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Catch You On The Flipside: a novel
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 17, 2025
What a thoroughly enjoyable and educational read. As a young person, I remember hearing about the Marcos regime and their abrupt departure from the Philippines. This story (and my internet searches while reading) gave me so much more. The Calgary casino characters and their stories were also captivating. Such lives unfolding behind the noise and chaos most of us only flit in and out of occasionally. Last but not least, I always enjoy an author who is not afraid to set their story in their own backyard. Elbows out Canada. Catch You on the Flipside is a must-read.
July 29, 2025
This is a 'must read' book, especially if you're like me and enjoy getting some world history through the eyes of some fictional characters. 'Impressive' and 'thrilling' are some of the words on the jacket and I agree. But most of all, I'd just like to say 'buy it' and 'read it'. It's well worth the cost.
Read
April 30, 2025Oh no.. I hate being the first in on a title when I DNF it.
This just didn't grab me and I have way too much on my TBR pile.
I'm sure there will be a reader for this out there - it's just not me.
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.
DNF
This just didn't grab me and I have way too much on my TBR pile.
I'm sure there will be a reader for this out there - it's just not me.
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.
DNF
May 10, 2025
Catch You On The Flipside
Lee Kvern
Enfield & Wizenty
Lee Kvern’s entertaining Catch You On The Flipside, is daring in its treatment of time and space, and in its eschewing some standard conventions and establishing its own logic, resulting in a reading experience in which we also learn—for me, an ideal combo.
The opening is brilliant: here’s the opening line: “Grizzly bear #122, ‘The Boss,’ sits in the alpine forest in the late night.” This reader was instantly seduced. Completely engrossing, the chapter does everything you want an opening to do: gives readers a mystery; piques our interest and curiosity; draws us eagerly forward. Who is this person? we wonder. And thus, an effective red herring—so to speak—is planted.
That utterly gorgeous opening is a hard act to follow. It’s set in 2017, and the next section, 34 years before, jolts us back in time to 1983. More shifts in time and place, some of them sudden, follow—the 2017 setting of Banff National Park, then 1983 Rural Philippines, then Los Angeles, then the Philippines again, then Calgary, Vancouver, and so on. The shifts are at first a bit startling, until a reader comes to expect them. This is also true of the changing points of view.
Kvern uses three general time frames, spanning over thirty years, and she uses numerous urban and rural settings in both North America and the Philippines. Marcos of the Philippines parallels Calgary in the boom and bust years of the 1980s. We are on a pig farm, we are in the Rocky Mountains, we are in the Manila airport, we are in a Calgary or a Vancouver casino. (I was fully engaged with the casino—it was fascinating to learn about the machinations that go on before, during, and after those doors open and customers stream in. Kvern, who has actual casino experience, shows us the inside; what a privilege! )
Kvern instils in us the necessary confidence to draw us in and propel us: this experienced writer knows what she is doing and why—we can trust her. And eventually, the seemingly disparate pieces start to coalesce, to float towards each other, and lead to ‘aha’ moments that reveal the connections and result in an integrated whole.
Catch You On The Flipside illustrates how even a seemingly insignificant person can, with or without intent or knowing, alter the lives of others close and far, how the ripple effects of even a small action can have far-reaching effects much as the philosophical pebble dropped into a puddle has. And, like the flipside of the title, there can be both good and bad intended and unintended consequences.
We are introduced to an array of intriguing characters, each with their own ‘flipside,’ who make us question: What does a pig farmer named Rolando living in rural Philippines have to do with a blackjack dealer named Elle in a Calgary casino? What relation is there between a grizzly bear in Banff National Park, and a political assassination in Manila? I sometimes longed for more of some of the more colourful members of the cast, to go deeper as a reader into fully-explored hearts and heads.
The friendship between Elle, and Amado, a baggage handler from Manila, who flees after witnessing a political assassination and ends up in Canada at the same casino in Calgary, is at the core heart of the novel. The story unfolds. The interconnectedness becomes clear.
Thematically, the novel is concerned with many things, among them, fidelity—to one’s job, one’s friends, one’s politics, and how events that occur half a world away can be and often are felt in one’s home, one’s heart. And that everything—everything—has its flipside. But which is which?
Catch You On the Flipside is a thriller; it is about political intrigue; it is about domestic discord, and violence; and it is about friendships that bridge time and space. Kvern’s novel is lively, bright, insightful, and entertaining.
Lee Kvern
Enfield & Wizenty
Lee Kvern’s entertaining Catch You On The Flipside, is daring in its treatment of time and space, and in its eschewing some standard conventions and establishing its own logic, resulting in a reading experience in which we also learn—for me, an ideal combo.
The opening is brilliant: here’s the opening line: “Grizzly bear #122, ‘The Boss,’ sits in the alpine forest in the late night.” This reader was instantly seduced. Completely engrossing, the chapter does everything you want an opening to do: gives readers a mystery; piques our interest and curiosity; draws us eagerly forward. Who is this person? we wonder. And thus, an effective red herring—so to speak—is planted.
That utterly gorgeous opening is a hard act to follow. It’s set in 2017, and the next section, 34 years before, jolts us back in time to 1983. More shifts in time and place, some of them sudden, follow—the 2017 setting of Banff National Park, then 1983 Rural Philippines, then Los Angeles, then the Philippines again, then Calgary, Vancouver, and so on. The shifts are at first a bit startling, until a reader comes to expect them. This is also true of the changing points of view.
Kvern uses three general time frames, spanning over thirty years, and she uses numerous urban and rural settings in both North America and the Philippines. Marcos of the Philippines parallels Calgary in the boom and bust years of the 1980s. We are on a pig farm, we are in the Rocky Mountains, we are in the Manila airport, we are in a Calgary or a Vancouver casino. (I was fully engaged with the casino—it was fascinating to learn about the machinations that go on before, during, and after those doors open and customers stream in. Kvern, who has actual casino experience, shows us the inside; what a privilege! )
Kvern instils in us the necessary confidence to draw us in and propel us: this experienced writer knows what she is doing and why—we can trust her. And eventually, the seemingly disparate pieces start to coalesce, to float towards each other, and lead to ‘aha’ moments that reveal the connections and result in an integrated whole.
Catch You On The Flipside illustrates how even a seemingly insignificant person can, with or without intent or knowing, alter the lives of others close and far, how the ripple effects of even a small action can have far-reaching effects much as the philosophical pebble dropped into a puddle has. And, like the flipside of the title, there can be both good and bad intended and unintended consequences.
We are introduced to an array of intriguing characters, each with their own ‘flipside,’ who make us question: What does a pig farmer named Rolando living in rural Philippines have to do with a blackjack dealer named Elle in a Calgary casino? What relation is there between a grizzly bear in Banff National Park, and a political assassination in Manila? I sometimes longed for more of some of the more colourful members of the cast, to go deeper as a reader into fully-explored hearts and heads.
The friendship between Elle, and Amado, a baggage handler from Manila, who flees after witnessing a political assassination and ends up in Canada at the same casino in Calgary, is at the core heart of the novel. The story unfolds. The interconnectedness becomes clear.
Thematically, the novel is concerned with many things, among them, fidelity—to one’s job, one’s friends, one’s politics, and how events that occur half a world away can be and often are felt in one’s home, one’s heart. And that everything—everything—has its flipside. But which is which?
Catch You On the Flipside is a thriller; it is about political intrigue; it is about domestic discord, and violence; and it is about friendships that bridge time and space. Kvern’s novel is lively, bright, insightful, and entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews