Add these 10 B.C. book titles to your summer reading list
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Written by a former Hollywood assistant and screenwriter, this romp of a novel is set in 1997 and follows a young assistant with big dreams, who moves from Vancouver to Los Angeles to work for an A-list director. Once there, Charity Trickett's dream of climbing the ladder to screenwriting and producing success is stymied at every turn by a backstabbing co-worker and a big, potentially billion-dollar mistake.
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If you're a B.C.er and you're looking to stay in the province for your summer vacation, chances are, you're thinking about the Okanagan Valley. If you do decide to head for the sun, pick up a copy of this informative, entertaining and very packable book from seasoned travel writer Arnott.
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The Kelowna author of the Governor General's Literary Award finalist All the Quiet Places is back with the novel Bones of a Giant. Set in 1968 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, where Isaac was born, the novel dives into a teenager's struggle with grief and becoming a man in a world that does him no favours.
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This cosy mystery is set in the fictional northern Oregon Coast town of Twilight Cove as it readies to celebrate an 18th-century pirate and all-around bad guy Dead Eye Dawson. Just before the day of celebration, pirate enthusiast and celebration committee member Jasper Hogan is found in a pool of blood in his study by fellow committee member Georgie Johansen. Georgie, who works at an animal sanctuary, goes into sleuth mode and sets out to find the killer. This is a perfect beach bag addition that comes with all cosy mystery signposts: murder, intrigue, love and two dogs with supernatural powers. OK, maybe that last thing is unique.
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Who doesn't like a good adventure story, especially a true one? Hughes — whose previous book Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition would also make a great addition to your summer reading list — is back. This time Hughes looks at pioneering climbers who tried, in the early 1930s, to conquer Mystery Mountain, a.k.a. Mount Waddington. The Final Spire is a chronicle of fascinating history and good old-fashioned chutzpah.
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If the west coast of Vancouver Island is on your summer travel list, this book would be a perfect companion. Martin, whose family has spent four generations in the area, has done decades of research and interviews for this comprehensive history of Ucluelet, complete with stories about settlement and dispossession, tragedies and triumphs, First Nations history and contemporary culture. And yes, shipwrecks and sea serpents too.
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CBC
25-07-2025
- CBC
Emergency plan 'worked great,' despite performer's encounter with lightning: Folk on the Rocks
Folk on the Rocks says its emergency response plan "worked great" after a thunderstorm forced the Yellowknife music festival to shut down early last Friday – and it has followed up with a local performer who had a scary experience with lightning. "Lightning hit the tent and I got shocked pretty good," Benji Staker, who performs as Hughes, told CBC News on Saturday. The annual three-day outdoor festival kicked off Friday with its Warm the Rocks event in the beer gardens at the Folk on the Rocks site. However, after the thunderstorm started, organizers made the decision to evacuate the site at around 8:30 p.m. Straker said he and his wife and two others had sought refuge from the storm under a tent with sound equipment when it happened. He'd been leaning against a metal equipment box at the time, and said it felt like someone punched him in the head and kicked him in the butt. "I felt fine right away," he said. "I think everybody else was kind of more concerned." Straker said many people pulled him aside at the festival to ask him what happened and if he was OK. "I'm having fun with it," he said. "They're wondering why I'm not stuttering and why I don't have, like, a white stripe on my head or, like, spider veins." "It's obviously nobody's fault. Maybe ours, for getting under a metal frame tent. But whatever, it is what it is." Teresa Horosko, the festival's executive director, said in an interview Thursday that the festival has spoken with Straker about what happened. "The static charge in the air when lightning is present is intense and it is possible to feel some shocks or some effects from that static charge," she said. "We've discussed that with him and also have opened up that conversation for anybody else who has been on site who may have felt some static charge." Asked whether the festival's emergency response plan worked, given what happened, Horosko said it's something she's been asking herself too. "Did we do enough, and quickly enough? And I think, ultimately, yes." Horosko said the festival had been monitoring the storm for a while and an evacuation didn't seem necessary at first. But then the wind changed, a low pressure system moved in, and things started to move quickly. "I think back on that moment a lot. If I had done things a little bit different … would we not have had those instances? And I can't guarantee that those wouldn't have happened. Like static charge in the air is a big thing when there is an electrical storm. And I think ultimately we made the right choice when we made that choice." Horosko said staff and volunteers did an "incredible job" clearing the site, and she's thankful to the audience for paying attention and being co-operative. Though she's satisfied with how the emergency response plan worked, she does hope to make some updates to it. "It was our first time doing an evacuation because of a thunderstorm. So going to edit that a little bit and also have a more detailed re-opening plan." The festival has described shutting down early on Friday as a "devastating financial loss." Horosko said the 19+ event brings in about a third of the festival's sales – through drinks at the beer garden and merchandise. Though attendance on Saturday was "big," the cool Sunday forecast meant fewer attendees.
