Long weekend reads for everyone in the family

On the first long weekend in warm weather we might work in the garden, do some serious spring cleaning or just collapse on the couch and read.

Keeper of the Flame, Jack Batten, Dundurn, 336 pages, $17.15.
Keeper of the Flame, Jack Batten, Dundurn, 336 pages, $17.15.   (Dundurn Press)
New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Creative Folks (and Everyone Else), Fay Wolf, Ballantine Books, 208 pages, $26.
New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Creative Folks (and Everyone Else), Fay Wolf, Ballantine Books, 208 pages, $26.   (Ballantine Books)
The Sudden Appearance of Hope, Claire North, Orbit, 480 pages, $32.50.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope, Claire North, Orbit, 480 pages, $32.50.   (Orbit)
Shooter by Caroline Pignat, Penguin Canada, 320 pates, $22.99.
Shooter by Caroline Pignat, Penguin Canada, 320 pates, $22.99.   (Penguin Random House)
Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees, Lori Weidenhammer, Douglas & McIntyre, 240 pages, $26.95.
Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees, Lori Weidenhammer, Douglas & McIntyre, 240 pages, $26.95.   (Douglas and McIntyre)
Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years, Andrew Solomon, Scribner, 592 pages, $36.99.
Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years, Andrew Solomon, Scribner, 592 pages, $36.99.   (Scribner)

On the May long weekend we might work in the garden, do some serious spring cleaning or just collapse on the couch and read. Here are some new books that cater to these admirable pursuits.

For the spring cleaner: New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Creative Folks (and Everyone Else), Fay Wolf

Wolf is a personal organizer and a singer-songwriter, so it follows that her title puts the emphasis on “creative folks” — and in any case, we all think we’re creative, right? What makes this book different from all those other organizing books is that it focuses not only on our personal spaces but our working lives too. It also addresses our mental spaces, dealing with all sorts of creative and emotional blocks. Plus social-media and email clutter, and who doesn’t need some help there. The writing is frisky, and the book is designed in short bursts of easily digestible tips.

For the gardener: Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees, Lori Weidenhammer

This book might be a good fit in your horticultural-environmental arsenal this year. Weidenhammer (or Madame Beespeaker) bases her illustrated guide on the fact that bee populations are in global decline; she reminds us that without bees we would lose 80 per cent of our flowers and three-quarters of our food crops. So there’s self-interest in saving the bees. The Vancouver “guerrilla gardener” provides step-by-step instruction on how to make a victory garden filled with bee-loving plants that produce pollen and nectar. She also equips us with many other tips on the care and feeding of bees. Definitely buzz-worthy.

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For the armchair detective: Keeper of the Flame, Jack Batten

You know Jack Batten as the Whodunit columnist on the Star’s book pages, and if you haven’t become acquainted with his series detective, Crang (yes, just a last name), now is your chance. This is the sixth Crang mystery, and it features a rap singer named Flame who aspires to be Hollywood’s next leading man. Flame’s people hire Crang to thwart the blackmail ambitions of the Rev. Alton Douglas, who heads up Heaven’s Philosophers on St. Clair Ave. W. The reverend is in possession of some violent, homophobic, racist lyrics that Flame wrote when he was just a kid. But that’s just the beginning. Soon there’s a murder, and sundry other crimes. Our smart-mouthed lawyer moves through Toronto with style and grace, with amusing stumbles and detours along the way.

For the young adult: Shooter, Caroline Pignat

What a terrific idea for a YA novel. Shooter is an updating of 1985’s The Breakfast Club for millennials. This time, it’s not a Saturday detention but a lockdown. Our four main characters, Alice (a.k.a. Nerd Girl, smart, introverted), Hogan (The Hulk, the troubled jock), Isabelle (Izzy, student-council president), Xander (Alexander, the weirdo, photographs everything with his Canon) find themselves trapped in the boy’s washroom when the drill begins. Soon they learn (because Isabelle is constantly texting Bri, her BFF who is trapped under the photocopier in the principal’s office) there really is a shooter in the school. We also meet Noah, Alice’s autistic brother, who communicates with us from his hiding place, through pictograms and bits of text. Pignat is an Ottawa high school teacher and this is her seventh YA novel.

For the globetrotter: Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-five Years Andrew Solomon

This fine collection of magazine articles — some reworked, all with a contextual introduction — are what the subtitle - advertises, beginning in 1988 with Solomon’s first overseas assignment, to Moscow, to cover a Sotheby sale of contemporary Soviet art, and ending with a 2015 memoir for The Moth about a visit to Australia. In total, he visits 23 countries in 28 pieces. An introductory essay, “Dispatches From Everywhere,” is worth the price of admission. Solomon is perhaps best known for Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

For the escapist: The Sudden Appearance of Hope, Claire North

Our central character is Hope, who has a kind of negative superpower: she is an individual who people tend not to notice, or remember. So Hope makes a smart career choice: she becomes a thief. The second strand of the plot concerns an app called Perfection, which tracks users’ activities and notifies and assigns points to the good and bad choices they’ve made. North is the pseudonym of Catherine Webb, who started out as a YA fantasy author under the name Kate Griffin. This is her fourth novel; her first was 2014’s bestselling The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Sarah Murdoch, smurdoch49@gmail.com

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