Vi by Kim Thúy My rating: 5 of 5 stars I listened to this relatively short audiobook (3 hours)and was absolutely riveted, but sometimes so sparked by the narrative that I would go off somewhere on my own reflections of the content and have to find my way back. I was never bored in three hours. Nothing seemed gratuitous or contrived. As one reviewer commented, "it seemed so real". "Vi" tells the story of a woman who leaves Vietnam with her children, taking a risky sea voyage without her husband because he appears to be "too lazy" to take the risky voyage with them. Vi is the youngest child, and only daughter in the large sibline. Her mother is a strong and wise, competent woman, but a kind of reluctant Matriarch (not really a feminist). Vi goes about 'breaking ground' for a different sort of life from what her mother would seem to envision for her, and to bust the traditions that wold prevent her from being in the kind of modern love relationship
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley My rating: 5 of 5 stars I remember the author of the memoirs "Run Towards The Danger" as a delicate, fair-haired little girl in the CBC's "Road To Avonlea" although I have little recollection of ever having watched the program itself. I picked up the book with interest only as far as reading something while waiting for some books that I had on order. What a pleasant surprise! Polley writes about her life in a series of fascinating essays, each 'stand-alone'. She gains the reader's sympathy for the child actor (child laborer, as she often refers to herself) who lived in a filthy home with a latently pedophile father who smoked and watched TV all the time following the death with cancer of his wife, Polley's mother. In stark contrast to what many believe must be a fun, fairy-tale life as a child actor-- a 'star' in Canada-- Polley describes the grim details of