Michelle Berry
Michelle Berry is the author of three books of short stories, How to Get There from Here, Margaret Lives in the Basement, and I Still Don’t Even Know You, as well as five novels, What We All Want, Blur, Blind Crescent,[1] Interference and This Book Will Not Save Your Life. In October 2016, Berry opened a bookstore, The Hunter Street Bookstore, in Peterborough, Ontario.[2]
The Globe and Mail reviewed Berry's 2011 novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life favorably, with reviewer Moira Dann called it a "a well-executed story that goes from quirky (intriguing off-centre family; blackly funny, even) to murky (unfettered, unrelenting dysfunction and despair, peopled by hard-to-like characters), while keeping the reader wondering what's going to happen next...The story is well-paced (even with the necessary repetition of its Rashomon-style narrative) and the characters are unforgettable."[3]
Berry's 2014 novel Interference received mixed reviews. Writing in the National Post, Emily M. Keeler said, "Berry’s better than most at weaving in and out of the perspectives of so many characters without losing steam; she manages her cast with considerable skill, and her approach makes it all the more enjoyable to piece together the goings on in fictional Parkville. Interference is like a short drive through a strange suburb, that rich domain of beautiful, frustrated youth and workaday adulthood; Berry’s Parkville is a place many Canadians will recognize, but altered just slightly enough through her comic noir lens to let a little of the wit, and the fear, bleed out of the novel and into your head."[4] By contrast in The Globe and Mail, reviewer Emily Donaldson suggested "Berry’s characters are so thinly developed it’s difficult to imagine them stripped of their banal problems."[1]
References
- 1 2 Donaldson, Emily (August 8, 2014). "Michelle Berry’s Interference: Dysfunction junction". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2017-05-22.
- ↑ "Michelle Berry’s next chapter". The Globe and Mail. December 16, 2016. Retrieved 2016-12-30.
- ↑ Dann, Moira (February 2, 2011). "This Book Will Not Save Your Life, by Michelle Berry". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 22 May 2017.
- ↑ "Interference, by Michelle Berry: Review". National Post. August 1, 2014. Retrieved 2016-12-30.