Ramping up (or trying to) my #CanLit reading for the #ShadowGiller project. It‘s coming up quickly!
Ramping up (or trying to) my #CanLit reading for the #ShadowGiller project. It‘s coming up quickly!
The backstory of historic school trains in northern Ontario, plus the situation of having a dependent adult daughter, helped me have patience during the convoluted early structure in this touching story about an old woman‘s preparations for her imminent death. Gladys is so determined in her course of action she “could paddle with a twig.” Colourful expressions like this are smoothly translated by Rhonda Mullins. #CanadianAuthor
They are the children of the school train, charmed children from a charmed time, friends from her childhood, the happiest days of her life. In the interviews they granted me, you can see where Gladys‘s irrepressible optimism comes from, how she got along with life despite the setbacks, her refusal to hold a grudge against it. “When you have known happiness, it‘s impossible to believe that it‘s no longer possible.”
It was in googling the word swastika that he discovered there existed, lost in the great Canadian expanse, a place that had ‘the impudence—the heedlessness—the arrogance‘ to go by such a name and, even more impudent-heedless-arrogant, to fight to keep it. The battle of the Swastikans was reported in detail on Google, along with their battle cry: To hell with Hitler; it was our name first.