2 Books Like Jawbone

Brett—stalled in Barrie, Ontario on her tentative way toward whatever the rest of her life might be—keeps her head down and her shoulders taut, clearing brush and dead animals from rural roadsides and relieving her stresses with her much younger musician boyfriend. Then one day there’s bleeding.

Susan Wadds’ novel What the Living Do tracks Brett’s life as she wrestles with an unexpected diagnosis, an unsettling past, and an uncertain future. Its stunningly good prose embeds us in Brett’s sensory world (her doctor “wiggles his fingers into blue stretchy gloves and lets the cuffs snap”) and in the fraught dynamics of her relationships. It’s a book to savour for its language and to remember for the raw, flawed humanity of its characters.

I see that the three books I liked the most this year all could be called "science fiction" in that they deal with some aspect of science. Sean Michael's book is an exploration of how artificial intelligence and poetry might interact, but it's far from being a simple speculative tale about dangers of AI gone rogue. At its heart is the question of what art is, and the story left me pondering that, even as I delighted in finding resemblances between Michael's characters and the world of technology.