Winnipeg Free Press
18-07-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Savage love story will have you wrestling with all the feels
Geoffrey Owen Hughes has more than 30 years of experience dressing up as wrestling superstar Macho Man Randy Savage, attending his first event as the 'Macho Manitoban' at a screening of Wrestlemania 8 at a restaurant in 1992. A wrestling ring had been set up in the parking lot; while in the ring with a group of other kids, Hughes attempted Macho's trademark vault exit over the top rope to the ground. 'But I had never done it before,' the Macho Manitoban says prior to the start of his fringe show Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story. Geoff Hughes plays Macho Man Randy Savage in Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story. Hughes' foot caught on the top rope, but 'the wrestling gods were merciful on that day and I stuck the landing — oh yeah, dig it!,' he says in his pitch-perfect Savage impression. The 52-year-old Winnipeg-born 'theatre kid' has been a wrestling fan since the 1970s, when his mom left him in front of a cluster of televisions showing a wrestling match while she was shopping at a department store. 'I had glue in my shoes. I was transfixed by my first-ever look at wrestling on TV,' he says. Hughes' imagination was captured by the archetypes present at the core of professional wrestling — specifically, the way good will always overcome evil. 'We don't get to see good guys prevail in real life. We seek that in culture, and wrestling offered that,' he says. One would not expect a lot of emotional vulnerability from professional wrestlers, specifically the Macho Man Randy Savage. So can macho men cry? Hughes thinks so, attributing the emotional vulnerability of his generation of men to the 1974 Marlo Thomas record Free to Be You and Me, which featured the song It's All Right to Cry. 'Macho Man was once asked by Arsenio Hall if macho men can cry and his answer will bring you to tears,' Hughes says, referring to a 1992 appearance on Hall's late-night talk show. 'On the show, Savage, in his trademark gravelly voice, said, 'It's all right for macho men to show every emotion. I've cried a thousand times, I'm going to cry some more. There's one guarantee in life and that is there are no guarantees. So if you get knocked down, get back up and fight again.'' MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Geoff Hughes plays Macho Man Randy Savage in Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story. Tears abounded during the five-year-long World Wrestling Federation storyline involving Randy Savage and his onscreen manager and real-life wife Miss Elizabeth, the focus of Hughes' show. The WWF saga concluded with a wedding at Summerslam 1991 that saw Miss Elizabeth in a Princess Diana-esque dress and a wedding gift of a cobra from the evil Jake (the Snake) Roberts that ended the night. But the true heart of Hughes' show is Randy Savage's loss at Wrestlemania 7 in 1991, where, in true Rocky fashion, our hero loses the match but gains the love of his life. 'I love that moment more than any comic book, any song. It was just so romantic and life-affirming. I hope I can make (my audience) feel even a fraction of what I felt when I watched it,' Hughes says. Randy and Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story runs to July 27 at One88 (Venue 23). Sonya Ballantyne is a Cree writer-director whose credits include the Chris Jericho-produced wrestling documentary The Death Tour and writing the Acting Good episode Battle in the Bush.
Calgary Herald
01-07-2025
- Calgary Herald
Indigenous author who dropped out of junior high school releases second novel
Brian Thomas Isaac's voice is quietly matter of fact when he talks about growing up poor in a home without electricity in British Columbia's Okanagan Indian Reserve. 'That was simply how it was,' he remembers. Article content Many years later, the minutiae of those childhood years would inform his late-flowering success as an acclaimed Canadian novelist whose latest work, Bones of a Giant has just been published. But at the moment he simply needs to emphasize how important it was when hydro finally did arrive. Article content Article content 'It would be a step into the future for us,' Isaac says on the phone from his home in Kelowna. 'You don't realize at the time how bad you've had it until there's a change for the better.'' Article content Article content Isaac's early memories, inextricably intertwined with his creative being, become more intense when he explains why he quit school in Grade 8. The racism he experienced as an Indigenous youth was more than he could bear. 'It was just horrible. I couldn't take it,' he says. Isaac needs to evoke the past in order to provide context for his emergence at the age of 71 — after decades of working as a bricklayer and in the Alberta oilpatch — as an award-winning Canadian writer. It took this junior-high dropout 17 years to complete his debut novel, All the Quiet Places, a coming-of-age story about life on a First Nations reserve back in the 1960s. Published four years ago, it won an Indigenous Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Article content Article content Now its successor, Bones of a Giant, has arrived on a wave of advance praise from the likes of veteran journalist Carol Off and award-winning novelist Thomas Wharton. Meanwhile, for Isaac, writing remains an ongoing learning process that's gradually getting easier. Article content 'This second novel, Bones of a Giant, took me two years. I'm now working on the third book of my trilogy — it will probably be finished within a month.' Article content Isaac writes about courage, resilience and survival in the face of racism, poverty and the antiquated tentacles of the 19th Century Indian act. But one also encounters warmth, humanity and humour in his pages — and, perhaps most significantly, a celebration of family. Article content 'When I first started writing these books, I just wanted readers to know that First Nations people are people first,' Isaac says. 'This book is not about hate — more than anything else it's about how a family survives together and what they learn. My first thought was to write in a way that would allow the reader to know more about First Nations people, by walking with them and seeing the highs and lows, and in this way give readers a sense of what it was like.'
