Tracking the Caribou Queen is a beautifully written memoir about growing up in Canada’s North. As a young girl, author Margaret MacPherson and her family move to Yellowknife, where her father was a school administrator and her mother a nurse during the 1960s and ‘70s. The move is a culture shock for the family, but MacPherson quickly adjusts and grows up deeply attracted to the land, to Indigenous culture and traditions, and to the people of the NWT. Yet, just as deeply, she remains separate from it. Here, the author navigates through colonial legacies, systemic racism, as well as her own role and participation in those realities.

This memoir is candid without being solacious and honest without being self-indulgent. Structured as a series of essays, the book moves through Polley’s life from being a child actor, to the death of her mother, to leaving home as a teenager, to becoming an activist, to becoming a mother herself. Run Towards the Danger is strangely inviting. Polley welcomes the reader into her life in a non-exhibitionist sort of way and keeps your attention.

Wreck by author, playwright, and documentarian Kelley Jo Burke is a hilarious and honest exploration of family trauma, love, and memory.

It a story about loss. How we carry loss in our bodies and minds, how loss can impact perspective. But it is also about love. How love remains despite the hurt, how love, if we let it, can heal, no matter how imperfect or messy.

A humorous and well-crafted memoir. 

Angie Abdou’s memoir This One Wild Life is a beautiful and engrossing reflection on the healing power of family and of time spent out of doors. 

In a series of hilariously authentic, poignant, and at times, down-right terrifying vignettes, Abdou writes about the grandeur of the natural world, the comfort of family, and the ever-challenging escapades of good parenting. Both author and daughter come of age in this daringly honest memoir, each discovering what it means to live This One Wild Life.

Recommended for a quick, delightfully absorbing summer read!!

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find a book that matches your particular mood or state of being. The realization of this simpatico starts as a simmer—a reverberation in your chest signaling recognition and relief. “That’s me,” you shout (hopefully in your head.) “That’s exactly how I feel!” And a nugget of gratitude lands in your throat. This is how Kyo McLear’s Birds Art Life found me: Stranded. Aching. Adrift. Just like her.