Bookworm, no. 147
Christina Tommasone reviews Kate Robson’s “Something to Hold Onto.” Justin Shen on Jane Park’s “Inheritance.” Even more nominees. Inside the May issue.
Something to Hold Onto: Simple Metaphors, Images, and Practical Tools to Transform Your Life
Kate Robson
Simon & Schuster
240 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
The psychotherapist Kate Robson’s Something to Hold Onto can help you build your mental-health toolbox with simple yet effective techniques. Robson, who spent sixteen years as a family support specialist in a neonatal intensive care unit, uses curiosity, empathy, and humour to explore life’s many challenges. “Just so you know,” she writes, “if you ever find yourself hoping that you’re having a mild heart attack so you can take time off, please take some time off. (And maybe talk to a therapist?)”
Robson shows us how we can use everyday metaphors—viral dog videos, a tape recorder, a needy baby—to better frame nerve-wracking thoughts. Consider the air mattress. The more we add to our metaphorical bed, the more it will deflate, until we are left unsupported. “Pick out a car or a cloud and identify it as a thought. ‘That blue truck is me thinking I’m not good enough’ or ‘That dark cloud is me feeling so angry with my parents,’” Robson writes elsewhere. “You may then notice that you have no control about what happens next. The thought might drive itself right out of your field of vision or float away across the sky.”
Conversational and relatable, Something to Hold Onto reads like therapy without the eye contact. The self-help genre has been criticized for oversimplifying concepts and for its commercialization, but Robson’s guide is different than many books: no habit-stacking or efficiency tips, no pseudo-science about brain chemistry. Each of her metaphors can provide a bit more softness in a reader’s life, like a perfectly inflated air mattress.
—Christina Tommasone
Inheritance
Jane Park
House of Anansi Press
352 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
On the drive home from visiting their alcoholic son, Charles, at a rehabilitation center, Anne Kim’s parents wonder what they could have done differently. Given their common immigrant mentality—with the past forgotten and the future tirelessly pursued—they agree that they would not have changed a thing. Suddenly, Anne’s father has a stroke, and his wife steers the car to a stop. So begins Jane Park’s debut novel, Inheritance.
Anne, a Yale-educated lawyer, returns to Edmonton for her father’s funeral. There, she learns he grew up in North Korea and abandoned his brother, Maknae, when he fled the war. She studies her father’s guilt-ridden letters and recalls her traumatic childhood in Fort Athabasca, where her family owned a grocery store. She realizes that her dad had sky-high expectations for Charles because he hoped that by giving his son the opportunities that he took from Maknae, he would atone for the past. However, Charles grew defiant and started drinking after he lost his father’s approval. Meanwhile, Anne threw herself into her studies to compensate for her brother’s failure.
Park has an expansive understanding of acculturation. The Kims cannot survive in rural Alberta because the locals boycott their shop. Eventually, they open a liquor store near a First Nation, where they profit from those ravaged by residential schools. Anne studies her way into the respectable white mainstream, while Charles descends into addiction—like the very people his parents exploit. The novel abounds with such quandaries, without offering easy solutions.
—Justin Shen
Look, Mom!
Our illustrators do more than earn sensible chuckles from readers. They also get nominated for awards. Just the other day, Tom Chitty, who draws our beloved Bookworm each week, received a nod for the National Cartoonist Society’s Magazine/Newspaper Illustration Divisional Award for his Gulliver-inspired piece in our December 2025 issue. Congratulations and good luck, Tom. But be sure not to get tied down!
Inside the May Issue
“Coined by the Canadian British novelist, blogger, and internet rights activist Cory Doctorow, the term perfectly encapsulates so much of our current digital hellscape: nothing as good as before and all but the kitchen sink pouring straight into the data centres.” Aaron Kreuter on Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and Stephen Monteiro’s Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal.
David Marks Shribman reviews Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson, edited by Goldie Morgentaler and translated by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind.
“Instead of talking about his memories and impressions from chapters of his life in Port-au-Prince, Montreal, or Paris, Laferrière takes up the issue of the violent gangs currently plaguing Haiti.” Catherine Khordoc reads Dany Laferrière’s L’Obsession du rouge (The obsession with red).
And much more!