Book Review: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Canadian Lit

Recommended Age: 16+ readers

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Rating Scale:

Educational value: ​​ 4/5

Positive message: 2/5

Positive role models: 2/5

Violence: 5/5

Sex: 3/5

Language: 2/5

Drinking, drugs, smoking: 4/5

Consumerism:​ 1/5

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“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.” —Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

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It’s been a really long time since I have had such a visceral reaction to a book. Around a month or so ago, a good friend of mine recommended Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows after realizing we shared the same love of books that hold the capacity to destroy their reader. 

Lately, I’ve been going through a lot of changes in my life—some good, some bad, all equally as frightening. Reading All My Puny Sorrows found me when everything felt so uncertain, and self-doubt continuously plagued my psyche in a never-ending spiral of change. The book follows two sisters, Elfreida and Yolandi, as Yolandi narrates their sheltered religious upbringing in relation to her elder sister’s rebellious grit and desire to find life outside of their community. 

I should stop my review now to warn readers that this book is not for the faint of heart and not for those looking for a happy time. 

Elfreida—in all her lust for life and worldwide success as a pianist—wants to die. In the simplest of ways, Yolandi’s sister doesn’t want to stay alive. Through the book’s narration of Yoli’s perspective, to watch the person she idolizes more than life itself rot in a hospital bed after a failed attempt and balance her role as a sister and friend to the shell of a human once resembling her sister all while dealing with two children and a divorce, All My Puny Sorrows tests the limitations of love; asking just how far will one go to honour those they love even if it kills them, even if it doesn’t.

Through motherhood, sisterhood, and childhood, how does one escape genetic sadness? What do you do when the one person on this planet you love more than anything wants to leave it? In a delicate analysis of human suffering, Toews bends the limits of humanity, exploring grief as a crash course in unaltering love and how far family can go to save each other. 

There was a moment that caught my breath when I first read it. When Elfreida lies in a hospital bed, she tells her sister there is a glass piano inside her, and she’s terrified it will break. I won’t get into my interpretation of this imagery, for that I invite you to pick up a copy and decide for yourself what it means.

I remember approaching the climax of this novel and leaving my house in search of a calmer place to finish. With tear-stained cheeks and a hollow hole in my chest, I closed this novel and sat in silence on the couch in my office. All My Puny Sorrows has left a stain on my soul—one that I cannot thank my friend enough for, and one I cannot recommend enough. 

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Who is Seen, Who is Heard, and What Happens When the Truth is Obscured

by Gillian Smith-Clark ​for The 44 North

Editor in Chief

“Tell the Truth” stamped on pavement in white capital letters

This February/March issue of The 44 North is, at its core, about visibility: who is seen, who is heard, and what happens when the truth is obscured: by power, by indifference, or by deliberate misinformation.

Across these pages, you’ll find work that grapples with Black history and resistance, the freedom to read, women’s and girls’ safety, sexual and reproductive health, homelessness, and the quiet, daily ways communities hold one another together when institutions fail them. These themes may appear distinct, but they are bound by a single throughline: access. Access to knowledge, to care, to dignity, and to platforms that refuse to look away.

That tension feels especially sharp right now. In recent weeks, more than 300 journalists were purged from The Washington Post—a decision that lays bare how vulnerable even legacy newsrooms are when journalistic missions collide with corporate ownership. The paper’s slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness—introduced in 2017 and greeted at the time with both praise and pointed skepticism—now reads less like branding and more like an unintended indictment. What does that phrase mean when an iconic publication is hollowed out by fear and corporate priorities, and when media power increasingly determines which stories survive, and which disappear?

This issue is our response to that question.

Independent media matters not because it is perfect, but because it is accountable. Because it asks uncomfortable questions. Because it makes room for more voices—especially young and marginalized voices—that are too often dismissed, underestimated, or filtered through institutions that no longer serve them. At The 44 North, we remain committed to publishing work that is courageous, ethical, and grounded in empathy, including, and more specifically, when doing so is inconvenient.

You’ll see that commitment reflected throughout this issue. Our review of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews explores grief, agency, and the limits of language when pain resists resolution. In our Artist Spotlight, Feels Zine offers a bold and tender exploration of queer sex and romance, reminding us that intimacy itself can be an act of reclamation. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Rosa Parks,” featured in Poet’s Corner, anchors Black history not in abstraction, but in lived courage.

