Award winning author, columnist, and blogger; editor of the Hot Apple Cider Books; teacher and encourager

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Category Archives for Book Reviews

How I Discovered I Have Curly Hair

If you missed part one of this blog “My Hair Has a Mind of Its Own,” go here. Some days, I look back and wonder how I could have been so obtuse. I mean, as you can see by my picture when I was three, my hair was trying really hard to be curly. And yet, […]

Am I Weird? A Children’s Book Made Me Feel Better About Being Me

For most of my life, I’ve thought I was kind of weird. Or maybe that there was something wrong with me. Perhaps the easiest way to explain is to tell you how I write my short stories and novels. People are always talking about how to make fictional characters seem real. And there are lists […]

The Wisdom of Madeline L’Engle

According to some people on Facebook, this is National Book Week. All over my feed, people are picking up the closest book and posting the 5th sentence from page 56. Which, for me, is “All light was gone.” However, I’m going to do a little more than that here. For the last eight or so months, […]

Gone to an Aunt’s: Remembering Canada’s Homes for Unwed Mothers – Part 3

Click here if you haven’t read Part 1 or Part 2 At some point, the unwed mothers of Canada’s Baby Boom (1945 to the early 1970s) went to a local hospital to deliver their babies. Going to the Hospital Most of the women Anne Petrie interviewed, including some young girls, had no idea what was […]

Gone to an Aunt’s: Remembering Canada’s Homes for Unwed Mothers – Part 2

If you haven’t read Part 1, please click here. Thirty years after she was a resident at a home for unwed mothers, Anne Petrie interviewed a number of other women from across Canada. In addition to telling her own story, Anne profiles six other birth mothers in detail and also mentions comments from other interviews […]

Gone to an Aunt’s: Remembering Canada’s Homes for Unwed Mothers – Part 1

A couple of years ago, I had a character in one of the novels “go to her aunt’s” when she was young. I’d heard the phrase somewhere along the way and remembered it was a common cover story for young, unmarried women who were pregnant. In my novel, the woman is old, and she’d “gone […]

The Girls Who Went Away, part 2 – the effects of adoption on baby boomer birth mothers

If you haven’t read part 1 of this post, click here. 6. In the years from 1945 to 1973, closed adoption was virtually a given for most unwed young women. Prior to 1945, illegitimate children were usually given to a family member or someone the family knew—either to be raised as their own, or until […]

The Girls Who Went Away: Part 1 – the treatment of unwed mothers during the baby boom

When I was four years old, my mother told me I was adopted. I said something along the lines of “Okay.” And that was, essentially, that. Forty-four years later, I met my birth mother. But even after meeting her, I really didn’t think much about it. I wasn’t angry or upset that I’d been adopted. […]

A Birthmother Remembers – My Review of the Book, The House of the Broken Two

After deciding I wanted to learn more about what it was like for a woman in Canada’s prairies to be an unwed mother in the late 1940s to the late 1960s, I was pleased to discover our local library had a book written by a woman who grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1968, I […]

The Need We All Have to Grieve During Sad Times

While researching the effects of adoption during the late 1940s, 50s, and 60, I kept reading that many of the young women who had given up their babies were never able to fully grieve their losses. Some, in fact, had managed to keep their pregnancy a secret from everyone in their lives, including their spouse and […]

Surprised by Oxford Certainly Surprised Me

I first posted this review in August of 2013 after picking up the book at the Write! Canada conference. This year, I was present at The Word Awards on June 11th where author Carolyn Weber won the $5,000 Grace Irwin Award for the best book published in 2013 from a Canadian writer who is Christian. […]

My Review of R. A. Dickey’s book, Wherever I Wind Up

Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball, by R. A. Dickey, with Wayne Coffey. We’ve all had painful experiences in our past. Some more painful than others. Many of us are able to deal with those experiences and keep going. But some of us either try to pretend the […]

Review of the book, Off the Map

If you’ve ever watched in frustration wondering why on earth someone in an abusive relationship didn’t get out at the first sign of trouble, I have a book you need to read. The title is Off the Map: Follow Me Out of Domestic Abuse. Jacquie Brown, the woman who wrote the book, says she was […]