June 8, 2026

Venom Lake, by Emma White

I’ve been disappointed before by books that look like this one, books that have promised tight storytelling, suspense, the kind of grip that really does, genuinely surprising twists, fresh approaches to old tropes. That cover, that setting, a read as compelling as that cottage lit up by the side of a lake, drawing me in, and I’m thrilled to report that Emma White’s debut Venom Lake lived up to all of my expectations—and then some.

The premise is this—a true crime book club in Toronto made up of four friends embarks on a September retreat to the not-so-cozy-sounding Massasauga Lake, and by the time they’re arriving on the island, we already know that the dynamics of this group are seriously awry. Every woman has something to hide, in addition to a reason to seek revenge, and what White does that’s so interesting is make the unveiling of every layer in the narrative fresh and surprising, all awhile the mystery itself (one of these women is going to die, and another one of them will have been the one to kill her) unfolds in a fashion familiar to anyone partaking in the crime or true crime genres—and it definitely comes in handy that these ladies are connoisseurs.

There is fabulous intertextuality, references to real-life Toronto true-crimes, transcripts from a fictional true crime podcast that ends up covering what happens on the island, and layer after layer revealing the story to be not quite what you thought it was in the most engaging and satisfying way.

In a crew of such bitchy conniving characters, who will actually prove to be the most monstrous of the lot? Emma White keeps the competition twisty and fierce right to her novel’s final sentence.

PS Go read Kate Jenks Landry’s interview with Emma White at https://www.theneedleandtheknife.com/home/2026/5/21/10-questions-for-emma-white

June 8, 2026

Three Things

• I had a library book due on Friday that, according to my library dashboard, had no holds, which means I didn’t prioritize it for reading, expecting to simply renew it. But then when I tried to renew it, there were holds after all, and instead of returning the book to the library as statutes require, I kept it for three more days so I could read it, and I feel so ashamed of myself. And the point of this is for you to give me some absolution, of course, but also to delineate how badly I feel about this while there are actual carjackers walking around (or I guess they’re driving) without much compunction, and how. How? I really was not cut out for the criminal lifestyle.
• I got my hair cut yesterday and sailed down Palmerston Avenue from Harbord to King on my bike to get to the appointment, the most incredible ride, bike lanes all the way. I love riding my bike so much. Even when I have to come back and everything is slightly uphill and I end up panting.
• My daughter received a game called “Wavelength” for her birthday, and I cannot play it. It’s a game of parsing out degrees between extremes, and I think I’ve become allergic to categorization and binary thinking and it’s just all shades of grey, keleidoscopic, and just when anything feels completely settled, I’m re-evaluating again, and maybe nothing is ever really fixed, and maybe I am overthinking “Wavelength.”

June 5, 2026

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

When I first heard about Yesteryear in February from a friend who was reading an early copy, the premise didn’t compel me—a tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to actually live the life she pantomimes, nary a washing machine to be seen. Neat idea, bro, but it sounds a bit like Back to the Future III, which had been my least favourite of the trilogy, so no thank you. I’ve already read Laura Ingalls Wilder. And even when the novel had become legitimately buzzy, I still wasn’t bothered—until I discerned that the buzz was so incredibly divisive. Readers were loving this book, and readers were hating this book, and readers were apparently flummoxed by “the twist,” which I managed to learn nothing about, avoiding the discourse entirely.

I didn’t REALLY want to read Yesteryear, however, until I couldn’t get it, the last copy at Blue Heron Books sold right under my nose at Canadian Independent Bookstore Day and for a while after that, it was out of stock everywhere, so when I saw it again, I grabbed a copy at once. (Scarcity! Such a powerful drug.)

