Bookworm, no. 129
Caroline Noël on Sara Peters’s “Mother of God.” Jadine Ngan reviews “Best Canadian Essays 2026.” Inside the January/February issue.
In the Flesh
Mother of God
Sara Peters
McClelland & Stewart
224 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
Sara Peters’s Mother of God follows Marlene, a thirty-seven-year-old self-employed exorcist who hasn’t visited her alcoholic mother, Darlene, for several years. That changes when an unexpected phone call draws her from Vancouver, where she lives, back to her sleepy hometown of Blackwood, Nova Scotia. “Come home, honey,” her mother’s frail voice pleads. “We can do up your old room.” What follows is a nonlinear account of sexual trauma and the ways patriarchal violence can splinter a family.
Marlene’s trip is interspersed with childhood vignettes: nursing her mother’s perpetual hangovers, confessing secrets in diaries that always disappeared, suntanning naked in “the field of wild grass.” When she arrives, her mother isn’t home. As Marlene literally and figuratively searches for Darlene—on the property and in her memory—she recalls the horrific abuse she endured at the hands of her mom’s long-time boyfriend. “In ‘attracting’ Ed’s attention,” Marlene thinks, “I had hurt my mother so deeply—she who was already so, so hurt.” Adding to their complex dynamic, Marlene has harboured an “obsessive kind of attachment” to Darlene, which appears through visceral, grotesque evocations. She imagines crawling into her mother’s face, her mouth a cave with a “flesh ceiling,” and snacking with her while they watch “diseased dogs with bleeding eyes and receded gums” tear Ed apart.
Near the end, it becomes clear what happened to Darlene and where she’s hiding. Less clear is whether Marlene can acknowledge her mother’s strangled yet unconditional love for her. Peters doesn’t shy away from this painful question—or anything else.
—Caroline Noël
Branch Out
Best Canadian Essays 2026
Edited by Brian Bethune
Biblioasis
224 pages, softcover and ebook
Kyo Maclear’s “Speaking to Trees” borrows a concept from Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love, from 2000: “In older times, when a person had a secret, they would go up a mountain, carve a hollow in a tree, whisper their secret into the hole, and cover it with mud.” In its finest moments, Best Canadian Essays 2026 reads as if you are cupping your ear against one of those trees. Brian Bethune chose fourteen compelling pieces that take on pressing issues: the climate crisis, medical assistance in dying, voluntary childlessness, addiction. The contributors sit with uncomfortable truths that are sometimes political but most often deeply private.
Several entries unspool from loss, including the opener, “A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths.” When Hollie Adams tried to teach her literature students about the apocalypse, they focused on “the death of the self.” But she desperately wanted to discuss the failures of neoliberalism; she was fixating on the bigger picture to cope with her collapsing marriage. Peter Babiak’s “The Grief of Mourning Sentences” and Andreae Callanan’s “All the Ghosts a Voice Can Summon” reckon with a loved one’s death by suicide, while Stephen Marche’s and Darryl Whetter’s entries sit with the loss of their fathers-in-law. Meanwhile, Ronna Bloom’s “Catfisher Dharma” concerns another kind of end: ruptured trust. The poet lays bare the shame of falling for a romance scam.
In “Driver’s Test,” Kelsey Gilchrist recounts her first solo drive, on the way home from her final conversation with her dying mother: “I thought it would feel scarier, driving by myself.” Actually, she was fine, but a few kilometres down the road, “the light ended, and the darkness began.” In his introduction, Bethune writes, “The most entrancing essays are intensely personal.” For them to reach a broader audience, however, they must also find meaning in individual experiences. These pieces do just that.
—Jadine Ngan
Inside the January/February Issue
“Pleau uses the phrase ma petite noirceur—‘my little darkness’—as an indication of his former environment, as a symbol of a confined and fearful family and community. His father is illiterate, and his mother left school after grade 4. As a result, Montreal, just over an hour’s drive away from Drummondville, was and remains strange and scary for them.” Graham Fraser on Jean-Philippe Pleau’s Rue Duplessis: Ma petite noirceur.
Giovanna Riccio reviews Melissa Tanti’s The Translating Subject.
“His staged photographs were good, arguably some of the finest he ever took. They looked real, and they showed the troops at their best.” J.L. Granatstein reads Carla-Jean Stokes’s The Taking of Vimy Ridge: First World War Photographs of William Ivor Castle.
And much more!