Showing posts with label governor general's literary award winner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label governor general's literary award winner. Show all posts

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Cool Water

cool water

(Note to self: stop using your phone to take pictures. Your camera that is just a camera works SOOOOO much better!)

Hello December…will I ever get caught up? This is still an October read and I still have the month of November to get through too…Fingers crossed! My pile of to-reads is going to grow soon too…Christmas is coming!

Cool Water. This book was a gift from my parents for Christmas? my birthday? a couple of years ago (oddly it’s not written in…that never happens in my family). It sat on the dresser and gathered dust, but as I’ve been unofficially on the book diet again, I’m slowly getting through that pile.

Cool Water follows some of the townsfolk in Juliet, Saskatchewan around for a day. There are some real characters in Juliet, but Dianne Warren describes their lives in such a way that they are fully believable. For a couple of nights after finishing Cool Water, I still dreamed about the characters in the book, mostly Vicki and Lee. It doesn’t happen often that I dream about characters from a book, but they seemed so real.

I was disappointed when the book ended because I wanted to know more (to me, a sign of a good book!). What happened to Vicki’s family? What happened to Lee and the horse and the postcards? What about Jodi and her trip to Alberta? What about Lila and the hard conversation(s) with Rachelle? So many questions…maybe that’s why I dreamed about them…maybe I was giving myself the endings I wanted…

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Sisters Brothers


The Sisters Brothers is the 2011 winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. I really liked this book...the tone was great and it was pretty funny in some parts! Eli Sisters narrates the book and he is a very compassionate hired assassin. Charlie Sisters, Eli's older brother, is more ruthless and has no (very little?) conscience. The ongoing ordeal of Tub the horse is both humorous and heart breaking. The imagery of the Wild West and the lawlessness and debauchery that went hand in hand with the gold rush is excellent. Their journey down the West Coast and back again really does bring them full circle from young boys living in an abusive home, to hired guns, to grown men, safe in their home...

Oh, and can I just say, I love the cover!