Readers, I loved this book. And I kept waiting for that twist everybody was talking about, but it never came, and I realized that some readers must have supposed they were reading a much more straightforward book than this one, a book where problems are resolved and there’s only just a single hinge, but this is a more complicated project, one that might warrant as many pages of explanation as Pa’s whatnot got in By the Shores of Silver Lake. There are layers of meaning here, and it’s not simply a send-up or satire of influencer culture, instead its own fictional creation, a statement on so many things but also remarkable for more than just simply what it’s “about.” It’s a troubling, uncomfortable, uneasy read, but I absolutely mean that as a compliment.

June 4, 2026

Down with art monsters.

‘“The word genius,” I learn from Kasia Van Schaik in Women Among Monuments, “comes from the Latin gignere for ‘beget’ or ‘to give birth or bring forth.”

And the glaring fact of this means that, when Van Schaik notes how the Romantic concept of genius was gendered (women were assumed to be ineligible for genius as “[d]ue to their biology, women, apparently, were fated to lack wit, judgement and skill”) I’m amused instead of outraged, the overcompensation of this clear, the tiny-dick-energy of a jacked-up Ford F-150.

How a woman’s procreative powers might make a man feel small, incidental, not integral, and so we have to shift things so that he’s centred, and we’re peripheral, and we take care not to mention motherhood in a conversation about the writing life. ‘

13 years ago I was almost 42 weeks pregnant. Tomorrow I will be the mother of two teenagers who are truly the most delightful people I’ve ever known. I am the luckiest.

I wrote about how motherhood made me a writer, and how a person’s creative and uncreative lives can exist in collaboration regardless of whether or not they are parents, and maybe for the better.

Like seriously, lick your own postage stamps, Nabokov.

Down with art monsters.

Read it all at https://kerryreads.substack.com/p/hybrid-creatures-artists-and-mothers.

June 1, 2026

One Day Hard and Clear, by Anne Baldo

Where do I even begin to tell you about how much I love this book?

Perhaps with the email I received three summers ago by editor Stephanie Small telling me about the short story collection, Morse Code for Romantics, by debut author Anne Baldo, a collection whose excellence was so sustained, and which was steeped in nostalgia, hot summers, and had me feeling as delightfully spent at the end as a long day at the beach.

And then with the experience I had the summer after that where I had the opportunity to work with Baldo on her next manuscript, a brutally glorious book that glittered, light reflected from the kind of edges that most people take for granted, don’t even pay attention to, but in an Anne Baldo sentence, they shine.

Then there was last summer, when I didn’t have an Anne Baldo book to read at all, but we don’t have to focus on that part of the story BECAUSE, One Day Hard and Clear is out today. The published version of that book I read two years ago and I’m so thrilled how it’s turned out, how it’s even more wonderful than it was on my first encounter, how that incredible cover sets you up for all the goodness this novel holds inside, it’s sepia tone, the stupid recklessness, female friendship, the posturing, and the heart at its core which is aching, human, and true.

One Day, Hard and Clear is about Sami, who has just finished high school in Windsor and dreams of escaping that world to Paris with her best friend Lucy, whose mother has never quite thought Sami was the right kind of friend for her daughter. And as the distance between them becomes clearer, Lucy moving into a different kind of realm as she pursues her university studies, Sami turns to True, with whom she’d once been a couple, but even after that was over, they’ve never been able to escape each other. Not even after Sami takes up with Bodie, who’s a wildcard, but such a predictable wildcard that he’s never going to really disappoint her, because she knows he only ever will.

Moving through the first decade of the century, the novel tells Sami’s story with extraordinary clarity of vision, her point of view understated but so tremendously defined, the power and beauty of Baldo’s prose underlining all of this. (“I’d stop calling True, I promised myself. Stop being like the sea, lovesick for the moon/ They say the moon, as it now is, was formed in the wreckage of a collision, millions of years ago, all the dust and debris transforming, out of devastation, into something luminous and new.”)

Rife with pop culture references, sympathetic Britney references, LFO playing in the background, characters who are so unbearably realized, reaching for each other but unable to connect—the tension of that. The brilliance of these sentences. The details with which Baldo builds her fictional world, it is all of just so wonderful, and I am so excited for the rest of you to discover it all.

