Books

Book of the month – February 2026

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Finding Flora

Elinor Florence

When a friend recommended this historical novel I was immediately intrigued because the setting is a very familiar one. The story takes place near the location of present-day Clive, Alberta, about an hour and a half by car from where I live! The action begins in 1905 with Scottish newcomer, Flora Craigie, jumping from a moving train to escape a disastrous marriage. Depending on where you live, 1905 might seem like fairly recent history, but this was brand new country at that time. The town where I live was established as a Canadian Pacific Railway townsite in 1906 and incorporated as a village in March 1907.

In the early 1900s, the Canadian government granted 160 acres of free land to any man who met three stringent conditions: he had to live on the property for three years, build a habitable dwelling, and cultivate a required number of acres each year. That opportunity wasn’t open to single women, however. Not surprising, I suppose, if you consider the fact that women in Canada weren’t even legally declared persons until October 18, 1929!

The heroine of our very well-researched story finds a legal loophole, however. Canadian veterans of the Boer War in South Africa were granted homesteads by the federal government in appreciation for their service and there was no law against them selling these claims. Flora purchases her claim from one of the twelve Canadian nurses who served in the Boer War and who were therefore considered veterans. She is astonished to find that her nearest neighbours are also female: a Welsh widow with three children, two American women raising chickens, and a Métis woman who trains wild horses.

With strength, determination, and endless courage Flora and her neighbours battle the harsh environment as well as those who were opposed to women owning land. They endure backbreaking labour and many hardships that were common to early Canadian settlers. Hardships like the winter storm that kept us housebound one day last week. Imagine surviving a prairie blizzard in a one room cabin without insulation, indoor plumbing, electricity, and central heating! To complicate matters for Flora, there were indications that her violent husband hadn’t given up looking for her.

The kindness of strangers and the importance of community are themes that weave their way through this heartwarming story.  There’s also an element of romance and although the ending is quite predictable, I can’t help but love a story about resilient boundary-breaking women!

Book of the month – January 2026

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More than ever these days, with the world in ever increasing chaos, escaping into a good book seems to be a way to hold onto one’s sanity!

As a child, when I was feeling down or stayed home from school because I was sick, I often turned to my same favourite book and read it again. As an adult, however, I seldom reread books. I first read this month’s feature trilogy soon after the third book was published in 1995. The boxed set has been sitting on a shelf downstairs for almost three decades and lately it had been calling out to me. Although I remembered the main characters and knew that the story had impacted me the first time I read it, I couldn’t recall many of the details. It was definitely worth a second read.

Mark of the Lion

Francine Rivers

I seldom read Christian novels because most of them are either futuristic stories based on the author’s interpretation of the Biblical book of Revelation or fluffy happy-ever-after romances. These three books definitely don’t fall into either of those categories. In fact, they are best suited to a mature audience that isn’t overly squeamish as there are some fairly graphic descriptions of violence and cruelty, as well as references to sexuality and sexually transmitted disease, discrimination, and other forms of injustice. For those who like romance, though, there’s also some of that!

Set mainly in 1st century Rome and Ephesus, this is a story of courage, faith, forgiveness, and redemption. The main characters include Hadassah, a young girl captured during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD and sold into slavery; the Valerians, a wealthy and aristocratic Roman family; and Atretes, a German warrior captured and trained as a gladiator. In addition, the author weaves in a whole host of other characters including several from the Bible, fictionalized of course.

Rivers does an outstanding job of vividly portraying the decadent culture of 1st century Rome and at times it seems all too familiar as many of the same issues still plague us today. One would have to wonder if contemporary Western culture is destined to fall in much the same way that corrupt Rome did, but I digress!

The core message of Christianity is woven throughout the series and clearly motivates some of the characters, but Rivers has managed to incorporate this without becoming preachy.

Even the second time through, I could hardly put these books down. In the words of one Goodreads reviewer, “These are can’t put down, aren’t going to feed the kids or the dog, not doing laundry kind of books!” Fortunately, my kids have all flown the nest and we don’t have a dog!

Paper or digital?

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There was a time when I wrote everything by hand. As a university student in the early 1970s, while most of my peers were cranking out essays on manual or electric typewriters, every paper that I submitted was handwritten. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to type. My mother had insisted that typing was a skill that every girl should have, so I had taken typing classes in high school. I just preferred to write by hand. My early freelance articles were handwritten, but I typed a final copy for submission because  that was required by most publications. Then came computers and the ease of word processing. I made the transition to writing on a keyboard and never looked back.

