Product Description
Award-winning author Miriam Toews's first novel tells the heartwarming story of two young mothers who set off on an adventure all their own, relying on luck, pluck, and friendship

Eighteen-year-old Lucy and her flamboyant friend Lish are two of the single moms who live in Have-a-Life, a housing project for single mothers better known as Half-a-Life. Lucy has no idea who the father of her son is, while Lish still pines for the father of her twins. Fathers aren't around much at the project. They're mostly the kind of people whose heads get cut out of pictures.

Life is tough for Lucy and Lish: Little Red Wagons and cheap strollers are the only way to get to and from the grocery store, and it's hard to make ends meet. So when Lish suggests a harebrained road trip in search of the fire-eater, Lucy can't help but be excited. They borrow a van held together with coat hangers and electrical tape, load it up with kids and clothes, and hit the road. Lucy tells her story in a wry, bittersweet voice that marks her as a literary sister to Nomi Nickel, the beloved narrator of Toews's A Complicated Kindness.

"A comic take on what initially appears to be a most improbable topic for humor--and it works." (Globe and Mail) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Great book!
I loved, loved this book.Took me awhile to get through but only because I wanted to savour it.The first half of the book introduces each wacky character in Half-a-Life.The second half deals with Lish and Lucy's advenure to find Gotcha.This is a different, entertaining, and really cute book that I would read again and again.

Single mothers' Canadian club
Lucy, the first person narrator, and Lish are unwed mothers living in public housing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a place where Fargo is considered the warm south. Lucy does not know the father of her child because "if you eat a whole can of beans how can you tell which one gave you gas." There are so many unfathered children in the building that their version of the alphabet song is "ABCDEFGHIJKalimony please".Both Lucy and Lish have difficult relationships with conventional respectable unsupportive (in the emotional sense) fathers of their own. These relationships form a faint thread of a plot, although the novel is largely made up of the intersecting stories of the other mothers in the building.
I was reminded of Adrian Leblanc's serious non-fiction "Random Family."That's a great book but Toew's is better, and actually contains more information about the singles mother's predicament, and offers more insight into her motivation, as well as being hilariously funny..
Once again we have a great Canadian female writer. Why is Canada the only country where a list of the top five writers cannot be made up that is not predominantly female?

Miriam Toew's First Novel is an unlikely vehicle for humour
Summer of My Amazing Luck, Miriam Toew's first novel, tells the story of single mothers who inhabit the fictional "Have-A-Life"- (A.K.A."Half-A-Life") welfare project in downtown Winnipeg.Single mom's on welfare seems an unlikey basis for humour, but Summer of MyAmazing Luck, shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Humour Prize in 1997, is gut-busting, laugh-out-loud hilarity. Told through the eyes ofeighteen-year-old Lucy, who lives at "Half-a-Life" with her babyboy "Dillinger", we meet the Lucy's older, more worldlyconfident, the eccentric Lish, who's raising three young daughters, and isin deparate search for her one true love, a fire-eater from Colorado, thefather of her twins.On the backdrop of Winnipeg's mosquito infested rainyseason, Lucy and Lish try to make homes for their children, and find loveand contentment in their own lives; we pity, admire and love them for it.Summer of My Amazing Luck is a wonderful book, and a tribute to motherseverywhere.

Interesting. Everything but the kitchen sink included.
Two single mothers living hand-to-mouth grapple with their desires to be loved and accepted and the relentless search for meaning in life. Ranges from humorous to pathetic. Leaves the reader with understanding, pity, andpossibly even admiration for the unlikely heroines. ... Read more

Product Description
Nomi Nickel lives with her father, Ray, in East Village, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. She dreams of escaping to the big city, but since her mother and sister left home, it's hard to imagine leaving her father behind. As she begins to piece together the story behind her mother's disappearance, she finds herself on a direct collision course with the town's minister. With fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews takes us straight to the centre of Nomi's world and the complicated kindness at the heart of family life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (45)

Dazed and Confused (2.5 stars)
I have very mixed feelings about A Complicated Kindness.On the surface, it's an interesting concept.Nomi is a teenager in a small Mennonite town and is more a typical teenager than a typical Mennonite.I was interested in the conflict between modern influences and a culture living in the past.