Several pieces examine storytelling as both a mirror and an intervention. Our feature on libraries as vital “third spaces,” including Dear TPL: The Passport Project, highlights how access to books and community resources can quite literally expand lives. “Novel Idea: How Fiction Helps Us See Ourselves” reflects on reading as self-recognition and survival. In The Writer’s Room, “ICE Murders: Lives in Slow Motion” uses current-events-based fiction to confront state violence in ways conventional reporting often cannot.

This issue also includes my own essay, “Watching Minneapolis from Canada: When Power Stops Explaining Itself,” which wrestles with proximity, responsibility, and what it means to witness injustice across borders in an era of relentless images and insufficient accountability.

At the heart of this issue is the winning essay from our inaugural essay contest: “The Pathogen of Perception: Quantifying the Multi-Dimensional Cost of Medical Misinformation” by Jason Wang.

Wang’s essay embodies everything we hoped this contest would epitomize: thoughtful analysis, moral seriousness, originality, and something more: a refusal to treat misinformation as a harmless difference of opinion. “Misinformation is not a victimless exchange of ideas,” Wang writes, tracing how falsehoods about vaccines during the global pandemic translated into preventable deaths—often borne not by those who rejected care, but by infants, immunocompromised patients, and those who never consented to the risks imposed upon them.

What makes this essay especially powerful is its insistence that the solution is not censorship, but literacy: scientific, media, and civic. “The answer is not censorship,” Wang argues. “It is teaching people how to think critically about health information the same way we teach them to read or do algebra.”  In a moment defined by fragmentation and distrust, this is a call not for control, but for collective capacity.

What happens to a society when it loses the ability to respond to shared threats? When truth is drowned out by noise, and institutions designed to inform either retreat or collapse?

This issue is our answer: we build capacity by telling the truth carefully. By amplifying young thinkers who understand the stakes because they have lived them. By defending the freedom to read, to question, to imagine, and to care for one another beyond narrow definitions of individual choice.

If we take the Post’s motto at its word and accept that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” it is worth remembering that darkness thrives in silence and isolation. It recedes when we insist on seeing the world as it is, clearly—and when we choose, together, to keep the lights on.

— Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor in Chief, The 44 North Media

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Holding Multiple Truths

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North

Editor in Chief

Pine boughs decorated with small yellow lights

As the year turns, we’re invited into a season that often arrives wrapped in a package of expectation: celebration, connection, spiritual renewal, reflection. Yet the holidays also hold multiple truths at once, and for many, the season arrives with more complexity than cheer—distance from family, uncertainty about the future, unresolved conflicts, and more questions about spirituality and religion than answers; alongside the not-so subtle pressure to reinvent ourselves on January 1st. This December/January issue of The 44 North looks at the holidays with honesty and curiosity, and joy and hope. Not because everything feels okay, but because to find joy and peace in the holiday season, it is not only possible, but necessary, to hold multiple truths at once. To see the world as it is: in all its beautiful messiness. 

This issue, our team explores the realities that shape our well-being at this time of year. Our feature story by Abbigale Kernya examines what it means to spend the holidays away from home—whether by choice, circumstance, or necessity—and how distance reshapes belonging. Abbigale and Helena together take on the pressures of New Year’s resolutions and career planning, challenging the embedded assumption that success and happiness in life can be scheduled like a process, or a destination at which we eventually arrive. The latest Life Outside the Box podcast episode is a powerful and inspiring conversation with Cal Campos, focused on questioning the systems we’re in and having honest conversations about suicide.

We’re also excited to share this issue’s Artist Spotlight, featuring Extended Mic, a community-rooted platform showcasing diverse young creators pushing the boundaries of film and poetry. And in our Book Review, we take a closer look at John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis—a deeply human, vulnerable reflection on illness, interconnectedness, and what it means to care for one another in a fragile and inequitable world.

We are honoured to publish a powerful work by Rohit Doel, whose poem and essay on disability justice push us to listen more deeply, to expand our definition of community care. Our Poet’s Corner highlights Terrance Hayes’ “The Same City,” and Mikaela Brewer brings us into the world of social support with a short story about calling 211, asking what trust in community looks like when it’s tested. Plus, we offer a collaborative gift guide from our team—because hope and joy can also taste like a good meal, or arrive as a small, thoughtful gesture.

Lastly, we're excited to be offering our very first essay contest. If you're hoping to submit over the holidays before our January 6th deadline, check out the recording and resource packet from our writing workshop, here.

As we close out another year, we’re not chasing perfection. We’re choosing presence: with ourselves, with each other, and with the complicated realities shaping our world. Whether your holidays are joyful, heavy, chaotic, beautifully quiet, or even all those things at different points, we’re grateful to be there with you on your journey.

Here’s to truth, peace, and possibility!

— Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor in Chief, The 44 North Media