Up Up Up, the debut collection by 2009 Writers’ Union of Canada Prose Competition winner Julie Booker, comes out next month. It’s a very funny book, but there’s a lot more to it than laughter alone.  I review it today in The Rover:

From soups to cocktails to Chicken McNugget sauce, sweet and sour is one of the world’s most popular and enduring flavours. I have a theory about why this is so. The key to sweet and sour’s success is in its ability to deceive. The first thing my palate detects is the sweet. In a flash, expectations and associations of a sugary sort – lollipops, cotton candy, birthday cake – form in my mind. In another flash, however, the sour kicks in. Suddenly, I’m tasting something much more complicated, much more adult. A similar happy deception occurs repeatedly in Julie Booker’s debut short story collection, Up Up Up.

Full review here.