Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild is the moving, surprisingly engrossing account of her 1,100-mile solo hiking trip along the Pacific Crest Trail. After the death of her mother and a devastating divorce, then-22-year-old Strayed decides on a whim to hike the Trail after finding a guidebook in an outdoor store.

From inauspicious beginnings in a dusty California parking lot, struggling with her overloaded pack, Strayed makes her way up to Oregon by hiking, camping, and occasionally hitchhiking. She encounters and often depends upon the kindness of complete strangers along the way, but the memoir is ultimately the story of how she comes to terms with her mother’s death, forgives herself for her mistakes—including those that led to her divorce—and figures out what kind of life she wants to have back in civilization.

Cheryl Strayed

The story of a woman walking alone through the wilderness for three months may sound tedious, but Strayed’s powerful writing and insightful look at her family’s history make Wild an inspiring, even gripping adventure story. She is a compelling and relatable narrator who writes about her Minnesota childhood, failed marriage, and fractured family relationships with wry humour. Before beginning the hike, she freely admits she is underprepared for her journey, but feels the desperate need to do something big to get her life back on track.

She meets setbacks with a mix of steely resolve and resignation: she sings to keep away bears and tackles icy mountain trails in northern California with the help of a bright pink ski pole. Fans of Strayed’s advice column for online literary magazine The Rumpus, recently anthologized in the book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar, will also recognize her fierce empathy for everyone she meets as she encounters other lost souls on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Wild is not just the story of a three-month hike, however. Strayed glosses over the technical aspects of her trip in favour of her real interest: finding the courage to own up to the past and move forward. After berating herself for cheating on her husband and driving away her family, Strayed takes stock of her losses: her mother, her marriage, and a pair of hiking boots that go sailing over the mountainside, leaving her with only a broken pair of sandals until her next supply stop.

“There was only one [option], I knew,” she writes. “There was always only one. To keep walking.” When she finally reaches the end of her journey, Oregon’s Bridge of the Gods, Strayed reflects gratefully on making her destination: “Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me.” Strayed’s solo adventure leaves her with a sense of self-reliance, strength, and grace that will move all readers, not just her fellow hikers.

(Knopf / 336 pgs / March 2012 / CDN$29 in hardcover)

Reviewed by Aaron Kreuter

The Great Gatsby, the new film by Australian director Baz Luhrmann, is one of the most anticipated literary adaptations of the year. Luhrmann’s colourful, overloaded style seems the perfect visual match for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, filled as it is with the glamour, glitz, and overabundance of the roaring twenties. Fans of Luhrmann’s other adaptation of an English-language classic — 1996′s Romeo + Juliet — will not be disappointed. And for those who want to see the story of Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and Jay Gatsby played out against a lavish backdrop of swirling, boozy parties, the camera zooming all over Long Island and Manhattan, set to a soundtrack of historical tunes and contemporary hip-hop, this is the movie for you.

Tobey Maguire plays the film’s narrator and protagonist, Nick Carraway, a young mid-westerner with hopes of making money off the stock market as a bonds salesman. Nick moves to the East and rents a small cottage in the newly affluent Long Island suburb of West Egg, where he will meet Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the exceedingly rich, party-throwing, secret-keeping character who gives the movie its title. Carey Mulligan is perfectly suited to Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s second cousin and Gatsby’s lost love, and Joel Edgerton steals every scene he is in as Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan, the polo-playing, old-moneyed aristocrat and adulterer. The whole cast embodies the language and the extravagance, as well as the underlying longing and fear, that the novel so brilliantly captures.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Luhrmann does a great job of bringing the opulence and exuberance of the Jazz Age to modern viewers, and it is interesting to see how the movie visualizes some of the more metaphoric and symbolic elements of the novel: the floating curtains of Daisy and Tom’s drawing room; the green light of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby is constantly yearning for; and, of course, Dr. Eckler’s dilapidated eyeglasses watching over the whole story, perhaps passing judgment, perhaps not.