It turned out to be not that interesting.If felt a bit like the movie Footloose to be honest.Nomi wants to be a regular teenager and dreams of escape but is constrained by the religious leaders and others in her church.The church ends up being more of a bit player than I would have liked and most of Nomi's story plays as a very typical bored teenager who dream sof escape and struggles with identity while regularly getting high.

This story was not all bad.Nomi's turn of phrase is sometimes very funny and her insights very interesting.Unfortunately, her style of speech is very Gilmore Girls and becomes tiring after awhile.

My favorite part of the book was the relationship between her mother and father and the deep love and sacrifice.I wish this had been expanded upon more.

So, thise was interesting concept that simply ends up being typical and a bit cointrived.I liked parts but don't recommend it.A lot will depend on how interesting you find Nomi's character as the whole book hinges on this.

You Just Can't Make the Mennonites "Fun"
Nomi is a senior in high school in Canada - in East Village , a Mennonite town.She and her father are living alone now, her mother and sister, Tash, having left a while back.Her uncle is the minister and her boyfriend, Travis seems totally disconnected.Eventually, Nomi is excommunicated and her father also leaves, giving Nomi the chance to escape - to try and piece together a life out of the odd pieces she has had up to now.We leave Nomi not knowing what she does or what happened to her family.

Reading the book flaps, I thought I would be reading a funny story about a Mennonite teen who yearns for modern comforts.Instead, I had a 246 page philosophy ramble.You are never told what happened to Trudie and Tasg or whether Ray is nuts, having a breakdown, going bankrupt or just quirky.What is up with Travis - is he married or a teen too?Why doesn't Nomi go to school?And why was she excommunicated instead of shunned?A totally confusing journey to nowhere.

Dark Humor
Nomi Nickel feels trapped in her small, Mennonite Manitoba town. East Village, Manitoba, combines strict religiosity with all of the career opportunities inherent in a chicken-rendering plant, and has brought nothing but strife to Nomi and her family. At the book's start Nomi's mother and sister have already run off, escaping the strictures of East Village. Nomi spends much of her time dreaming about reuniting with her mother and sister, reminiscing about the past, and trying to escape the strictures of East Village. Toewes does a brilliant job of narrating as Nomi, a troubled teenager. Much of Nomi's resistence seems to come from her perverse sense of humor, which sometimes distracts the reader from just how tragic her situation is. Nomi's is a world with few opportunities and no real solutions, and the novel is certainly a cautionary statement on the dangers of ideology without thought.

"A work of fierce originality and brilliance."
Sometimes the jacket blurbs get it right.

This is a gem of a book. (I can't bring myself to call it a 'novel'. Maybe 'slices of fictional memoir' is how I'd label it.) Its narrator's voice is stunning, absolutely authentic, unfailingly truthful, bearing all the insight -and ignorance- that all great taletellers possess.

Being staggered by an author's skills, their chutzpah, a singularity of expression...these are what I hope for every time I sit down to read a new offering. And I was repeatedly staggered by Ms Toew's 'A Complicated Kindness'. But I was never patronized, I never felt that the first-person narrative got precious, or self-involved; the teenaged perspective of Nomi Nickel rang true, and was expressed as cleanly as if you were listening to the gal share her story on a bus downtown, or a cross-country train, or in a booth at a diner.

Phenomenal.

(Personal rating: 9.5/10)

Shiftless
I was really hopeful about this book, because I didn't know anything really about Mennonites or Manitoba and I was interested in both.But it was disappointing.Maybe it's reflective of the nature of the place, but these people are just kind of wandering around, and I really lost interest in them in a hurry.I did make it all the way through...I had taken it on vacation with me and was determined to read it to the end.But it left me with a real sense of dullness.

Also, what is up with the annoying trend of not using quotation marks?Maybe it makes a statement in some avant-garde writing sense, but to me it just seems sloppy. ... Read more

Product Description
One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. With razor-sharp precision, Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment. A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An amazing book
This book must have been incredibly hard to write but we should thank Miriam Toews for seeing it through. This is a very insightful picture of one man's struggle and its ripple effect. She captured a perspective that many of us are lucky enough not to feel but that we need to understand in order to be supportive to others.