There are, however, some areas where I have intentionally hung onto vestiges of the past.

In a world where it seems that we’re constantly glued to screens, I still prefer a physical, paper calendar that gives me a visual overview of upcoming appointments and events. One hangs on our kitchen wall and I carry a smaller version in my purse.

I also use a simple paper planner where I write my daily to-do list. Putting pen to paper and actually writing down my intentions and placing them where I will see them multiple times throughout the day keeps me focused on accomplishing them and there’s something deeply satisfying about crossing off each item as it’s completed. Unlike digital alerts that disappear once they’re completed, a handwritten paper planner also provides a record of tasks completed and gives me a greater sense of accomplishment. Ultimately though, the best calendar or planner is the one that a person will use consistently and for me, that’s paper.

Then there’s books. When we travel, I absolutely love the convenience of the e-reader that my daughter gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, but at home I still prefer to immerse myself in the pages of an actual, physical book.

What about you? Have you completely joined the digital world or are you like me, still a little bit old-school?

Book of the month – December 2025

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Early in December, I was looking for something light and entertaining to read when I came across two books that fit the bill. The fact that both are set in locations that I’ve had the privilege of visiting added to the fun. Since I couldn’t decide which one to review this month, I decided to share them both.

Buying a Piece of Paris: The Home of My Dreams in the City of Lights

Ellie Nielsen

Buying a Piece of Paris is a charming memoir about the Australian author’s humorous and challenging quest to find and purchase an apartment in Paris. With only two weeks to locate and secure the apartment of her dreams, something exuding character and Parisian chic, Ellie embarks on what seems an almost impossible pursuit. Armed with only a cursory grasp of the language, she finds herself trying to navigate the bewildering French real estate market with its unique customs, quirky agents, and unexpected cultural hurdles. All in all, a very entertaining read and especially so since, although I’ve only spent five days in Paris, I could visualize many of the places that she mentioned and the kind of buildings she visited in her frantic and sometimes hilarious search for the perfect place to call home.

A couple of Paris street scenes from our visit in 2019…

The Colour of Tea

Hannah Tunnicliffe

After moving with her husband to the tiny, bustling city of Macau, across the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong, Grace Miller finds herself a stranger in a very foreign land. Facing the devastating news of her infertility and a marriage in crisis, Grace resolves to do something bold, something that her impetuous mother might have done. Turning to her love of baking, she opens Lillian’s, a café specializing in coffee, tea, and delicate French macarons. In this story of love, friendship, and renewal, Lillian’s quickly becomes a sanctuary where women from different cultural backgrounds come together to support one another.

I could easily visualize Grace’s café on a street like this, one of the many that we walked down during our one day visit to Macau in 2009.

Book of the month – November 2025

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CLAIRE McCARDELL The Designer Who Set Women Free

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

When Jennifer Connolly of A Well Styled Life, mentioned this fascinating biography in a post a couple of months ago, I knew I had to read it. A book about fashion and a woman ahead of her time all wrapped up in one! What’s not to like? I immediately searched our interlibrary loan system and requested it. I was not disappointed.

At a time when American designers were still copying Parisian fashions and dressing society women who could afford to change their clothes three times a day, McCardell fought to introduce functional ready-to-wear clothing for modern women who, like herself, were going to work, playing sports, and traveling. She introduced “menswear” fabrics like denim and tweed into womenswear. She invented ballet flats and although they shocked beachgoers at the time, she designed swimsuits that were actually comfortable to swim in! Thanks to her, we have wrap dresses, hoodies, and leggings, and although she didn’t use the term, she introduced the concept of a capsule wardrobe; a small collection of versatile, quality clothing items that could be mixed and matched to create a wide variety of outfits. And, perhaps best of all, she insisted that women’s clothing should have functional pockets! 

When interviewed by a popular radio host who asked her, “Do you believe the old saying that you have to suffer to be beautiful?”, McCardell responded, “I certainly don’t. When you’re uncomfortable you are likely to show it. That’s why I make even my most formal dresses as comfortable as a playsuit. Clothes should stay put too, so there is no temptation to be forever pulling, pinching, and adjusting them which spoils your own fun and makes everyone else fidgety. You never look really well-dressed when you’re overconscious of what you have on. Comfort should be a keynote of style.” Definitely a woman after my own heart! 

