Monthly Archives: May 2026

Pick a Colour – Souvankham Thammavongsa

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Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa was our April book club pick and it made for an interesting discussion even if not everyone liked it.

Pick a Colour is the story of Ning, an ex-boxer who now owns a nail salon. She is single, in her early forties, lives above the salon and keeps things to herself. She is observant, though: “You look at something long enough and you begin to see everything in its details.”

Everyone who works for her is called Susan because “So many girls come and go. I don’t want to bother getting new name tags each time.” Everyone in Ning’s salon is replaceable and interchangeable. “We all have black shoulder-length hair and wear black T-shirts and black pants. We are, more or less, the same height, too.”

Thammavongsa’s follows a day in the life of a salon. Mia, Ning’s employee and possibly her only friend, spend time talking about the clients as they go about their tasks: manicures and pedicures, facials and threading. Ning is slow to reveal anything personal about herself. “I don’t like to talk to people,” she says “The other girls are better at it than I am, and I don’t mind nodding along. If I had a signature move, the nod is mine.”

But over the course of the day, Ning does drop little hints about her time as a boxer and her regrets. For example, when one of her clients laments her fifth miscarriage, Ning thinks

…suddenly I felt a sadness. That we get one life and sometimes in that life we’re just not going to get to do everything. And in this life, I understood, that was something I wasn’t going to get to do. It’s a grief, but for something you never even had or even loved.

Pick a Colour is a quiet novel that is more character study than plot, but Ning is an interesting character to spend time with. It won the 2025 Giller Prize.

Take Me There – Carolee Dean

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Seventeen-year-old Dylan Dawson just can’t seem to catch a break. When Carolee Dean’s YA novel Take Me There opens, Dylan and his best friend, Wade, are on the run. They’ve been in trouble before and even did a stint in juvie together and because Wade had rescued Dylan from a sticky situation when they were locked up, Dylan just can’t give up on him up now.

Dylan and Wade are headed to Texas. That’s where Dylan’s father, Dylan Dawson Sr, is currently sitting on death row. Dylan hasn’t seen his father or communicated with him in any way since he’d been locked up eleven years ago. But his execution date is imminent and Dylan has questions only his father can answer.

Dylan is also trying to put as much distance between them and members of the Baker Street Butchers, a gang of street thugs who had tried to bring the teens into the fold in a plan that had gone horribly wrong, thus the running. But leaving California also meant leaving Jess, a girl Dylan had known as a kid and later, by sheer coincidence, reconnected with. Their blossoming romance helped Dylan imagine a different sort of life for himself and that’s where he thought he was headed until things took a sharp turn at murder.

The truth is, Dylan has a lot of cards stacked against him. His mother has never been quite the same since his father’s arrest. Dylan is unable to read and dropped out of high school. The positive male role models in his life are few and far between, although the man who owns the garage where he and Wade work is definitely a contender.

Dylan is a sympathetic character and he always tries to do the right thing. People don’t always do right by him, though, and it’s hard to watch him struggle against the system and the people who haven’t always had his best interests at heart.

Although the book falls apart a little at the end, I flew through this story and I know lots of my students will really enjoy it.