The Whatnot of TJ

Canada Reads 2026 short list is out. Thoughts? Feelings? I've only read one book and didn't like it. Very excited that Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a champion. I could stare at her face until I die.


Cinder House by Freya Marske
This was getting hyped up by someone at my bookclub, and I probably should've known better (not because they don't have great recs, just that I'm more miss than hit on fairytale retellings), but it was a novella, so I thought I'd give it a go. I indeed should've known better.

It's a cute idea: the step mother murders both Cinderella and her father on the first page, and the rest of the story is about Cinderella's ghost haunting the house. I appreciated a lot of the little twists on the story (which seemed pretty closely linked to the Disney version, but I also haven't read a tonne of other versions, so maybe not). There's some neat worldbuilding around how society treats magic, and the author did a good job incorporating the history and politics of the country without info dumping. I liked how the glass slippers worked.

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time connecting with it, and I'm trying to work out how to describe why. The story had a certain smugness to it, maybe? Like it was aware that it was telling the version of the story that would appeal to someone who thought a bisexual ghost polycule was the solution to every love triangle, where of course the other woman was a secret badass, because this is the kind of story that has Awesome Women who Subvert Tropes. Which is something that I ought to enjoy, and have enjoyed in other contexts, but not here. Maybe it was just that it should've been a novel with a few more subplots to hold it up, but either way the emotional beats never felt all that earned to me. What should've been crowning moments of awesome kept feeling like they were happening because this was the kind of story where they had to happen? It's all very clever, but never felt like it had any grounding in real emotion.

I thought this was a first outing, but it looks like Marske has written a bunch, so maybe she's just not my thing.


Leave Our Bones Where They Lay by Aviaq Johnston
Found this in a library display of books advertised as short reads to help you make your year-end goal, which made me laugh.

Short stories set inside a framing device: every season, an Inuit man travels into the wilderness to meet with a monster, and every season he must tell the monster a story. As he grows older, he struggles to find an heir to continue the tradition, but his immediate family is shattered, and won't go, so he ends up leaning on a young granddaughter. The stories are a mix of twists on traditional Inuit legends, and contemporary snippets of life in the high arctic, with or without supernatural elements.

The chapters are also interspersed with line art of traditional Inuit tools, and beautiful full page black and white photographs of lichen. It's physically a really beautiful book.

Both the frame and the stories examine how colonisation has affected Inuit society, and the ways families and individuals figure out how to recover their culture and even thrive. There's a mix of horror, humour, and quiet sadness. Johnson had originally published some of the short stories independently, so there isn't an explicit connection between the stories and the frame. However, they are arranged so that the stories fit with who's telling them, and match the tone of the frame story, so it never felt cludged together.

I loved the conclusion, and finding out who the monster was, and why we were telling it stories, and the tender relationships between all the characters. Really beautiful, hope Johnson keeps publishing.


Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by Kate Reading
Third time through this (maybe fourth?), and I still get new things out of it every reread.

Our heroine is middle-aged mother who has recently been freed from a curse, and now has to figure out if she's going to take another shot at having a life, or if she's just going to sink back into helplessness (which is a valid choice, considering how the rest of her life has gone!). She goes on pilgrimage, mostly to get out of the house, and then the gods get involved.

It's all about trying to figure out how to make choices, especially when your history with making them has been utterly catastrophic. It's also coming to understand that the narrative of your life has been told by other people, and maybe they didn't have your best interests at heart, even when they said they did. I also love how unrepentantly horny our heroine is. She hasn't gotten laid in a good twenty years, and is starting to think she should do something about that.

There are also a handful of beats about how women navigate in a patriarchal society, for good or ill, that largely avoid the way that a lot of books in these settings shame women for wanting power. Some characters we initial dismiss turn out to be capable of heroism, if someone thinks to ask it of them.

I just really love this duology.


Wounded Christmas Wolf by Lauren Esker
(Know the author disclaimer.)

A new series, with slightly different rules for the shapeshifters, which I enjoyed, and am interested in seeing how it builds out in future books.

I enjoyed how cheerfully over the top the set up was, with a family matriarch who was so into Christmas that the kids all have Christmas-themed names, and there's aggressively Christmas-themed cabins on the property, which is also a Christmas tree farm. And that the natural reaction to the relatively normal-person hero is, "Holy cow, this is all a lot." Which it was, and all the characters admitted it was, but we're just rolling with it now.

We have a classic Esker hero who's not sure where his place is in the world, or if he has one. He's got a whole traumatic backstory to heal from, and just falling in love isn't going to be enough to fix him. (I thought the fire theme could've used a little more set up). And a heroine who's also at loose ends and second guessing herself. The sparking romance built naturally around their foibles and hesitations, and was really sweet. I liked what we met of the rest of the family, especially the heroine's dad, and look forward to them getting their own books.