Category Archives: Reviews

I read Angel Wing Splash Pattern, a short story collection by Richard Van Camp, during last semester. Van Camp is now a Vancouver resident, but grew up in the Northwest Territories as a member of the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation. The short stories tie together with themes of healing, being Aboriginal, and living in the north. Explore the healing going on in Indian country. There is pain in these stories and there is loss. There is death, but there is also rebirth, and there is always the search from each of the narrators for personal truth. Readers will recognize Larry Sole from Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed in the story “How I Saved Christmas”, but there are new voices here, new secrets, from new characters in communities across the north and the south, yet they are all linked by themes of hope, the spirit of friendship, and hunger. From the publisher, Kegdonce Press As I often find with short story collections, I wanted to continue reading — to follow the character’s journey and hear their story. Certain stories held me more captivated than others. For example, I wanted to hear all of Torchy’s life story, but only glimpsed a tortured piece of it from “Mermaids”. I also enjoy when short story collections tie together, and not only does Angel Wing Splash Pattern have a uniting theme, but some of the characters reappeared in multiple stories. I appreciated how Van Camp played liberally with time, it being unimportant to the messages [...]

This is the first book of fiction by Stuart Clark, a well-known UK astrology journalist and astophysicist professor. The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth is the first of a trilogy of novels inspired by the history of trying to understand the Universe. Called The Copernicum Trilogy, the first book (The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth) portrays the struggles of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. The second (The Sensorium of God) focuses on the story of Isaac Newton and his contemporaries such as Edmond Halley, and the third (The Day Without Yesterday) addresses Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, and George Lemaitre. At the dawn of the seventeenth century everyone believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yet some men knew that the heavens did not move as they should, a heresy punishable by being burned alive. As Europe convulsed in conflict between Catholic and Protestant, these men prepared to die for that truth. German Lutheran Johannes Kepler is convinced that he has been given a vision by God when he becomes the first man to distill into mathematical laws how stars and planets move through the heavens.  Galileo Galilei, an Italian Catholic, will try to claim Kepler’s success for his own Church, but he finds himself enmeshed in a web of intrigue originating from within the Vatican itself.  Both men struggle with themselves, with the evidence and with the forces of reaction changed not simply themselves but our world. They become trapped by human ignorance and irrational terror to the peril of their [...]