CBC Canada Reads 2022 Shortlist

Happy Monday y’all! This year, I will do something that I haven’t done in the past. I am going to discuss some award books. Last week, the five finalists for CBC Canada Reads 2022 were announced, with the winner being named on March 31, 2022. CBC Canada Reads is an annual contest to find the one book that all Canadians should read. The books cover a range of topics and a variety of genres, and one thing they all share is a story that needs to be told.

What is CBC Canada Reads?

CBC Canada Reads a battle of the books. Five books are paired with five panelists. Each panelist then argues why their book is the best out of the five. It sounds like a regular book award competition, right? The most significant difference is that these panelists aren’t generally involved with the publishing world. They may have written and published books, but it’s not part of their day-to-day lives. Generally, the panelists are readers who just so happen to be known around the country. Athletes, actors, activists, entrepreneurs, and even an astronaut have been panelists in the past.

Starting in 2001, CBC Canada Reads has introduced many books to a broader audience. And all of the winners have gone on to become bestsellers. Recently, all of the books that have been on the shortlist have also become bestsellers. The first winner, In the Skin of a Lion, sold over 70,000 copies after the show.

Of the five CBC Canada Reads 2022 Shortlist books, I have already read one book and thoroughly enjoyed it. I will be attempting to read the other four before the show at the end of March. But that may not be possible between life and hold times at the library.

Now let’s take a look at the CBC Canada Reads 2022 Shortlist!

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.

Alone and without any skills, support, or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.

Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez

Synopsis from Goodreads

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighborhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighborhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.

And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness; Sylvie, Bing’s best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.

Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighborhood that refuses to be undone.

What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

Synopsis from Goodreads

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who Vanna soon rescues. Vanna is a teenage girl who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vanna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.

Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing by Clayton Thomas-Muller

Synopsis from Goodreads

Clayton Thomas-Muller’s very existence has been scrutinized and vilified for much of his life. As a child, he endured the intergenerational trauma that resulted from his family attending residential school. Growing up Cree in downtown Winnipeg, Canada, Clayton faced systemic racism and violence in school and on the streets, which led him to use his fists to defend himself and earn his livelihood. He escaped the hold that drugs and alcohol had on his life by reconnecting with his Cree heritage. For twenty years, he has been a campaigner with organizations including the Indigenous Environmental Network and 350.org, on the front lines of stopping the assault of industry on Indigenous peoples’ lands. Using a nonlinear, oral storytelling style, Life in the City of Dirty Water offers the reflections of a man in midlife, telling his inner child, “I’m here now, and I’m going to keep you safe.”

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Synopsis from Goodreads

Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born.

When his master’s eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or “Titch,” is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist.

He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human, and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed, and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, Titch abandons everything to save him.

What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life, one which will propel him further across the globe.

From the sultry cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, Washington Black tells a story of friendship and betrayal, love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again–and asks the question, what is true freedom?

Wrap-Up

What do you think of the five books on the shortlist? Are there any that you’ve read? Any that you would like to read? I know that I have set myself a challenge, trying to read these books in the next seven weeks, but it is one that I am willing to try!

Looking for some more ideas to read? Check out my monthly reading wrap-ups and bookish lists.