Like everything I’ve read and loved by Katherena Vermette, real ones is a rewarding story that delves into the lives of Métis women and their complicated relationships with each other, with past injustices and with the settler world. Two sisters in the novel navigate the exposure of their estranged mother as a high-profile “pretendian” with help of family even as their own lives are undergoing change. Vermette’s novel is hopeful and the generosity of her writing is always encouraging at its foundation, even if her characters paths are never straight. Having just read May Our Joy Endure, I couldn’t help but compare some aspects of these two cancel stories, finding real ones the more interesting of the two, probably for being the more credible. My only quibble with the novel is that Vermette’s dialog is never quite natural and I wish fewer authors would have their characters explain things at each other for the sake of the reader. That said, like her other novels, it felt like slipping into a comfortable jean jacket and Vermette’s fans (and I am one) won’t be disappointed in this latest effort. 4/5
Humans’ long history with rats is interestingly bifurcated. We’re deadly afraid of them as co-habitants of our spaces, and at the same time have become dependent on them in the laboratory. In Rat City, Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden explore both sides of the dichotomy through the work of rogue scientist John Calhoun as he seeks to understand the implications of human population growth through unorothodox experiments with rats. Calhoun started his career as a New Deal scientist whose insight into rat control was that the usual efforts to find ways to poison them out of cities might not be as effective as controlling their population through environmental design. His research findings from studying rat populations gave ecologists, psychologists, biologists, architects and designers insights into the effects of overcrowding, and extrapolation of those findings to human cities was never far behind. Overarching the fascinating explorations of the details of his science, Adams and Ramsden position his work in a big question of the day: is it better to alter people’s biology to mitigate social harms or to change their environment? By the end of his career, Calhoun’s research was at once subverted in some quarters to advocate for racist and classist social engineering, and on the other hand ignored in favour of pharmaceutical solutions to social ills. Rat City can at times be a messy compendium of scientific, literary, architectural and philosophical odds and ends, but its framework ultimately holds together as a remarkable work. 5/5
