Be sure to watch Episode 2 before reading my spoilerful comments below! (CBC YouTube link above)

I really enjoyed today’s debates! No surprises to me in the results, except maybe Maggie Mac Neil’s vote against Dandelion. I thought she’d stick with Etta & Otto & Russell & James. But I think Jennie’s Boy being second to go was the right call. I completely agreed with Michelle Morgan’s thoughts on it – the ending felt strange, since we’d spent so much time with Wayne’s illness and here he was getting worse instead of better, with only a recap to tell us that eventually he improved.

Again, I felt like Michelle was the best debater of the day. I loved her opening comments about Etta & Otto & Russell & James changing the narrative around dementia, that it’s “a shifting, evolving state of being where people still have agency and still matter” rather than being an ending, and that the book also “challenges what we expect from a novel.” With arguments like that, I really do feel like that book could win.

However, I still get the impression that most contestants struggle to criticize Dandelion or A Two-Spirit Journey in any solid way. I thought Saïd M’Dahoma argued well against criticisms that the pacing of Dandelion was uneven and that there should have been more focus on the mother/daughter relationship. He’s right, the beginning of the book was about Lily’s childhood, where her memories of her mother were fractured and sometimes vague, and that section did have a lot to set up about her family and culture that kept the pace slow on purpose. And Shayla Stonechild’s wish for a character list and maps barely felt like a criticism at all. Most books don’t have those things.

I loved the moment at the end of Shayla’s opening argument when she was saying that A Two-Spirit Journey doesn’t just change the narrative, it expands it… and she had to squeeze out “to include voices that are often silenced” over the bell, haha! Clever move that probably scored her some points with the others. But I did agree with Maggie’s criticisms that it was hard to follow in places, with similar experiences being grouped together rather than playing out chronologically. Shayla and Linwood Barclay were right, though – for one thing, Ma-Nee Chacaby doesn’t owe it to the reader to explain all of Indigenous Canadian history for context, even though the lack of it might leave some readers embracing negative stereotypes about Indigenous people (though, honestly, those who readily embrace negative stereotypes about Indigenous people probably aren’t persuaded against it by hearing their history anyway); and for another thing, criticizing a book for not being something that the author clearly didn’t want it to be doesn’t really make sense.

Overall, I love how polite everyone is being to each other in these debates, and you can tell that they each have a lot of respect for all of the books and authors represented here. From here on out, it’s anybody’s race!

What did you think about today’s debate?