Lee Kvern

Two words came to mind while reading Lee Kvern's "7 Ways To Sunday": immovable and brave.

Immovable: There are times when I felt like I was trying to push against a brick wall while reading the stories. These are stories than demand attention to every single word. They don't bend or give the reader any coddling. These are not stories to be read lightly while relaxing on a beach. These stories, in a sense, are a bit of work.

Brave: For all their refusal to give, these are brave stories. They are about as far away from "mass commercial fiction" as you can go. This is pure literary fiction. Uncompromising. One gets the sense that Kvern wrote the stories she wanted, readers be damned. Because of this, the stories work. They mightn't have, but they do.

** I was given a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review. However, it was a book on my TBR pile, so I probably would have read it anyway. **… (mehr)

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–”four, if you count Sylvie.”
In short, enigmatic, alternating chapters, over three decisive Wednesdays in three successive decades, the story of the Burrows family is teased out with measured restraint from its blistering beginnings to its nuanced conclusion. Three days of narratives gradually unite–Jacqueline in 1961, Lloyd in 1973, and Lesa, their oldest daughter, in 1987–and the years between them melt away and form a cohesive, lucent whole.… (mehr)

Lee Kvern's spirited, funny and poignant first novella Afterall takes us for one night into the plush world of Vancouver's Kitsilano in a kind of literary equivalent of Martin Scosese's Soho nightmare film, After Hours. … The novella’s saucy voice generates real narrative pull and neatly folds together high comedy and social satire … In its arch observations and descriptions of lives structured to fend off oncroaching ennui, the novella is also an accurate snapshot of the canker that lies at the heart of the hip, urbane life of middle-class Canada.… (mehr)

AFTERALL [Lee Kvern] At a dinner party, Beth -- thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on -- impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets "in commiseration of the homeless". Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason -- nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak in company -- whispers in his mother's ear that he wants to go with her. Mason's parents, good limousine liberals that they are, reluctantly allow him to go. Disaster, of course, ensues. So begins this fast-paced, tightly wound, funny and quirky first novel from a fresh new voice in Canadian fiction. The action follows a well-meaning but ultimately misguided woman through one night on the streets as she frantically searches for the boy she has lost, ruminates on the shopping cart as a status symbol, loses her shoes, meets a writer, knocks herself out cold, discovers romaine lettuce as a hair accessory, and maybe -- just maybe -- falls in love after all. { 128pp, 135x200mm, May 2005; HB, £14.50, 1897142013:9781897142011 , Heritage House Publishing (Brindle & Glass Publishing) }… (mehr)