Book of the month – October 2025

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When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

Gabor Maté, MD

In this international bestseller, renowned mental health expert and speaker, Dr. Gabor Maté, provides insight into the critical role that stress and emotions play in the development of many common diseases.

Although written for a general audience, When the Body Says No definitely wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of tea. It’s like reading a textbook, but my daughter and I both read it recently and when I discovered that another friend was also reading it, I decided that it might appeal to more of you and that it would be worth reviewing here.

Dr. Maté has experience as a family practitioner and a palliative care physician and has also worked with the addicted men and women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He weaves together scientific research, numerous case histories, and his own insights and experience to explain the relationship between psychological stress and the onset of chronic illnesses including arthritis, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease. While I don’t agree with everything he says and he definitely needs to update the section on prostate cancer (the book was published in 2003 ), a lot of it makes very good sense. 

What I liked best was the fact that Dr. Maté validated what I have believed for years; that the stress I endured prior to and especially during the early decades of our marriage and the anger that I suppressed during those years contributed to my present health conditions. In fact, the author would probably say that they caused my cancers. As he says, all of us probably have within our bodies the occasional rogue cell that could multiply and become cancer. In most cases, the body has the resources to destroy those cells before they spread, but chronic stress and repressed anger reduce the body’s ability to do that and magnify the risk of developing the disease.  

In the final chapter of the book, Dr. Maté addresses what he calls the seven A’s of healing: acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion, and affirmation. He believes that pursuing these will help us grow into emotional competence and empower us to be our own health advocates.

Note:  This book was published in the US under the title When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection.

 

Book of the month – September 2025

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During our teaching careers, hubby and I had to learn numerous acronyms describing ND (neurodivergent) children: ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and so on, but the book that I’m reviewing this month is an extreme example of what hubby calls PPS (Poor Parenting Syndrome)!

Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free

Suzanne Heywood

At seven years old, Suzanne Heywood set sail from England with her parents and younger brother on what was supposed to be a three-year trip around the world retracing one of Captain Cook’s voyages. What followed was a decade of isolation on a 70-foot sailboat crossing some of the world’s most dangerous oceans and surviving horrendous storms, shipwrecks, and reefs. What sounded like the romantic adventure of a lifetime became a child’s worst nightmare “trapped inside someone else’s dream”.

Deprived of safety, friendship, and education, Suzanne longed to return to the stability of England and the opportunity to attend school, but her parents saw this only as selfishness on her part and refused to entertain the idea. Determined to educate herself, she worked diligently on correspondence courses dropping lessons into the mail whenever and wherever the family went ashore. Ultimately her desire for independence and self-determination became so intolerable to her parents, particularly her mother, that at age 16, they dropped her off at an isolated cabin on the north island of New Zealand, leaving her responsible for her younger brother while they continued their travels around the South Pacific!   

It would be hard to read this book without becoming increasingly angry at the parents who, according to the epilogue, told their daughter later that she had a “privileged” upbringing! It is, however, a story of resilience and determination. At 17, finally escaping the constraints of her bizarre childhood, Suzanne was accepted into college at Oxford where she went on to earn her PhD.

While Suzanne’s childhood was one of neglect rather than physical abuse, there are strong parallels between her story and Tara Westover’s powerful memoir, Educated. 

Book of the month – August 2025

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The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir

Roma Ligocka

The book opens with an elderly Jewish woman sitting in the elegant dining room of a posh hotel on the French Riviera. Suddenly and quite seamlessly it transitions to the dark Ghetto of Kraków, Poland during World War II and I was hooked!

Roma Ligocka was born to Jewish parents in Poland in November 1938, less than a year before the beginning of World War II. Told through the eyes of a child, the story of her early years living in the Jewish Ghetto of Kraków is a harrowing account of uniformed men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, people being shot indiscriminately, her mother’s tears, and from her hiding place under a table, seeing her own grandmother seized by SS officers. After her father is arrested and taken to Auschwitz, Roma and her mother, with their hair dyed blonde and carrying falsified documents, escape the Ghetto and are taken in by a non-Jewish family who pass them off as visiting cousins. Sometime later, when her father escapes the concentration camp and is reunited with his family, she fails to recognize the haggard spectre that he has become.

Roma is just short of her seventh birthday when the war comes to an end, but her life continues to be marked by severe hardship. Within two years her father dies and the communists take control of Poland.