May 29, 2026

This Is Why I Need You, by Alecsandra Kakon

Alecsandra Kakon’s debut novel, This is Why I Need You, begins with the drama dialed up to eleven: besties Zinnia, Fay, Kiara, and Valentina, are on the eve of their annual girls trip together, this time to Barbados, but Valentina has just rejected her boyfriend’s proposal, Kiara’s controlling fiance is flying all the red flags, and Zinnia and Fay have secretly become “more than friends,” even though Zinnia is married with children. None of these are spoilers, all happening at the novel’s outset, and while I had some doubts about a story being so front-loaded, whether such tension could be sustained (and it does get frothy in a few spots), the novel—which follows the women over the course of a life-changing year—was ultimately enjoyable and meaningful, a celebration of complicated friendships and messy lives, love, forgiveness, and chosen family.

May 28, 2026

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, by Nina McConigley

“You have to acknowledge wrongdoing, or it will never heal. Vinny Uncle never acknowledged it. He was just like Lieutenant Marley, doing whatever he liked, regardless of the cost to others. Who was going to rewrite our story? Who was going to say what he did to us was wrong? He wasn’t. So we had to.”

Like its protagonist, the American-Indian Georgie (short for Georgette Ayyar, her sister is Agatha Krishna), How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a mash-up, a mix, and a mystery—but not quite for the reasons you’d think. Set in the 1980s, and scattered with multiple choice quizzes ala teen magazines (“How do you know if a boy likes you? …Mostly a: Sounds like he must be confused…”), this is a story if sisterhood, a novel about two girls who decide to take justice into their own hands and kill their sexual predator uncle, a monster who lurks in their home.

That home is a ranch house in Wyoming, a curious place to be a girl with brown skin, where a mythology of cowboys and Indians (the other Indians) continue to dominate, and the threads of colonialism seems consistent, universal. And this story, which has something of the screwball comedy about it as much as a murder plot, takes on an unbearable poignancy. This is a slim little book that’s outrageous and contains multitudes.

May 28, 2026

Definitely Thriving is Totally Booked!

I’m so thrilled to be able to share my conversation with Zibby Owens about #DefinitelyThriving on the Totally Booked with Zibby podcast from our live recording at the Whitby Hotel in New York City last month. I don’t meet a lot of people who read more than I do, and so this encounter was both a privilege and a delight. Thank you for having me, Zibby and team, and for making my novel one of your fabulous spring picks. You can listen to Totally Booked wherever you get your podcasts! Direct link at https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/totally-booked-with-zibby/id1366633318?i=1000769789225

May 27, 2026

Some Updates

These are not urgent updates. Possibly updates have never been less urgent than these ones, but I feel like I’m in an odd place right now, recalibrating, taking stock, and so this is what I want to share today.

