writes about war from a young person's view #bannedbyrussia
The Dead Don’t Bleed by David Krugler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A rollicking enjoyable spy thriller set in Washington DC just as WWII ends. Lt. Voigt, a navel intelligence officer, goes undercover to solve the murder of one of his colleagues but soon stumbles upon something much bigger — a Soviet spy cell secreting bomb info from Los Alamos. Many unexpected twists and turns and some really great characters. A fun read.
Thank you Netgalley for providing the ARC.
Shared with Toronto’s Great War Attic.
As a child, curious by nature, Marsh Forchuk would often ask his father George why he had left good farm land in southern Alberta to move north to Lake Eliza, a harsh place to establish their family farm. When old friends would come by for a visit, they would suddenly speak in whispers. But years later, after hearing of a news story about Canada’s internment of enemy aliens during the First World War, Marsh began to get his answers.
At the encouragement of the Canadian government, George Forchuk, a Ukrainian farmer from Werechenko, Austria, arrived in 1913 to settle and farm in southern Alberta. When war started he registered as an “enemy alien” and reported regularly as required by the War Measures Act in 1914. Despite this, he was arrested and forced into hard labour, eventually ending up in an internment camp in Jasper Alberta, which opened in February 1916. He laboured through dire conditions and escaped as “bullets whizzed by his ears” that same year. He moved around, hiding and working where he could. In 1918, Forchuk was spotted by police through the window of a restaurant in Calgary.
At the time, people were required to wear face masks in public to prevent the spread of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic. George thought he was being arrested as an escaped internee, but to his relief, he was informed that it was because he had lowered his mask to speak more clearly to the other person at his table. He also found out that the internment camp had closed in August 1916, shortly after he had escaped.
His farm was not returned to him, and so he had no choice but to purchase land where he could. The repercussions of the war continued. By the 1940s, ill health made it impossible for George to farm. Marsh dropped out of school at the age of 12 to take over. Marsh did not want to be a farmer, eventually selling the land his father gave to him, and moving east to make his own way. George Forchuk’s pride in being a staunch Canadian made the shame of his internment all the more difficult to bear. Right up until his death in 1967, he spoke of the injustices suffered for crimes he did not commit.
Congratulations, Maurice Mierau, on your win! It was an honour to be a nominee.
Karen Bass has made a name for herself by writing well-researched and page-turning historical fiction from a post-WWII German teen’s point of view. What I love about her books is that she breathes life into bits of history that no one else is writing about and she does it with muscular aplomb and page-turning suspense.
The Hill is utterly different from anything Bass has written before. It’s a contemporary thriller about Jared, a rich spoiled teen whose plane crashes in remote northern Alberta, and Kyle, a Cree teen who witnesses the crash and comes to assist. The two protagonists are the same sex and age but that’s the sum of their similarities.
Jared survives the crash with just a concussion and his pilot is alive but injured. His cell phone has no service and he wants to get to the top of a nearby hill in order to light up a few bars on his phone. Kyle tells him that they cannot do that. It’s a forbidden place.
They go anyway.
There’s no cell service, and when they come back down, there’s no plane.
It turns out that by climbing the forbidden hill, the teens have slipped into a different dimension, and this alternate reality is a dangerous place populated with creatures from Cree legend. Now that they’ve slipped into this other dimension, how do they get out? Only by setting aside their differences can the boys puzzle that out and save themselves.
In less capable hands, the novel’s premise could be a disaster but Karen Bass anchors the fantasy element with such gritty, sore and smelly reality and such nail-biting terror that the reader has no choice but to be hooked.
I read this novel in a single long gulp because I could not put it down. And after I was finished, it stayed on my mind.
A phenomenal page-turner. Love the premise. Love the writing. Don’t read this book in bed.
What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound challenge the conventions of genre – memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, essay – and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant creative writing by some of Canada’s best-known Ukrainian Canadian authors.
To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.
The Best Gifts is the story of Sara and the important moments in her life. It starts with her birth and concludes when she welcomes her own baby. On each occasion, friends and family bring gifts to celebrate. In the end, though, the most cherished gifts are the ones that cannot be purchased. The first cherished gift Sara receives is her mother’s milk and the story comes full circle when she gives that same gift to her own baby.
Originally published in 1998, The Best Gifts has been fully revised, with all-new illustrations and updated breastfeeding resource information.
The Best Gifts has been a cherished baby book for fifteen years. This fully revised new edition with breathtakingly beautiful illustrations by Elly MacKay is sure to be cherished for generations to come.
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When Mama Goes to Work follows several children and their working mothers as they move through their day. From morning to night, through the daily activities of work and play, children and parents keep each other in their thoughts even when they are apart.
Both children and parents will relate to the routine of work and play in When Mama Goes to Work. Secure in the knowledge that their mothers will return at the end of the day, confident children enjoy themselves and concentrate on learning and play while looking forward to being reunited with their mothers, when they will discuss their day, help with dinner, and other evening routines.
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