Breakaway Books

Authored by Paige Lewis; Published May 2026; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

I fully admit, I’m not really a literary fiction person, and this novel, though technically fantasy, could definitely fall into that category. If I had to describe Canon in two words, it would be performatively weird.

In Canon, God appears quite unexpectedly in Yara’s life and sends them on a quest to defeat the villainous Dominic, in spite of the fact that Yara has absolutely no qualifications for this task. Simultaneously, God’s prophet Adrena is miffed at not being selected for the quest herself and seeks to ally herself with the commander of a great army to beat Yara to the punch. 

With novels like this one, I never know where to start a critique. Did I really get what the author was trying to do? Probably not. I did appreciate the intimate perspective of a person living with severe obsessive compulsive disorder (Yara), and I felt like that part of her journey is both enlightening and heartbreaking. Adrena’s upbringing, with her constant desire for her mother’s love, felt real enough to inspire at least a little empathy. But the rest? I know it was purposely outlandish, but what am I supposed to get out of it? I definitely didn’t connect with the characters. Is it all an allegory to convey that creatures are deserving of love and respect, even if they are deemed villains by God himself? This book makes too much of a farce of religion for me to care whom He disdains.

To me, the novel feels like a strawman argument against God and religion. All of the worst conceptions of God are embodied in His depiction in this book—or at least those most bandied about in society. It’s the superficial stuff that the novel makes fun of, with less emphasis on the loss of free will that comes with an omnipotent and omnipresent God, and more emphasis on God’s seemingly capricious desire to intervene in human lives. In the end, Yara finds happiness completely alone, out of the reach of God and everyone else, and that… seems sad to me, despite the fact that it is depicted as a blessing for Yara. 

Canon might be exactly your type of weird. It wasn’t mine.