Mahtab and I have been friends since the early 2000s when she joined my online critique group. I was over the moon when her first novel, The Third Eye, won the Silver Birch award in 2009! Since then, she’s never looked back, writing one fantastic novel after another. I hadn’t seen her in person for more than a decade because she moved to the west coast, so it was such a wonderful treat to celebrate Canadian Children’s Book Week not far from Mahtab’s home! She invited me to dinner on Thursday evening as I was traveling from Pemberton back to North Vancouver. She cooked up a feast and it was like no time had passed at all! I’m already missing her!
