Three Rivers

Sometimes people leave their home with the hopes of finding something better. Sometimes they are forced out and chased away. Philip Eamer and his wife, Catrina, experience both in this true story of immigrants searching for a place to call home. The Eamer family’s story begins in 1755 as they leave the Rhine Valley for a better life in America. Once there, they move to the Mohawk River Valley in New York, where they build a home and raise 10 children. Despite the effects of the French Indian War, the Eamers flourish and happily find their lives intertwined with their neighbours and fellow immigrants for almost two decades. However, no family’s story occurs in isolation, and eventually the Eamers find themselves at the mercy of the political and historic events of the American Revolution. Choosing to side with the Crown, they are forced to flee their home at the hands of neighbours and soldiers. What follows next is representative of many Loyalists’ experiences. The Eamer family is forced to make a 370-km (230-mile) trek to Montreal, where they must live in a refugee camp for three years before finally being granted their own land in the St. Lawrence Valley for their loyalty to the King. Told by one of Philip and Catrina’s descendants, Three River Valleys Called Home is historical fiction based on a real family and true events. Although some of the interactions and dialogue may be imagined, they are firmly planted in the harsh realities that many immigrants faced and pay tribute to the true grit of the settlers who built North America. While this book will have special meaning for the thousands of descendants of the Eamer family (and the other families who made up their community), their story will touch anyone with a history of immigration in their family tree.

Sixteen-Year-Old Celstia spends every summer with her family at the elite resort at Lake Conemaugh, a shimmering Allegheny Mountain reservoir held in place by an earthen dam. Tired of the society crowd, Celestia prefers to swim and fish with Peter, the hotel’s hired boy. It’s a friendship she must keep secret, and when companionship turns to romance, it’s a love that could get Celestia disowned. These affairs of the heart become all the more wrenching on a single, tragic day in May, 1889. After days of heavy rain, the dam fails, unleashing 20 million tons of water onto Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the valley below. The town where Peter lives with his father. The town where Celestia has just arrived to join him. This searing novel in poems explores a cross-class romance—and a tragic event in U. S. history.

Melody Mahaffey, trapped into touring for years with a third-rate Christian pop band she can hardly stand, is almost relieved to receive her mother's distress call. But when she returns home to care for her dying father and brain-damaged brother at the sprawling, defunct Three Rivers Farm, Melody is shocked to discover that her mother has abandoned the family. Sure that her daughter will do the right thing, Geneva has left to seek spiritual guidance and break things off with her long-time lover. Rain begins to fall and an epic flood threatens the Mississippi Delta. While Melody tries to get a handle on the chaos at home, a man and his little boy are squatting on her land, escaping their own nightmare. Obi is on the run from a horrific mistake, and he's intent on keeping his son with him at any cost. When the storm arrives, though, they have no choice but to take shelter in Melody's house. And the waters just keep rising. A lifetime of lies, misunderstandings and dark secrets bubble to the surface as the flood destroys the land and threatens their lives. Set against the fertile but dangerous landscape of the rural south near the fictional town of White Forest, Mississippi, Three Rivers beautifully weaves together three parallel stories, told over three days, as each character is propelled headlong into the storm.

Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Three Rivers: The Yukon's Great Boreal Wilderness is a gorgeous coffee-table book about a wilderness area so vast and so crucial to planetary survival it defies comprehension. Previously unknown to the outside world, the Yukon's Three Rivers watershed is emerging as an environmental issue of global importance--a key piece of the boreal region. The boreal forest is like a green banner draped around the northern hemisphere. It is the world's largest expanse of intact forest, covering nearly 11 percent of our planet's surface. Every breath we take is in part a gift from this immense, earth-circling ecosystem. Now the renewed Mackenzie Valley pipeline proposal, the Alaska Pipeline and escalating energy and mineral exploration in the north all threaten this last world-scale refuge of natural values--and conservationists around the world are mobilizing to defend it. Three Rivers focuses on one of the most strategic undisturbed regions left in the world, an oceanic wilderness that is under threat from gas and mining development. Packed with awe-inspiring photography, art and writings by such notables as Courtney Milne, Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul, this sumptuous volume offers an unforgettable tour of a natural wonderland so rich in grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, peregrine falcons and wildflowers most will have difficulty believing such a place still exists. Three Rivers is a prize to be cherished by anyone who appreciates great photography, fine writing and untrammelled nature, and a must-have for anyone who takes an interest in the fate of our beleaguered but still awe-inspiring planet.

Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin.