Angie Abdou

From the author of Canada Reads finalist The Bone Cage. Includes research on the shy child, parent-child bonding, social media issues, and the benefits of outdoor activity and nature immersion. Disillusioned with overly competitive organized sports and concerned about her lively daughter's growing shyness, author Angie Abdou sets herself a challenge: to hike a peak a week over the summer holidays with Katie. They will bond in nature and discover the glories of outdoor activity. What could go wrong? Well, among other things, it turns out that Angie loves hiking but Katie doesn't. Hilarious, poignant, and deeply felt, This One Wild Life explores parenting and marriage in a summer of unexpected outcomes and growth for both mother and daughter.

A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir

This One Wild Life

In Case I Go

Writer and competitive swimmer Angie Abdou, tells the tale of Digger, an 85 kilo wrestler, and Sadie, a 26-year-old speed are nearing the end of their athletic careers, and are forced to confront the question: what happens to athletes when their bodies are too old and injured to compete?

The Bone Cage

Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal It’s the last ski weekend of the season and a mishmash of snow-enthusiasts is on its way to a remote backwoods cabin. In an odd pilgrimage through the mountains, the townsfolk of Coalton—from the ski bum to the urbanite—embark on a bizarre adventure that walks the line between comedy and tragedy. As the rednecks mount their sleds and the hippies snowshoe through the cedar forest, we see rivals converge for the weekend. While readers follow the characters on their voyage up and over the mountain, stereotypes of ski-town culture fall away. Loco, the ski bum, is about to start his first real job; Alison, the urbanite, is forced to learn how to wield an avalanche shovel; and Michael, the real estate developer, is high on mushroom tea. In a blend of mordant humour and heartbreak, Angie Abdou chronicles a day in the life of these industrious few as they attempt to conquer the mountain. In an avalanche of action, Angie Abdou explores the way in which people treat their fellow citizens and the landscape they love.

The Canterbury Trail

Vero and her husband Shane have moved out of the sweet suite above his parents' garage and found themselves smack in the middle of adulthood?two kids, two cars, two jobs. They are not coping well. In response to their looming domestic breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in help with their sons?a woman from the Philippines named Ligaya (which means happiness); the children call her LiLi. Vero justifies LiLi's role in their home by insisting that she is part of their family, and she goes to great lengths in order to ease her conscience. But differences persist; Vero grapples with her overextended role as a mother and struggles to keep her marriage passionate, while LiLi silently bears the burden of a secret she left behind at home. Between offers readers an intriguing, searing portrait of two women from two different cultures. At the same time, it satirizes contemporary love, marriage, and parenthood by exposing the sense of entitlement and superiority at the heart of upper-middle-class North American existence through a ubiquitous presence in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou comically and tragically tackles the issue of international nannies by providing a window on motherhood where it is tangled up with class, career, labor, and desire. Angie Abdou has a PhD in English literature from the University of Calgary and teaches English and creative writing at the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada. Her first novel, The Bone Cage (NeWest Press), was a finalist in CBC's Canada Reads competition.

Between

Angie Abdou_s short story debut is a sassy collection about likeable women running wild. In an irreverent vivisection of cultural myths of gender such as "women are born nurturers" or "men are inherently more aggressive", Abdou reveals the silent contracts that lie at the underbelly of polished marriages, platonic friendships, barroom flirtations and not-so-meaningless sex. Abdou_s characters have an easy honesty, a dirty-kneed grace that reminds us of girls who climbed trees and pulled the wings off butterflies. Now grown up, they offer biting and insouciant revelations into sexual stereotypes, fear of intimacy, and anger management. Abdou's stories brim with the emotional, moral and social conundrum of living GAP commercial feminism on a thrift store budget, and provide a deliciously self-effacing joyride through the girl slums of Boystown.

Anything Boys Can Do

The author of the Canada Reads–nominated The Bone Cage tackles the ups and downs of amateur hockey, from a mother’s point of view Over 570,000 people are registered in Hockey Canada and over 600,000 in Hockey USA. It’s a national obsession. But what does that really mean when your child wants to play on a team? As a former varsity athlete and university instructor teaching sport literature, novelist Angie Abdou is no stranger to sport obsession, but she finds herself conflicted when faced with the reality of the struggles, joys, and strains of having a child in amateur hockey. In Home Ice, with equal parts humour and anguish, Abdou charts a full season of life as an Atom-level hockey mom, from summer hockey camp to the end-of-season tournament. Her revealing stories and careful research on issues such as cost, gender bias, concussion, and family pressures offer a compellingly honest and complex insider’s view of parenting today’s young athlete in a competitive and high-pressure culture.

Reflections of a Reluctant Hockey Mom

Home Ice

Young Eli - with the help of his friend Amy - finds himself answering for the mistakes of his late great-great grandfather. Both Eli and Amy have a foot in multiple worlds, and they relive and account for past lives of seduction and betrayal. This new kind of ghost story explores the ways we’re haunted by the misdoings of ancestors.

Jamie Dopp

Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre’s potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works. Organized chronologically by source text, ranging from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays offer a variety of ways to read, consider, teach, and write about sport literature.

A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature

Writing the Body in Motion

The Canterbury Trail brings together a motley collection of ski bums, hippies, yuppies, poseurs and snowmobile-riding rednecks on a late winter trip into the mountains around the fictional Coalton, B.C. Coalton is a close fit with Abdou's home of Fernie, a powder-skiing haven that uneasily combines an economic base of coal mining with a mountain escape for Calgary's moneyed classes.

Angie Abdou

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