For the most part a fun, colourful, and well-acted adaptation of an American classic, the movie does have its flaws. The framing device, where an older, apparently now-alcoholic Nick starts writing his story as part of his treatment at a sanatorium is a complete narrative misstep, adding nothing to the story and putting an unneeded layer in between the viewer and the characters. And, as in any adaptation, there is what’s left out. The most striking omissions are Nick and Jordan Baker’s novel-long affair, which is downplayed in the movie to the point of non-existence, and Gatsby’s father, whose appearance deepened our understanding of Gatsby’s past and his reinvention.

Even with these shortfalls, the movie is still a terrific example of what a thoughtful, playful, and overall loyal adaptation of a novel can be.

A goat and a moose are working together this May, as Toronto theatre company One Little Goat presents the English-language world premiere of the play The Charge of the Expormidable Moose, by Quebec poet-playwright Claude Gauvreau. Widely considered to be Gauvreau’s masterpiece, the playful and provocative play (whose original French title is La charge de l’orignal épormyable) revolves around a poet who is mocked and envied by his fellow housemates — or are they fellow inmates?

The show runs at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre (30 Bridgman Ave.) from May 10–26, and Bookclub-in-a-Box is giving away two tickets for the date of your choice, plus a copy of the book (translated by York University professor Ray Ellenwood)! To enter, just email laura@bookclubinabox.com with your first and last name by Friday, May 10 at noon.

For more details about the show, or to purchase tickets, visit the One Little Goat website here.

Good luck!

*Winning tickets can be reserved for any date except opening night (May 10) and closing weekend (May 25 and 26), subject to availability. Above photo of the cast courtesy of One Little Goat.

The Best Place on Earth, Ayelet Tsabari’s debut collection of short stories, brings readers directly into the messy, human heart of life in Israel. Tsabari — an Israeli of Yemeni descent now living in Canada — tackles a wide number of issues, from the different social stratas of Tel Aviv to living in a country that is constantly at war, to the varied ways that Israelis of different ages, origins, and genders learn to deal with the daily realities of violence, segregation, and death.

As is evident in these stories, Tsabari knows Israel intimately: from the urban streets of Tel Aviv to the quiet outer suburbs, from the Old City of Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, the stories are filled with the scenes and smells of everyday life of the small Middle-Eastern country. However, the stories are not just cold explorations of Israeli society; they are, in fact, anything but. Tsabari is able to get to the hard, emotional core of a stunning variety of human experiences and relationships, including adolescent girls, artsy boys and hyper-masculine fathers, old lovers, and more. The amount of human connection on display here is astounding. The stories are fierce, startlingly emotional, and teeming with sexual energy, but they are also deeply empathetic, quietly political, and brilliantly executed.

Ayelet Tsabari

In the opening story, “Tikkun,” two old lovers run into each other at a Jerusalem cafe during the first intifada and try to come to grips with where life has taken them. In “Casualties,” a female Israeli soldier works at an army health clinic, sells forged “gimelim” (forms that grant soldiers two-day health leaves), and deals with her boyfriend’s recent stationing in Gaza. Tsabari inhabits the mind and world of her characters: “Invisible” is from the point of view of an illegal Filipina worker taking care of an elderly Yemenite Israeli; “Brit Milah” looks at the changing relationship young Israelis have with religion and tradition through the eyes of a grandmother visiting her daughter and new grandson in Toronto; “A Sign of Harmony” investigates what it’s like to be dark-skinned, female, and Israeli in India, where young Israelis often travel after their mandatory army service. These little descriptions do nothing to capture the depth and beauty of the stories themselves, brimming with insight and emotion as they are. These are stories that need to be read, reread, shared, and experienced.

Though Tsabari works within a proscribed number of themes — belonging (as well as not-belonging and sort-of-belonging); living in a militarized country where violence is a given; and deep, painful longing — the stories never repeat, each one focused as it is on a different situation. Taken together, the collection reveals a multi-faceted world where skin colour, sexual longing, missiles, and the army are all extraneous to what is really important: human connection.

According to the author bio in the hardcover edition, Tsabari is now at work on a novel. Hopefully, this does not mean that the author is leaving the short story form behind, as her  talents for concision, dialogue, and the ability to quickly set up complex emotional situations are perfectly suited to the short story format. But if this is the end of Tsabari’s short-story-writing career, at least we have these 11 stories to keep coming back to.