Yes- a paperback of this is good
I really enjoyed reading "Complicated" but this book didn't have quite the same tone as complicated.It was still well written, but a little maudlin.I like to have a break from feeling low myself, and I think people DO read to escape, therefore, I can't say all that much was wrong with the book.It just wasn't a clear picture like Toews' other book was. ... Read more

Product Description
"Min was stranded in her bed, hooked on the blue torpedoes and convinced that a million silver cars were closing in on her (I didn't know what Thebes meant either), Logan was in trouble at school, something about the disturbing stories he was writing, Thebes was pretending to be Min on the phone with his principal, the house was crumbling around them, the black screen door had blown off in the wind, a family of aggressive mice was living behind the piano, the neighbours were pissed off because of hatchets being thrown into their yard at night (again, confusing, something to do with Logan) … basically, things were out of control. And Thebes is only eleven."
–from The Flying Troutmans

Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris – "he was heading off to an ashram and said we could communicate telepathically" – Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, she loads the kids, a cooler, and a pile of CDs into their van and they set out on a road trip in search of the children's long-lost father, Cherkis.

In part because no one has any good idea where Cherkis is, the traveling matters more than the destination. On their wayward, eventful journey down to North Dakota and beyond, the Troutmans stay at scary motels, meet helpful hippies, and try to ignore the threatening noises coming from under the hood of their van. Eleven-year-old Thebes spends her time making huge novelty cheques with arts and crafts supplies in the back, and won't wash, no matter how wild and matted her purple hair gets; she forgot to pack any clothes. Four years older, Logan carves phrases like "Fear Yourself" into the dashboard, and repeatedly disappears in the middle of the night to play basketball; he's in love, he says, with New York Times columnist Deborah Solomon. Meanwhile, Min can't be reached at the hospital, and, more than once, Hattie calls Marc in tears.

But though it might seem like an escape from crisis into chaos, this journey is also desperately necessary, a chance for an accidental family to accept, understand or at least find their way through overwhelming times. From interwoven memories and scenes from the past, we learn much more about them: how Min got so sick, why Cherkis left home, why Hattie went to Paris, and what made Thebes and Logan who they are today.

In this completely captivating book, Miriam Toews has created some of the most engaging characters in Canadian literature: Hattie, Logan and Thebes are bewildered, hopeful, angry, and most of all, absolutely alive. Full of richly skewed, richly funny detail, The Flying Troutmans is a uniquely affecting novel.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (57)

Cross country trip with eccentric characters
Hattie Troutman, the narrator, is a Canadian ex-pat living in Paris who has just recently been dumped by her boyfriend.Then she gets the phone call from her mentally unstable sister that she needs to come back to Canada to watch after her kids.Hattie arrives and gets Min, the sister, settled in the hospital, she decides to take the two kids, Thebes, age 11 and Logan, age 15 to find their father.The last anyone heard from him he was in the sticks of South Dakota showing his art out of a barn on the outskirts of some town.So off they go across the border.

Thebes has purple hair and talks non-stop.While Logan is a moody, rebellious 15-year-old who constantly has headphones on and his hoodie pulled over his head.Hattie is an immature 28-year-old who is more a companion to Thebes and Logan than a caretaker.Along the way they hit a deer and tear up the van; Hattie makes out with a joint toking hippie; Logan breaks his wrist; they are run out of one town by the police; and they end up adopting a pit bull.Eccentric characters pop in and out of the story at every stop they make but none of them have any significance to the story. The dialogue quickly becomes trite and underwhelming as Thebes nonstop talking continues and Hattie's observations are not very astute.

Needless to say once they get to South Dakota the father is long gone and someone in the town thinks to Twentynine Palms, California, so off they head to California.They stay in fleabag motels along the way, but most of the action happens within the van.It's a readable book and quick read, just slightly disappointing.

Offbeat with Eccentric Characters
Reason for Reading: The publisher's plot synopsis grabbed me right away.

