Rhubarb Strawberries And Willows

Hurtling up Highway 69 toward Sudbury in her VW bug, Kate Dumont Walker decides she’s going to keep her baby. After all, it’s the 1980s. That is, until she is unexpectedly plunged 100 years into the past, without her Amelia, to the early days of her Northern Ontario community. Unable to return to her own time, she eventually learns to stop living as a visitor and settles into life with Claude, the devoted single father who lives in a log cabin that stands on the same property as her present-day family home. And yet, she is caught between two times and the fear she will lose everything again if she is drawn back to the future. Still knowledge of another tragedy consumes her––the Spanish River Train Disaster of 1910. Just a few miles from Nairn Centre, the train jumped its tracks, telescoped in the middle of the bridge, and sent the second and third cars over the edge and through the ice like a bullet. Almost all of the passengers were lost. Was it the screeching of the train she heard ringing in her ears as she travelled back in time? Puzzled by the connection between her family and the devastating derailment, she tries to shift the proposed Trans-Canada Railway route west of Sudbury. Will she be able to change history to prevent the tragedy, and at the same time save her family?

Caught between the pressure to be a good Canadian girl, her duty to her immigrant parents, and her own personal desires, Angelika Langer must learn to translate not just the three languages she speaks, but also her own inner voice. Her parents left Germany in the early 1950s for a new life after the war, settling first in Quebec then moving to northern Ontario when Angelika is eleven. She struggles to fit in—not Canadian enough for either her French- or English-speaking classmates, not German enough for her family who stayed behind. Seeming to never quite measure up to the expectations of her demanding mother, Angelika exists in a lonely place between worlds, vulnerable and uncertain of her future. Even her passion and talent for competitive skiing becomes unsafe when her coach turns predatory, and her friends and family turn their backs. Tender, beautiful, and unflinching, A Hyphenated Life is an expertly woven story of coming of age in the sometimes-oppressive shadow of complicated ancestors.