(HarperCollins Canada / 224 pgs. / March 2013 / CDN$24.99 in hardcover)

Following a style similar to his previous three successful novels (All My Friends Are Superheroes, The Waterproof Bible, and The Tiny Wife), Toronto-based author Andrew Kaufman’s latest offering, Born Weird, is an upbeat, quirky work of magic realism. If you’re willing to be taken on a trip where some things fall just outside the realm of possibility, you will be delighted by this (mostly) uplifting read about a scattered family finding a way to be together again.

The book’s main quest begins when the stern Grandma Weird (the family’s surname is Weird, thanks to an immigration officer’s clerical error in the 1930s) reveals to her granddaughter Angie that each of the five Weird Siblings was given a blessing upon their birth — but those blessings have inadvertently become curses (or “blursings,” as they call them) over time. In descending age order, Richard has an uncanny knack for self-preservation; Abba never loses hope; Lucy is never lost; Angie forgives everyone, unconditionally; and Kent can beat anyone in a physical fight.

Andrew Kaufman

Grandma Weird predicts that she will die on her birthday, less than two weeks away, and that Angie must bring her siblings together in their grandmother’s Vancouver hospital room by that time. “Round all of them up and bring them here,” she tells Angie. “All five of you must be in this room at 7:39 p.m. on April 20 precisely. At the moment of my death I will lift the curses.” After some initial skepticism, Angie sets off on a mission to reunite her siblings, who have not seen each other in years and are scattered across Canada (and in one case, the small island kingdom of Upliffta).

Despite the book’s unlikely premise, the repartee between the five siblings is what grounds this novel. Even though they live separate lives now, their shared childhood brings them together, and their sometimes-grudging loyalty to one another provides the book with its much-needed heart, as well as quite a few laughs. If you have siblings, or if you have only imagined what that might be like, you’ll appreciate the squabbling, the allegiances, and the inside jokes (such as Rainytown, the miniature cardboard city they once built together, featuring such morbid landmarks as the Tragedy Strikes Bowling Alley and the Terminal Bus Terminal). Adding to their quest is the ongoing hope that their father, whose body was never found after his Maserati was pulled out of Georgian Bay, might still somehow be alive.

As reviewer Patricia Dawn Robertson of the Globe and Mail aptly notes, Born Weird is “a Wes Anderson film yet to be made, with its quirky family premise reminiscent of Anderson’s marvellous The Royal Tenenbaums.” With that comparison as your guide, step into Kaufman’s newest universe and let it envelop you.

(Random House Canada / 288 pgs. / December 2012 / CDN$22.95 in paperback)

April 15–21 only

Click on the title below to save 25% off that Bookclub-in-a-Box guide:

· A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
· The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje
· The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson
· Nicole Krauss 2-in-1 guide
(Great House & The History of Love)
· State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
· The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

No coupon code necessary.

Location for all events: National Council House, 4700 Bathurst St., Toronto
Hosted by Marilyn Herbert

First event:
Thursday, April 11, 1 p.m.
Free public screening of Woody Allen’s Manhattan

Second event:
Thursday, April 18, 1:30 p.m.
Discussion of the book Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar

“New York is one of the world’s most romantic cities, so it’s no surprise that Ariel Sabar chose it as the magical setting for his short stories, each of which is dedicated to the true romantic stories of nine couples. These relationships span from the 1940s to the present day.”

Third event:
Thursday, May 2, 1:30 p.m.
Discussion of the book The Golems of Gotham by Thane Rosenbaum

“This is an affectionate, humorous, but serious love story with a difference. Fourteen-year old Ariel seeks to understand the missing people in her life: her grandparents and mother. Using the mystical Jewish symbol of redemption and rescue (golem), Ariel hits the streets of New York with six literary Holocaust-surviving ghosts, who teach her how to live and love.”