Summary: Hattie in Paris, who has just been dumped by her boyfriend, receives an urgent message from her niece in Manitoba to come home quickly. Hattie's sister Min is in a deep depression and needs to go into the hospital again and when Hattie arrives she finds the kids in a state. Teenage Logan retreats into his hoodie all the time, rarely speaks and the neighbors have a backyard full of hatchets. Thebes, on the other hand, does not stop talking, ever, and looks as if she hasn't changed clothes in a few weeks nor combed, let alone washed her hair in months. Hattie is totally not up to the job of looking after two children so she takes the children in the van on a road trip to the States to find their father whom Min chased out of their lives when they Logan was a toddler and Thebes newly born. With only the name of a place of where he was ten years ago they set off.

Comments: What a wonderful, brilliant book! A humourous, heart-felt, sometimes poignant story of a family of the most quirky characters. This family is both dysfunctional and each member is suffering their own mental health problems but they are also lovable, unique and become accepted to the reader just the way they are. The only character I didn't connect with nor grow to like was Hattie, who was quite negligent with looking after the children and as a 32yo woman had no excuse for her behaviour except that she daydreamed about her ex-boyfriend back in Paris and hadn't looked after children before. I didn't buy it. However, the children and Min (who we get to know through Hattie's memories) were extremely outlandish yet totally believable characters.

A great story that will have you chuckling, shaking your head and growing fonder of these two children the more you read. I really enjoyed this, my first foray into Toews, and I will be looking into her other work hoping to find the same quality of story. The book vaguely reminded me of the movie "Little Miss Sunshine" and I pictured Logan just as the teenage son in that movie. If you enjoy an offbeat story populated with eccentric characters this book will certainly fit the bill.

Funny, moving, and tragic story of one family dealing with mental illness
This book was by turns funny and moving and tragic.The quirky character traits the children exhibit definitely spark a smile, but it is a sad smile as you realize why they were forced to develop these defense mechanisms.None of the adults in the books act actually like adults (most of the time) which is truly unfair to these children.Hattie is certainly not prepared to act as a parent; in their own way, Thebes and Logan are the most grown-up characters in the story.

I thought that Min's mental illness was handled with sensitivity and accuracy, especially as it impacted the lives of those around her.I was also impressed with Hattie's character development as the novel progressed.This novel doesn't present any answers to the questions raised in the narrative- it is just a story of a family trying to cope the best way they can.Impressive and enjoyable read.

Where do I begin?

This book is, in its own way, a stellar accomplishment. At the same time, not everyone will like it, not everyone will 'get' it. But man...what a ride.

It's economical. Spare. And maybe, just maybe, because of the core subject -depression- this was the perfect tack to take, rather than getting bogged down in narrative that provides more in its depth, but that depth ends up detracting from the power of this core.

Normally, I don't touch on 'what the story's about' in my reviews. Here, I'm going to make an exception. To a small extent. 'Troutmans' is a road trip. A road trip as told by a fractured, vulnerable, flawed narrator...whose own profile does not impact negatively on the story...something I consistently harp on about these days. Along with Hattie, there's Thebes, her 11 year old niece, and Logan, her 15 year old nephew. Both are, to most observers, intellectually heightened to the extreme...and maybe this is part of what would put off some readers. (I'll get to the major element of this effect in a moment.)

These two kids are so fantastically presented- Look; I'm a writer, I pride myself on being great with dialogue...but what Ms Toews comes up with repeatedly, what she lavishes on us by way of these two characters is... Well, at times, not only was I laughing, but I was almost applauding. The voices -for those who can hear them- are authentic to the point of being painfully so. In fact, my basic litmus test for any novel (and I'll confess here that I know this reveals a major prejudice of mine, so go ahead; sue me. But then, I am also a screenwriter...) is whether I'm compelled to see the tale in my head, as a film. Better yet, would I *want* to see it as a film, on the screen. In this case, absolutely, positively, beyond any shadow of a doubt. It might just be the ultimate 'indie film', pushing aside such beloved gems as 'Lost in Translation', 'Little Miss Sunshine' and 'Sideways'. I may have felt very, very uncomfortable with some of what unfolds, what's said, what's done...even moreso when deconstructing the family history, figuring out just how they got to be the people they are...but I was affected by what Ms Toews wrote, and really, is there any greater goal, than to effect your readers, to get them to a different place, add to their experiences in a rich way?

