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THE SHOPLIFTER'S APPRENTICE. By Ellen Lesser. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) Women poised on the brink of self-discoveries dominate this slim collection of well-observed and evocative stories. From the Miami journalist visiting her old school friend's Vermont farmhouse to the East Village proofreader forming an uneasy bond with the tenant of a neighborhood group home to the transplanted Middle Westerner in midtown Manhattan whose solitary routine is disturbed by the noisy lovemaking of the couple upstairs, these characters often see themselves reflected in the lives of others.

In this prequel to the popular Black Magician trilogy (The High Lord, 2003, etc.), two young women on opposite sides of a war discover their life's work.Tessia has just begun her apprenticeship with a master magician when her country, Kyralia, ...

Several audio books on reviewed, including: 1. The Magician's Apprentice by Trudi Canavan, 2. Great Classic Women's Fiction: Ten Unabridged Stories by Willa Cather and others, and 3. 44 Charles Street by Danielle Steel.

Writing of the great poem that is the province of Ontario and pondering upon what might be called its \"essential voice,\" James Reaney noted that [Margaret Atwood] was the first Canadian author to provide a vivid \"literary reflector\" for Toronto in The Edible Woman, where, even if the city itself remains unnamed, one recognized its \"subways like pastel chutes\" and realized that Atwood was drawing heavily, wittily, sardonically and affectionately upon what she knew well. But that first novel is a mere draft compared to Cat's Eye. There, the geography of the residential Moore Park/Leaside area can be mapped and retraced today (one can cross the bridge and even sort out the jokes pertaining to Atwood's grade-school teachers at Whitney Public School). So too the (still) trendy Queen Street world of galleries, studios and restaurants ate celebrated with striking accuracy and satiric force. Here phrases like \"It serves you right\" and \"What do you have to say for yourself?\" capture the litany of adult condemnation that, as in Alice Munro's fiction, so characterized the Ontario of mid-century. Such an outlook served to render self-protective the sensibilities of many young Torontonians, becalming them in a paralysis of self-satisfying irony that too often undermined and made a mockery of positive action and generous affection. That \"small, mean voice, ancient and smug\" that rises up from \"deep inside [Elaine's] head,\" talking the talk that leaves her so much and so sadly alone, is rooted in that parental and generational legacy (341). It is her late. As Davidson astutely notes in Seeing in the Dark, Elaine misconstrues her \"real problem\" (84) in her self-analysis; it is not the way she sees herself as a woman that is the problem; rather it is the miserableness that follows from her lack of woman friends and her inability to venture unrestricted friendship (other than in her head). Certainly, a close reading of Toronto's social and cultural history would help readers, be they in Chicago or Leeds, to understand more fully the intricacies of Elaine's thinking and her failures. Indeed, what Atwood does imaginatively with Toronto is worth a study in itself. [Ted Davidson]'s Seeing in the Dark does not explore the complexities of that subject fully, but his analysis of Cat's Eye is nevertheless attentive to much that is germane to Atwood's \"Toronto\" sensibility and, as such, in addition to its many strengths as a monograph aimed at students, it encourages further investigation. Ted Davidson sees Cat's Eye as a major book, Atwood's best overall (that judgment would seem to include The Robber Bride and Alias Grace and her \"most artistically accomplished novel thus far\" (17). Tracing some of the prominent ways in which Atwood returns to certain of her earlier themes and stories, he makes a strong case for the novel as an accomplished and persuasive reworking of apprentice-like efforts like Surfacing. \"My own sense,\" he writes, \"is that these similarities are roughly analogous to the connections between Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Great Expectations. All writers have their subjects, but sometimes an older writer pointedly returns to a topic treated earlier to do it fuller justice, to portray it with a more developed art and vision\" (14). His monograph seeks to measure those depths. Linking Atwood's novel to Dante's Divine Comedy, Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, Davidson examines Atwood's self-conscious debt to these writers and their concerns with \"the darkness of the human heart\" (18). He is particularly attentive to the ways in which Atwood \"signals her artistic intentions by staging a \"daughterly\" rewriting of Proust, Shakespeare, and Dante (17). Ever mindful of the politics of feminism (an increasingly charged aspect of the Atwood industry in large part because Atwood refuses to be any less a novelist for merely political reasons), Davidson engineers his language and argument to see Atwood in the best possible feminist terms, even if the lineage is fraught with patriarchal ties of various sorts. Though he admits that \"Elaine can sound remarkably like a terminally sexist man\" (90), he does his level best to provide a perspective in which Atwood's feminism is not found wanting, even if it may appear to be so to the ideologically obsessive. Atwood clearly revels in the games that ideological positions provide for her.

Not surprisingly, several of the essays' recommendations involve taking risks, suggesting that teachers experiment not only with content but with classroom style. Two examples are \"Mathematics: From Constructing Privilege to Deconstructing Myths,\" by Sue Willis, and \"So We've Got a Chip on Our Shoulder! Sexing the Texts of `Educational Technology,'\" by Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell. An essay on music education, \"Tone Deaf/Symphonies Singing: Sketches for a Musicale,\" by Roberta Lamb, is formally experimental as well. Saying that she speaks \"from a doubled position as both participant in and feminist critic of music education,\" Lamb represents this dual subject position by \"doubling\" the text (alternate pages list women performers, composers, musicologists, etc.). And because \"neither music nor gender is linear,\" she assembles motifs and improvises on their thematic material. She considers the aesthetic basis of music education, and its performance traditions (she calls musical performance an \"untheorized practice\" and a \"male-constructed model for music\"). While Lamb's adherence to a self-reflective practice of interpreting her own improvisations makes most of the essay suggestive rather than prescriptive, in a section called \"Motive on a Major Second,\" she summarizes what a radical transformation of music education would be like. Among other things, it would be a \"praxis...informed by feminist music criticism;\" women would no longer be silent; \"alternatives to the master-apprentice model\" would be found; and a \"specialized scholarship of women in/and music\" would come to the fore. Some of the essays connect sexist practices in schools to problems of race, class, sexual orientation, and \"imperialist\" bias, showing that the general problem facing those who would transform schools is inequity in any form it takes. The link between bias in the curriculum and in society may be nowhere clearer than in ESL, where identity politics intersect with pedagogical practice. As Kathleen Rockhill and Patricia Tomic state plainly in \"Situating ESL Between Speech and Silence:\" \"Linguistic dominance works through gender, race, and class.\" In \"Learning to Write: Gender, Genre, Play, and Fiction,\" [John Willinsky] connects students' confinement to traditional genres in writing to restrictions placed on students different by sex, color, and so on, relating \"struggles against colonization and racism...to questions raised by gender and to writing's participation in and against the divisions suffered.\" In a second introduction, included to reflect protests at the conference over the inadequacy of representation of issues of race, class, and sexual preference in the agenda for both conference and book, Annette Henry claims that \"without a pedagogy for understanding and challenging racism,\" even a feminist practice is \"rendered poisonous.\"