Welcome to Litsy!

Absolutely compelling read for my IRL: the story of four very different but strong sisters and their mother living in Roaring Twenties Vancouver. The narrator is sometimes the sister who has had an abortion, sometimes a third person, and occasionally the family dog, which works surprisingly well. It tackles complex themes that include marriage and betrayal, queerness in an age when it was illegal, abortion, immigration, smuggling, and more./1

I wondered if we could have come up with the name of one woman who in the past decade had not lost someone. A husband, a brother, a son.
We who survived the war and the pandemic, we recovered-emotionally, mentally-despite our dreadful losses, didn't we? We went on. Why not Ahmie?
I thought of Dr. Blakeway, who first prescribed laudanum to Ahmie. To calm her nerves, the old man said.
Was he dead? I hoped he was.
Otherwise I wanted a word with him.

Flore, still seated, stretches her
hand out to Harriet. There's an endless second during which Harriet is certain she should never have come, but then Flore's mouth opens.
"You sexy thing," Flore whispers.
Now she has her arms around Harriet and
says, "Now take me dancing,
Harry."
And here, in these clothes, with Flore, Harriet is finally home. Relief, a spring river, floods every one of her bones. Every single one of them.

#WeekendReads @rachelsbrittain
My read for my IRL book club: I‘m about 15 percent in and finding it excellent. A novel about four sisters in the Roaring Twenties in Vancouver, who are dealing with marriage tensions, sexual orientation, abortion, parenting… Sound familiar?

#12Booksof2024 November

It was a month dominated by stories of the complicated, beautiful relationships of sisters. In the end, the McKenzie sisters eked out the top spot over the Blues. Their hopes and dreams of finding a way to be themselves amid the societal pressures of 1920s Vancouver were engaging, beautiful, often enraging, and all too relevant to today's world.

@Andrew65

This book is utterly unique. It reads almost like an epic poem of old, but at the same time, completely new. Medieval-Modern, knights for the new age. It examines the mythology of Camelot through the lens of today‘s world, with all its complexities and difficulties and joys, where even the setting feels queer and off-kilter. ⬇️

Possibly in keeping with the season…

Such a great book! A story that follows 5 survivors of Indian residential schools. I was tearing up so much as their individual stories unraveled. Such a dark part of history.

From the moment I started this one, I wanted to do very little other than read it.

In 1920s Vancouver, Isla McKenzie seeks out an illegal abortion. Her sisters find her near death in a hospital ward. The consequences ripple through the lives of all four McKenzie sisters and those around them, as they each try to find a life that is true to their own selves in a society that places little value on a woman's ideas, love, and choices. Cont'd 👇

This was such a good read, raw and searching, solid and seeing, compelling and quiet. It is storytelling in the most real sense of that term, like a history being imparted rather than a novel being written. And I guess it is, for all that the characters are fictional, their stories have real cousins out there that also need to be heard. I was deeply affected by the characters and the journeys they each traveled in order to find home.