As I said, the core subject is depression, and this is what many people simply wouldn't like about 'The Flying Troutmans'. Its discussion, even as pithily presented by the author, brings with it a suitable weight. And tonal impact. People don't feel comfortable talking about 'everyday depression', never mind the kind that's held someone in its grips their entire life, kept them on the abyss of suicide for nearly the duration. (It's familiar territory for me, having been a self-diagnosed 'functional, cyclical depressive' for more than three decades.) Min, the mother of Logan and Thebes, sister to Hattie, the patient in this story, is the lynchpin of 'Troutmans', but her situation is handled with a true deftness-of-touch, a near-perfect consideration by Ms Toews, not only in references in the present tense, but also in flashbacks. Your heart breaks for her, putting the pieces together, but I never felt that this element was overdone, never turning either mawkish or maudlin. But then, it's not what the book's about; the road trip is what the book's about.

'The Flying Troutmans' is a gem. Written by a novelist who took a particular tack to tell a particular story a particular way, it's a distinct tale in a world where just about everything's been heard before. And of course now I'm going to be investigating the rest of Ms Toew's oeuvre.

(Personal rating: 9/10)

Hysterical
Characters are incredibly well developed and witty. This book makes you laugh out loud and similarly tugs your heart strings. Best book I have read in some time. Ending is less well developed and slightly abrupt, however it leaves you feeling like we need more Troutman's in the future. ... Read more

Product Description
From the award-winning author of A Complicated Kindness comes a delightfully funny and charming novel about growing up, getting old, and falling in love in a small town

Life in Winnipeg didn't go as planned for Knute Corea-McCloud and her daughter, Summer Feelin'. But moving back in with her parents in Algren, Manitoba, and working for the longtime mayor, Hosea Funk, has its own challenges: Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea's attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister-even if that means keeping the town's population at an even 1500. It's not an easy task, with citizens threatening to leave, Summer Feelin's father threatening to move back, Hosea's lady friend looking to move in, and one Algrenian on the verge of giving birth-to twins or possibly triplets. Hosea's search for his own roots takes us back to Algren's days as an outpost prairie town, when his mother, Euphemia, was seduced by a mysterious cowboy. Discovering the true identity of that cowboy fuels Hosea's many obsessions and just might reveal whether he is, indeed, a boy of good breeding.

Miriam Toews's inimitable humor and her largerthan- life characters bring small-town Canada to life. A Boy of Good Breeding is a big-hearted, hilarious novel about finding out where you belong. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Hilarious, big-hearted, small town story
After the success of Canadian author Toews' award winning "A Complicated Kindness," some of her earlier novels have been released in the U.S. While 1998's "A Boy of Good Breeding" may not be the perfect gem "Kindness" is, it's a captivating and very funny story of acceptance, love, and finding one's place in the world.

The novel focuses on two disparate characters, Knute McCloud, a young single mother having a tough time making it on her own in the city (Winnipeg), and Hosea Funk, the awkward, shy mayor of Algren, Canada's smallest town.

After losing her gas-pumping job for accidentally blowing up a motor home, then failing to seat anyone at her restaurant-hostess job, Knute moves back to Algren with her 4-year-old daughter, Summer Feelin' (S.F. for short), to help out after her father's heart attack. Tom, her father, is depressed and declining and her mother has embarked on manic house renovations, accompanied by stories of other people's personal disasters.

Hosea, Tom's best friend since boyhood, is preoccupied with a secret project - winning the prime minister's visit to celebrate Algren's designation as Canada's smallest town. To gain this distinction, the town's population must be 1,500 - one more and some other town may win, one less and Algren is demoted to village status.

Anticipating success, Hosea hires Knute as his assistant though he can't, at least at first, find much for her to do but rid the town of a recalcitrant mutt. His days are taken up with regulating the population - visiting the hospital to check on the maternity ward and the dying, tallying up those who move in and out, fretting.

Then Max- Summer Feelin's feckless father - comes back to town. And Hosea is on the brink of losing Lorna, the love of his 50-year-old life, because he daren't let her move in with him before the population count and he can't tell her why. Fact is, his mother, who never married, said on her deathbed that the PM was his father and Hosea is desperate to meet him.

