gift Legacy series and Emelynn’s gift is one of flight. Who has not envied the birds and dreamed of flying? As a child, I tried to jump off my father’s armchair into flight; after all, I was named after Wendy from Peter Pan. Flying dreams followed, where I ran off the edge of a hill and was suddenly airborne, arms moving in a gentle breast stroke. If you’ve ever experienced these fantasies, you’ll love Jo-Anne’s descriptions of flying. McLean is a masterful writer and includes a complete flying glossary where she introduces you to her secret world.
After a disastrous crash, Emelynn is discovered, healed, and brought up to speed on her gift by Dr. Avery Coulter, a kind doctor, who is part of a secret underground society of flyers. The handsome, sexy, rich, and charming Jackson takes her “under his wing” on his yacht and teaches her to use her gift. Part romance, part sexy thriller, this series introduces a brilliantly original world where our desires are possible.
The story is set in Coastal British Columbia in an idyllic setting that makes me a little envious of young Emelynn who lives in a postcard cottage with waterfront and is able to fly.
This is the tenth cozy mystery featuring Cait Morgan, a fifty-ish, marmite-munching, tea-drinking, Welsh-Canadian sleuth who works as a criminal psychologist at a B.C. university on a mountain I’m sure I attended. I recognize those inlet views. In fact, Ace’s dashes of local colour really pulled me into this book.
After travelling the world for nine books solving light, cozy international murders (yes, no slash and gore is possible) Cait and her ex-RCMP/Intelligence officer husband, Bud, become embroiled in a possible murder right next door to their home on Red Water Mountain. Their ninety-year-old neighbour, Gordy Krantz, is discovered dead. He’s recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and suicide seems plausible until the coroner’s report comes back and they discover that old Gordy had been dosed with hemlock.
In between bouts of cooking, cuddling her Labrador retriever, and watching Scandi-noir (who doesn’t love Scandi-noir?), Cait investigates with the guile of Agatha Christie by pretending she’s collecting information for the eulogy Gordy directed her to write in his will. An eccentric cast of locals, one of whom is a garden centre mogul, rounds out the suspect list.
Early on, Cait and her faithful husband Bud (I still don’t know who’s more faithful, Bud or the dog?) acquire a disgusting mattress full of Gordy’s journals and using her eidetic memory, Cait is able to sort and file his life story from 1954 to 1993 all in her mind. After conducting her polite investigations, Cait laments: “This isn’t a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as Churchill spoke of Russia; this is a maze of bricks walls, all ten feet high, with no apparent way out.” But get out she does. Cait Morgan is an impressive woman, as is Cathy Ace.
Ace has been shortlisted for the Bony Blithe Award the last three out of four years and won in 2015 for Best Canadian Light Mystery. Her writing is stellar. Details, references, allusions, expertly crafted phrasing, and serious subjects punctuated by wit and humour. Her references to local settings intrigue me. I deduced that the elusive Red Water Mountain must be on the north side of Lougheed Highway just west of Mission and craned my neck when I drove through the other day hoping I would see it and know. Before immigrating to Canada, Ace was a marketing specialist, speaker, and trainer. I’ve seen her present and she’s as lively and entertaining as her books. The Cait Morgan Mysteries have been optioned by the UK company Free@LastTV who produced MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin books for TV.
Living in a rural community everyone knows their neighbours. Or do they? Is the eccentric single man you move in beside really the man he says he is? Or could he be a killer? A thief? An imposter? Is the woman offering you tea trying to get to know you or investigating you? How many bodies are buried outside your door?
The Corpse with the Iron Will is published by Four Tails Publishing.
I do a fair amount of podcasts, tv and radio shows, but Sci-Fi Saturday Night is up there at the top of my list. I’ve been waiting all summer to get back on this show. I think it’s because a) the hosts, Dome and Cam, read my books (even in the wrong order) and b) they get me. Not every host gets me cause I’m just not that easy to get. I didn’t want the conversation to end. Even after they stopped recording, we kept talking and they pretty much had to kick me out of the studio.
