Her apartment building was only two minutes away, the mintgreen balconies within sight, but she couldn’t go home. Not until she did this first. She couldn’t explain it, but she knew she was wanted in the park. It was connected somehow to Oni, to the reading. The change was starting. Right now. Someone was waiting, someone was—
From last year’s Hugo packet (supplied by Diana M. Pho as editor), this is a great intrusive fantasy novel set in the Jamaican-Canadian community in Toronto. I’m used to fantasy novels with maps at the beginning, just not used to novels where that map is a sketch of the main arteries and landmarks of a major North American city. (Those that are set in US cities tend to assume that you already know the geography.)
The protagonist has a master’s degree but is working in retail rather than academe, and then finds herself confronted by the Jamaican water goddess River Mumma, whose golden comb has been stolen and threatens horrible vengeance against humanity if our protagonist does not retrieve it. There’s a very entertaining hunt through the freezing city on behalf of a tropical deity, with cultures, temperatures and intergenerational mores all clashing. I really appreciate a book with a good sense of place and where the background culture is well thought out, and this is one of them. You can get River Mumma here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Meanwhile I acquired Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, which goes to the top of that pile.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.
L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.
The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.
Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.
Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.