This is a generous, big-hearted novel, made tart and funny by the very particular eccentricities of Toews' full-fleshed characters, and her considerable flair for comedy.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Early Book by the Fannie Flagg of Canada
I guess people have different reactions to Miriam Toews, but all of us pat ourselves on the back for picking up her fiction and reading it through despite the cultural uncertainty of being unsure about how to pronounce "Toews."Her current bestseller was so big that here in the USA her American publishers have brought back some earlier books, and this is the one I settled on, after some debate.The funny thing is that I still don't know who the boy of good breeding us.But maybe it's Hose, Hosea Funk, the mayor of the smallest town in Canada--Algren, Manitoba.

He's concerned because his mother, Euphemia Funk, once told him while she as dying that his dad was John Beart, the true Prime Minister of Canada (in the novel, that is) (the real Prime Minister, I have determined, is Stephen Harper, who was just on TV last night honoring the Canadian victims of the World Trade Center disaster).But check later, because they turn over like flapjacks there north of the border.Prime Minister Beart has made a vow to visit the smallest town in Canada, and so Funk will get his chance to meet his putative father.

He keeps obsessive track of every newcomer to town, as well as those dying, and those newborn (Veronica Epp has triplets, so to keep the population of the town at a steady 1500, Funk has to make sure three people leave or die!)This black comedy is just a backdrop, or better yet a "blackdrop," to the main story of Knute McCloud and her little daughter, the delightful Summer Feelin'.These two return to town to comfort Knute's father Tom as he feels poorly.

Miriam Toews is like Fannie Flagg but with more writing ability.Reading this book makes me want to move to a small town where, even if we don't have money, we care about each other.There maybe were too many characters with humorous names, as though the spirit of LIL ABNER were thriving in Manitoba, but quirky is as quirky does, and we should all have such problems.

Empire Falls "light"
Hosea Funk is an eccentric middle aged mayor of Algren, the sometimes "smallest town in Canada," which he strives to keep that way to increase his chances of winning a contest which would result in a visit by the prime minister, who he's been told is his father.He flits in and out of the lives of the residents of the town, irritating some, like the town doctor, with his nosiness, necessary to keep his plan on track.Births, deaths, and decisions of townspeople to move into or out of the town limits could all affect the count of residents that he diligently keeps track of, much to the irritation and wonderment of those who knowingly and unknowingly provide him information.His never known to be promiscuous mother's decision at a dance to go off into the night with an out of town stranger, results in his sudden appearance after months spent in a baggy hot wool sweater.Hosea, whose grandparents are somehow able to, at least temporarily, swallow as having been left with his mother by a man on a horse, grapples with the decision of whether to commit to his girlfriend from the city, increasing the town's population and risking the loss of the contest, or to risk losing the girlfriend altogether.Subplots about his friend Tom's daughter, Knute, who comes to work the him, granddaughter, Summer Feelin', and the boyfriend who up and left the town and that of Tom's life after suffering a heart attack, round out the story.Mayor Hosea eventually makes all the right moves and wins at the most important thing, the game of life - a quick quirky read which feels a bit like Empire Falls.

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award
Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award and ably narrated by Ruth McIntosh, A Boy Of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews is an abridged audiobook set in a small Canadian town - a town so small that the Mayor schemes to keep the population at an even 1,500 to win a contest for being the smallest town in the nation. Young mother Knute and her four-year-old daughter have returned to town to escape the havoc of the big city, but when the mayor enlists Knute for his schemes, she must figure out how to keep the town population down when folks keep getting married, having babies, and more. The return of Knute's old boyfriend Max further complicates issues in this charming, down-home folksy story, originally broadcast on CBC radio. 3 CDs, 4 hours.

The problem with CanLit...
The problem with CanLit is its overly self-conscious need to be "not American", with "uniquely" "Canadian" "settings" and "characters".

Some (most notably Carol Shields and Jane Urquhart, possibly Robertson Davies, occasionally Margaret Atwood) rise above the genre and write for an audience that goes beyond the coy quaintness so beloved of Canadian cultural conservators, and reach a broad readership who appreciate the universal themes in their work. The rest write for a limited audience in a style no more nourishing than most scifi, mysteries and romances. CanLit is just another species of genre fiction at its most government-subsidized mediocre.

