Reviews
April 1, 2023
The Mercy Journals
“From the opening paragraph, I dove into the deep end of a dystopian world that was terrifying, familiar, and thrilling, and made me keep reading until the shocking end. The novel focusses on family and survival and love and humans’ nature; hunger, passion, possession, and murder. It’s a masterpiece.”
– Jamie Lee Curtis
“Posing profound questions about compassion, values, and our capacity for life-saving change, Canadian author Casper performs a remarkably incisive and sensitive variation on the dystopian theme in this suspenseful and provocative tale of sacrifice and survival.”
-Booklist
“While the novel is set in the future, it doesn’t seem that far away or fantastical…The Mercy Journals work on two levels: as a cautionary tale and as an examination of one man’s struggle to find meaning in life. The two levels work beautifully together.“
-Vancouver Sun
“Literature is the air we breathe. It’s the background for our species in our culture. It contributes to change by changing the air we breathe, changing what’s in our background sense of what is known, what is normal, what is experienced, what we’re conscious of. It can galvanize change over a generation or two. What literature does, I think in some ways better than any other medium, is it takes you inside another mind and expands in a whole world in that character. Once you have that empathetic understanding of another character, it doesn’t leave you, even if you don’t remember the plot.”
-Q&A with CBC Books’ Jane van Koeverden
The Continuation of Love by Other Means
“A moving and mature piece of work…melding brutal realism and quiet hopefulness.”
-Quill and Quire
“The questions Claudia Casper raises in this novel are big ones, meaningful ones… the attempt to negotiation the treacherous waters of live is to be applauded and appreciated on many levels.”
Times Colonist
“As elegantly plain and satisfyingly functional as a Shaker hatbox… The novel is an organic rendering in fine detail of the intertwined lives of two people from conception onward. It’s a skilfully told story with lots of life-juice and animal sensuality, perfect reading for the salty afternoons of midsummer.”
-The Globe and Mail
The Reconstruction
“An important new talent. (Casper’s) voice is a welcome paradox: it is fresh and original, yet confident and mature.”
-Maclean’s
“The strands are elegantly woven in prose that combines strength and precision with great lightness of touch. There are occasional excesses, but the central evolutionary metaphor proves an excellent vehicle for a tale that is individually absorbing and which effectively carries much wider and more primeval resonances.”
-The Observer
“A resonant first novel, rich with literary parallels and allusions…supremely satisfying.”
-Booklist
“Her observations of her heroine’s willful decent into primitive eccentricity are deft, her evocation of creative and academic obsession a delight, and her eventual award of hard-won happiness believable rather than pat. All in all, this is a sparkler of a first novel.”
-the Independent
“An involving, funny, thought-provoking and even inspiring story of one woman’s personal transformation. It is as flawlessly constructed as the mysterious creature created by the protagonist.”
-The Leader Post