1. We have a funny room in our apartment dedicated to storing camping equipment and Christmas decorations, and it’s also my bedroom closet, as well as a repository for all the things we’d put down in the basement if we had a basement, and lately the situation there had become untenable. Too much stuff I possibly didn’t need, like the exercise bike that hadn’t been used for the last five years, my vast collection of padded envelopes, the outfits we wore at a Thai elephant camp in 2004, boxes I was keeping because they were good boxes, as well as hand-me-downs saved for my youngest child. A giant plastic bin full of dress-up clothes, and then this weird box full of hideous clothes from Honest Eds (a long brown paisley skirt and a polyester blouse with a snakeskin print, and a bra branded Bob Barker [not the “come on down” guy; it turns out there were two of them?]) that no one can recall ever having seen before. And this weekend we finally tackled the challenge and returned the room to rights, getting rid of bags and bags of stuff and clothes. And suddenly there is room in that room, and my life feels a little bit right lighter.
2. My children are four years apart, which has meant that hand-me-downing was a serious commitment in terms of organization and storage—we had a lot of stuff put away for when the youngest would grow into it. But she is now 13 and has a vastly different body than her sister had at that age, not to mention more discerning tastes—we’re all a bit disturbed (and some of us feel guilty) about how often floral pants appeared in our eldest’s wardrobe, and the youngest was having none of it. And then the fact that my 17 yo has stopped growing, which means she wears her own clothes out rather than passing them along for someone else to do so. So our hand-me-down years have ended, the floral pants put out to pasture, and the youngest will now be able to pick out her own clothes, instead of turning up her nose at other people’s tastes, and this is contributing to the room in that room, and my life feeling a little bit lighter.
3. On Monday morning, we booked a car and drove to Value Village to offload all that bagged up freight. The new Value Village location in our area has no parking or unloading area, which I suspect is part of the plan—it doesn’t always work out so well when families pack up bag and bags of random crap and drop them off for Value Village to deal with. But that’s what we were doing, and so I pulled into somebody’s laneway so my husband could take the bags and bags out of the trunk and carry them to the store entrance. But of course I was blocking in somebody’s car, and that somebody turned out to be H., who’s in my singing group, and it’s just weird to encounter somebody at the end of an alley and it turns out to be someone I know.
4. But this has been happening to me often this week. Last Monday we were in the east end and walked past a crowded park where we’d often met up with friends before, and there they were, almost as though I’d conjured them. On Saturday, my best friend sent me a text message that said “Everybody in Toronto is in the Eaton Centre Indigo today,” completely unaware that I too was in the Eaton Centre Indigo, and so she was not wrong. I enjoy that in this city of nearly 3 million people, things like this can happen.
5. It’s been an odd kind of spring for me, as I’ve been operating on my own momentum, not fully engaged with the season, instead running parallel to it. We were travelling in April and so I didn’t start seeds early. I’ve felt like I’ve been playing catch-up with getting my container garden into shape, fixing up my porch after winter. But my schedule has eased and the seeds I’ve sown are finally sprouting. Every year, every single year, I doubt it’s going to happen, find it impossible to believe (although seeds are a miracle; can you blame me?). But maybe I prefer not taking it all for granted. There’s something to being bowled over by it every single time.

May 25, 2026

The Great Good Places

I was late to Margaret Drabble, unsurprisingly, since she started publishing novels almost twenty years before I was born, and it was only when I was living in Japan in my 20s that I fell under their spell, battered copies of her Penguin paperbacks with their faded orange spines readily available at Wantage Book in Kobe. Already somewhat dated (see faded spines: Margaret Drabble had been so CURRENT in the ’60s, chief to her appeal!) but somehow also seeming as though they contained the universe, which felt timely, as at that moment I felt I was on the cusp of my own life, including the writing career I so desired. Drabble’s intimate portrayals of ordinary lives were so tied to huge societal and existential questions, constellations that I felt as though I could map and come closer to understanding everything.

When we left Japan, I insisted on sending all my books home by sea, which didn’t make much sense, financial or otherwise, but I didn’t want to part with them. Only now, more than twenty years later, have I been able to let them go for these beautiful editions that are for more readable, first editions, no less, acquired via my mom and her voluntary work for her local library’s book sale. There’s a line in Definitely Thriving where Clemence notes that the upside of women’s fiction being so devalued is that you can collect their first editions for a bargain. And maybe now that I am nearing fifty and have become challenged by the impossible type in mid-century paperbacks, these new-to-me editions will make rereading more palatable.

The Great Good Places, however, is a first edition Drabble that is new to me, signed no less, acquired on our trip to England this spring. It’s a collection of essays and stories from where Drabble sits in her late 80s, all of it with an autobiographical bent. She tells us that her 2016 book The Dark Flood Rises is her final novel, for the death of her daughter in 2017 left her unable to write fiction anymore. There’s a sadness permeating the collection, unsurprisingly, but still the same clarity and curiosity that makes her voice her own, a writerly voice that still compels me and likely always will.