A Boy of Good Breeding is an okay read, but it seemed more of a caricature than a story. If this author's other work genuinely warrants the accolades she has received (Governor General's award, Margaret Laurence award for Fiction, numerous Book of the Year awards), this book surely must be an anomaly, and I wonder why the author persisted with the project.

The narrator and the characters all seem to think this is a far funnier story than I thought it was, perhaps because nothing in the book really made me care about the people or the setting. A plus, perhaps, is that it wasn't set in Toronto for a change (which every Canadian knows is the true center of the universe) but for all that I didn't find the story or the thematic undercurrents all that interesting.

Surely this is a harmless read compared with W.P. Kinsella's overrated and arguably racist portrayals of the "hilarious" antics of those wacky inhabitants of Hobbema, Alberta, or Jack Hodgins' impenetrable magic realism, or W.D. Valgardson's self-absorbed personal angst, but even at that, I don't think the vast cultural investment in Canadian literature has, in the case of A Boy of Good Breeding, paid off. ... Read more

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Product Description
Chapters: John Hamm, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Miriam Toews, Roland Ritchie, Russell Maclellan, Walter C. Lawson, Arthur Haliburton, 1st Baron Haliburton, Duncan Mccue, David Mcguffin. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 33. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: John Frederick Hamm, OC, ONS (born April 8, 1938) is a Canadian physician and politician and was the 25th Premier of Nova Scotia, Canada. Hamm, a graduate of the University of King's College and Dalhousie University, was a family doctor in his hometown of Stellarton, Nova Scotia, and the president of the Nova Scotia Medical Society. He entered politics in 1993, becoming the Member of the Legislative Assembly for the riding of Pictou Centre. Hamm was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Nova Scotia in 1995, succeeding Terry Donahoe. His party won 14 seats in the 1998 provincial election and held the balance of power in a minority government where both the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party, led by Russell MacLellan and Robert Chisholm, respectively, each had nineteen seats. Hamm's Tories defeated the Liberal minority government on a budget vote on June 17, 1999, and in the subsequent election on July 27, 1999, Hamm was elected Premier, winning 30 of the 52 seats in the provincial legislature. After taking office, Hamm sold or closed government-owned industries such as Sydney Steel. He invested more in education and health care, and implemented some tax cuts. His government was the first to truly balance provincial finances in 25 years, following changes in public sector accounting practises. In 2001, Hamm was at odds with the Nova Scotia Government Employees Union, trying to legislate nurses back to work after a legal strike. In the 2003 election, Hamm's Progressive Conservatives were reduced to a minori...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=226559 ... Read more

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Chapters: Di Brandt, Owen Gingerich, Menno Simons, Graham Kerr, Alan Kreider, Karl Schroeder, John A. Hostetler, Miriam Toews, Donald Kraybill, Julia Kasdorf, Rudy Wiebe, Joseph Yoder, Harold S. Bender, Joseph Funk, Christopher Dock, David Bergen, Tripp York, Jim Unger, Sandra Birdsell, Reuben Epp, Vern Thiessen, Paul Hiebert, Patrick Friesen, Armin Wiebe, John Weier, John D. Roth. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 93. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Dr. Owen Jay Gingerich (1930-) is a former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University, and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he has written many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Academy of the History of Science. He has been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists, and is on the Templeton Foundations Board of Trustees. He was born to a Mennonite family in Washington, Iowa, but was raised on the prairies of Kansas where he first became interested in astronomy. His father, Melvin Gingerich, taught at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, from 1941 to 1947, when he took a job at Goshen College in Indiana. When his family relocated, Owen Gingerich began attending Goshen College without having graduated from high school, having just completed his junior year. He continued his studies at Harvard University. In 2004, Newton High School awarded him with an honorary high school diploma. Due largely to Gingerichs work, De revolutionibus (here the cover of the 2nd edition of 1566, Basel) has been researched and cataloged better than any first-edition...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=772414 ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She moved to Toronto in 2009. Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book Swing Low: A Life was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads. A series of letters she wrote in 2000 to the father of her son were published on the website www.openletters.net and were profiled on the radio show This American Life in an episode about missing parents. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Winnipeg Free Press, published by Thomson Gale on December 16, 2007. The length of the article is 509 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Fall release for new Miriam Toews novel.(Books)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: Winnipeg Free Press (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 16, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: d0

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