As her adult life unfolds, we see the results of the trauma that she endured as a child. Although she studied art and costume design at the prestigious Academy of the Arts and became a successful costume and set designer, she continued to confront her frightful memories and her adult life is characterized by anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse and the inability to maintain lasting relationships.

Finally, at the age of 55, on March 2, 1994, Roma reluctantly attended the première of Steven Spielberg’s epic movie “Schindler’s List” in Kraków. The Academy Award-winning movie was shot entirely in black and white except for the image of a little girl in a red coat. Seeing something of herself in that little girl, Roma, who had had a bright red coat of her own as a wee child, finally felt inspired and strong enough to tell the story of her own experiences.

Interestingly, although I suspected it early on, until late in the book, Ligocka doesn’t reveal the fact that her cousin, Roman, with whom she had a close relationship, was none other than the famous director, producer, writer and actor, Roman Polanski.

Book of the month – July 2025

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I haven’t been reading as much as usual this summer. In fact, I only completed one book in the entire month of June! That would help explain why I haven’t written a book of the month post for awhile, but it’s time for that to change. Maybe I need to add reading to my daily to-do list!

The Indigo Girl

Natasha Boyd

If I didn’t know that this novel was was a well-researched, but fictionalized retelling of a true story I would have thought it a bit far-fetched. A father giving his 16-year-old daughter control of three family plantations in South Carolina while he leaves the country to secure his political position on the Caribbean island of Antigua would be remarkable at any time, but this was 1738! At a time when the role of women was purely domestic, intelligent and headstrong Eliza Lucas was determined to find a cash crop to pull the plantations out of debt, pay for their upkeep, and support her family.

Upon learning how much the French were willing to pay for indigo dye, Eliza was convinced that it could be the key to resolving the family’s financial woes. Thwarted at every turn, even by her own mother, she refuses to give up. After three years of persistence and many failed attempts, she proves that indigo could indeed be successfully grown and processed in South Carolina.

A woman before her time, Eliza Lucas dares to choose her own path, to choose whether or not to marry, and to prove herself as competent as the men who try to intimidate her. Although she couldn’t have accomplished what she did without the help of the plantation slaves, she struggles with the concept of owning people and unlike many slave owners of her time, she seeks to treat her people well. She has improvements made to their living quarters and, with the help of a lawyer friend, cleverly circumvents the law forbidding masters to teach their slaves to write. She sets up a small school to teach the children to read and also teaches one of the men who has been with her family for many years.

This is a story of friendship, intrigue, ambition, sacrifice, betrayal, and for those who like romance, there’s some of that too. Excerpts of actual letters written by Eliza Lucas are interspersed throughout the book.

Book of the month – April 2025

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I often pick up books to read at the local thrift stores, so they’re not always recent releases. The book I’ve chosen for this month’s review was published in 2015.

The Hummingbird

Stephen P. Kiernan

This book is really three stories in one, each distinct, but all connected. Deborah Birch is a seasoned hospice nurse assigned to care for an embittered and lonely history professor whose career ended in academic scandal. As his life slowly ebbs away, the professor, an expert in the Pacific Theater of World War II, begrudgingly puts his trust in Deborah and begins to share with her an unpublished book that he wrote. As she reads to him from his story about a Japanese fighter pilot who dropped bombs on the coastline of Oregon, he challenges her to decide if it is true or not.

The chapters that Deborah reads to the professor alternate with chapters of the primary story. At first I found that disconcerting. I even wondered if it would be okay to skip those, but I’m very thankful that I didn’t as they are an essential part of the story. Like Deborah, I was soon drawn into the substory and wanted to know if it was factual. I even found myself searching the internet to find out!

At home, Deborah’s husband, Michael, has recently returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq. Suffering from PTSD and haunted by the faces of those he had to kill, he is a changed man. While gently helping the old professor die, Deborah also struggles to help her husband heal and to restore the loving marriage that they once had. It is through the professor’s book that she begins to understand Michael and how to help him conquer his demons.

The author does a masterful job of intertwining the three stories and tying them together. The Hummingbird is a powerful, thought-provoking book that deals very sensitively with human frailty, dignity in dying, the effects of war, and the healing power of love. Ultimately, it is a deeply moving story of forgiveness and redemption.

Often, when I finish reading a second-hand book, I return it to the thrift store for someone else to buy, but this one’s definitely a keeper!