Fall 2002

Once in a rare while a work of fiction is published with an astonishing range and a compelling story line--a veritable treasure--that you want everyone to read it. Crow Lake is such a book. It has everything: love, hate, friendship, intellectual stimulation, biology, the ties that bind families together and what rips them apart, self-sacrifice, grief and redemption. This is an opus masquerading as a simple story, the author is in complete control, there isn't a false note and the reader, mesmerized, does not want this insightful book to end.

It's 1984, in Victoria, B.C. A city whose biggest claim to fame is Tea Time at the aristocratic British, Empress Hotel. Sara lives with her hippie father, who loves her, but is having a hard time dealing with her bursting adolescence. Her mother, with whom she has no contact, still lives in the cult-like commune from which she and her father escaped years before. "I was born with a fever," claims Sara in the opening chapter, a fever that subsided until she turned 16, when it returned suddenly and exuberantly and changed everything. The stoner boys from Mt. Douglas High (AKA Mt.

Gwen Swick's Love and Gold contains lyrics that are wholly satisfying: original, witty and complex. Swick writes like the bastard daughter of Leonard Cohen and Jane Siberry: with words dripping equal parts cleverness and compassion. An example of this can be found in the opening track, "Amazed," about a nun who left a convent in Saskatchewan after 50 years to open a beauty salon.

It seems there's no stopping Ember Swift. Since 1996 she's released seven albums on her own label, Few'll Ignite Sound, and judging from the images on her latest disc has also found time to pick up a few circus tricks along the way. On Stiltwalking, Swift and her band continue to explore various parts of the musical map with nods to pop, jazz, a touch of flamenco and stripped down vocal harmonies. And that's a big part of what makes listening to Swift's albums fun. The style of music varies but the political and social commentary is (almost) always present.