The Toronto author’s fanciful Goldilocks parable for COVID times, “Just Right” (April/May 2022), displayed her flair for powerful imagery and droll humour, and Bradbury’s second memoir wields the same power as she charts her life at 69, “between end of middle age and the beginning of old age.”

Physical maps become a metaphor for the road she has travelled and where she is going in the last quarter of her life. The distance between her hometown of St. Catharines, Ont., and Toronto is meagre – three-quarters of an inch on a map – but the inner space she covers is vast. The frustrations, joys and sorrows of aging are familiar, but Bradbury reminds us not to dwell on the long and winding road in the rearview mirror and to embrace the short runway ahead.

he lauded Canlit author who adroitly interviewed Margaret Atwood about Burning Questions (April/May 2022), thanks her friend for encouraging her to see “a subject that has been literally under my nose all my life: my Amazonian size.”

Swan grew up in 1950s Midland, Ont., where her 6-5 father was an absent parent, which left her with a constant yearning to be loved. By 12, she had reached her full height of 6-2. “To be tall is to be big and to be big is to take up space … a cultural no-no for women of all sizes,” she writes.

The avowed feminist details a heart-rending struggle to reconcile her height  with societal expectations of women, and, at 79, realizes her body is more than enough, and not too much. 

Cat Conway, a disgraced big-city reporter looking for journalistic redemption at a small-town Ontario newspaper, enters a world of duplicitous wellness peddlers and scurrilous anti-vaxxers in the second mystery co-written by Renzetti, who brings the brio she displayed in our Cher cover story (October/November 2024).

Cat is extra prickly because her hypercritical mother is in town, protesters are attacking her series on vaccine hesitancy and she’s covering fluff – the Welcome, Goddess wellness conference. She goes into detective mode when one of the Goop-y headliners meets a mortal death and Cat’s mom is a prime suspect. Hilton and Renzetti deliver zingy one-liners as they skewer pseudoscience, social influencers, self-help culture and local politics, built on a plot that would make any judgey mother proud.

Ashenburg, who smartly unpacked the cultural significance of shopping emporiums in “Elegy for the Department Store” (April/May 2024), drapes a mystery around Christian Dior in her third novel, where curator Margaret Abrams hopes her 1947 New Look exhibition will clinch a promotion at a fictional modern-day museum.

When exhibition treasures start disappearing, Margaret realizes saboteurs want to expose the dark side of Dior: his mentor’s Nazi associations, haute couture’s elitism and how his extreme hour-glass silhouettes distorted female bodies.

The fashion crimes are embroidered with contextual subplots, but the real treat is Ashenburg’s evocative descriptions of Dior’s creations. “Insofar as the right dress can guarantee a good time, Zemire promises a delightful cocktail party,” she writes. You will feel corsets dig into your ribs, hear the whoosh of crinolines and see the sparkle of silver-threaded beads.