Fourth event:
Thursday, May 30, 1:30 p.m.
Discussion of the book Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

“In 1938, young, feisty, and single Katey Kontent navigates life in New York, moving from her secretarial job with a law firm to the upper reaches fo New York society. This love story visits many of New York’s sites, while bringing in hints of the era’s music (jazz), art (Stuart Davis), and echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other contemporary literary figures.”

National Council House members: $36/whole series, $15/individual book discussion
Non-members: $45/whole series, $18/individual book discussion

The “airfare” for this journey is certainly affordable and I hope you can join me.

Your pilot,

Marilyn Herbert
Founder and director, Bookclub-in-a-Box

(This contest is now closed, but BEA Power Reader tickets can still be purchased at this link.)

BEA, the largest book event in the U.S., is now open to the public for their Power Readers Day on June 1, 2013 in New York City! This is your chance to discover new books, meet favourite and up-and-coming authors, and get some serious free book swag from exhibitors.

Bookclub-in-a-Box is giving away individual BEA Power Reader tickets (travel costs to NYC not included) to five lucky book lovers—to enter, simply email laura@bookclubinabox.com by April 9 with your full name. Want to enter more than once? To enter again, simply follow us on Twitter (@bookclubinabox) and tweet the following (including the link) by the same date: “Dear @bookclubinabox, please send me to BEA’s Power Readers Day on June 1 to meet authors and get free swag! http://bit.ly/10BISO8”

Even if you don’t win, BEA is offering group discounts for you and your book-nerd friends. Regular full-day tickets are $49, but you can save with the following group discounts (which can be purchased here):

• 10% off for groups of three or more
• 15% off for groups of five or more
• 20% off for groups of 10 or more

Good luck, and happy reading!

Canadian-American author Emily Schultz’s novel The Blondes is based on a compelling premise. Just as grad student Hazel Hayes discovers she is pregnant by her (married) thesis advisor, Karl Mann, she finds herself caught up in an even more pressing dilemma: an unprecedented epidemic is spreading across New York City, turning blonde women—and only blonde women, natural or dyed—into violent, mindless killers.

It almost brings to mind the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse, although these women don’t have to die to become infected by the “blonde fury,” and the word “zombie” is never used in the book. But attacks are becoming more frequent and more widespread, and when Hazel tries to flee the city to return home to Toronto, she finds that public panic and border security impede her ability to return home, or even to communicate with her family or her best friend, Larissa.

Emily Schultz

The narrative contains a number of descriptions that are alternately very funny to imagine (crazed flight attendants in the JFK Airport) or just plain heartbreaking (an incident with a blonde toddler in Washington Square). But no matter the situation, Schultz’s witty, satirical writing gives you something to think about in each scene. In addition, the narrative premise itself is an act of original storytelling: instead of an omniscient narrator or a simple first-person narration from Hazel’s point of view, the story is told as though Hazel is speaking directly to her unborn child—a child who she is unsure will ever even see the light of day.

While The Blondes is a book about a violent epidemic, it’s also very much an analysis of beauty ideals, social norms, and relationships between women. Why are some blonde women in the book so vain that they refuse to dye their hair dark, despite the risk? And when Hazel unexpectedly finds herself in close quarters with Karl’s wife, Grace, can the two reconcile their differences for the sake of keeping each other safe in the midst of a national crisis?

Although to some degree the book’s subject matter is fantastical, it leaves the reader wondering what decisions they would make in a similar situation. And while the novel’s ending leaves many questions about Hazel’s fate unanswered, the book conjures up a number of scenarios that are ripe for discussion. Overall, The Blondes accomplishes the impressive feat of being equal parts social commentary and a truly entertaining, sometimes gory read.

(Doubleday Canada / 400 pgs. / August 2012 / CDN$29.95 in hardcover or CDN$14.99 for the Kindle edition)

Each printed guide also includes:

· A Bookclub-in-a-Box bookmark
· A complementary RAG (Read-Alongside-Guide), a quick reference pamphlet offering interesting facts and questions to consider while reading the novel

Click here to buy the guide in print or PDF format.

About the novel: Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents of Le Cirque des Rêves is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose. This is a game in which only one can be left standing, and despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone hanging in the balance.