If you’re in the mood for a delightful little book that will take you on a mini-journey into rural life in southern Ontario, Canada, then I can’t recommend Finding Larkspur, A Return to Village Life by Dan Needles strongly enough. As someone who grew up in a semi-rural community, I could relate to so many of Needles’s stories and chuckled at his depiction of small-town…
There probably isn’t a baby boomer out there who does not have someone in their life affected by one of the dozens of conditions under the dementia or Alzheimer’s umbrella. Whether it’s a friend, parent, spouse, or even ourselves, the disease eventually attaches its tentacles to someone we know or love. While it is primarily considered an old person’s disease, we are increasingly seeing younger…
First of all, Pulitzer Prize-winner Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Demon Copperhead is not about a snake as the title would suggest. It’s a modern interpretation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield retold about a drug-addicted teenage boy. His name is a riff on his first name, Damon, and his distinctive red hair. What shocked me most about this amazing book is how different this story is…
If you’re a fan of historical fiction and you enjoy reading about World War II, then you will appreciate two books I just finished. The Secret History Of Audrey James by Canadian author Heather Marshall and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden are coincidently similarly themed. Both novels are about the fallout of Nazis and SS officers seizing and occupying the homes of Jewish deportees….
To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I would like Jeanne Beker’s new book My Heart On My Sleeve: Stories From a Life Well Worn—but it surprised me and I did. Born in Toronto to Holocaust survivors, Beker loved acting, dancing, and dressing up in the fashions conceived and created with the help of her mother’s sewing skills and displayed an interest in theatrical arts…
Russia and its people have always fascinated me. The country is vast—the only country in the world larger than Canada—and its people have a complicated history. The Traitor’s Daughter by Roxane Spicer is the true story of one of those people. Spicer is a Canadian writer, journalist, and film-maker who spent more than fifty years trying to uncover her mother’s history, her secrets, and her suffering….