Last time, we talked about To Kill a King. In this show, we talk about To Render a Raven, my love relationship with Estrada, my mixed up genres, the Pacific coast, and my writing process. I love that Cam said it was horror. That was a first for me.
I didn’t do a big launch for this book so it’s one of the least read of the four. That’s a pity because it’s my favourite in the series. I really enjoyed chatting about it with two guys who loved it as much as I did and weren’t afraid to say so. We’d all just read it so talk with insight, but don’t worry—we went easy on the spoilers. Except for this one—the ravens are vampires.
Please go back and check out other shows on Sci-Fi Saturday Night, and make it one of your regular stops. Dome and Cam have intriguing guests and their charm, insight , and intelligent conversation brings out the best in everyone.
Here’s the link to this show. If you’re pressed for time, we start talking at the 10 minute mark.
Who’s your favourite writer? I’ve always dreaded being asked that question because I didn’t have one, until now. Cherie Dimaline is my new favourite writer. I read and reviewed Empire of Wild (2019) not long ago because the cover was so striking. Last week, I finally picked up The Marrow Thieves.
This short, dark, dense, YA book won numerous prestigious awards when DCB released it in 2017. TIME magazine declared it one of the Best YA Books of All Time. Why?
The Marrow Thieves is timely. Emotional. Superbly written. Thought-provoking. Gut-wrenching. Grave.
This dystopian novel is labeled Science Fiction. It’s also labeled Young Adult, I assume because it has limited sex and course language, and the main character, Frenchie, is a sixteen-year-old Metis man-boy on the run with an eccentric familial crew in the forests of northern Canada. With him are Frenchie’s love interest Rose (16); Chi-Boy (17) and Wab (18) who are one sweet couple; Tree and Zheegwan, 12-year-old twin boys; Slopper, nine and delightful; Ri-Ri , a seven-year-old girl whose grown up with them from infancy; Minerva their Anishinaabe Elder; and Miigwan who holds them all together.
The story is set in the not-too-distant future, before 2050, in a time I may not be physically here to see, but perhaps you will. Global warming, a concept we are becoming more and more familiar with each day, has destroyed most of the world. Tectonic plates shifted. Cities crumbled into the sea. America fought Canada for clean water from northern rivers. The Great Lakes were “polluted to muck … fenced off, too poisonous for use” (24). The government militarized. The North melted. People died in masses from disaster and disease and stopped reproducing. And then the non-Indigenous folks stopped dreaming. Which brings us to the crux of the story.
The only people who can still dream are Indigenous. As Miig explains: “Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones … You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into marrow like spinners … That’s where they pluck them from” (19). Frenchie’s band of survivors are running north because they’re being hunted for their bone marrow. The government has built new “residential schools” and hired “recruiters” to track down and capture anyone with Indigenous ancestry. They work them, kill them, and siphon their melted marrow into vials labeled by age and nation. The historical echo of exploitation and genocide rips through this book leaving us horrified.
But, take a deep breath. This is science fiction. Right?
Cherie Dimaline is a multi-award-winning author from the Georgia Bay Metis Community in Ontario. Her writing is so fresh, so original, so stylish and real, I’m hoping it seeps into my own bone marrow. I hope she is not a prophet, but merely issuing a warning like those forest fires and floods and Hellish droughts that continue to shake and shock us.
Listen up. Young Adult or grandmother, if you read no other books, please read this one. Preferably aloud to each other. And then talk it out. And hug it out.
And if this book seems too dark and depressing and your guts are already shivering, know this. The sequel is coming out this October. Hunting by Stars. I’ve already pre-ordered my paperback. You see, I have hope for Frenchie and his crew. And I have a new favourite writer.
Photo from her website, cheriedimaline.com which has a wealth of information about who she is.
I really love doing interviews. Most interviewers ask slightly different questions and each question teaches me more about myself. There are horses and canines in almost all my books. This is why.
In this latest written interview we delved more into my childhood and how I ended up writing novels. I also discuss my new catch-phrase “myth, magic, and mayhem.”
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