Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021)

The British Columbia Review is the new name of the Ormsby Review, an online site whose focus is B.C. books, a determination based on B.C. authors or authors who spent time here, who published their books with a B.C.-based publisher and/or make B.C their setting.

"Ormsby" stood for Margaret Ormsby (1909-1996), a historian considered by some to be the first to write a comprehensive (if not ethnocentric) history of the province. But "British Columbia" is a double sin given that the British were a colonizing force when her ships dropped anchor in what is now called Burrard Inlet in the 1790s -- just as the Genoan Christopher Columbus entered Caribbean waters 300 years before that, when he claimed to have "discovered" America.

How long this new title will last will likely depend on how it is responded to. In the meantime, we still have a George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award despite the ex-Brit's own ethnocentrism, most notably in his provincial travelogue Ravens and Prophets (1952); and an Ethel Wilson B.C. Book Prize for Fiction, despite the South African-born author's own ghastly depictions of non-white British Columbians in the opening pages of her best-known novel Swamp Angel (1953).

With that said, my review of Larissa Lai's Iron Goddess of Mercy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021) is now up on what is for now known as the British Columbia Review.