Hard to Pick a Favorite

Once a year, I like to review for you a few of the books I’ve read in the past twelve months. Looking through my list of 47 for 2022, I see that nearly half were either for writing contests I was asked to judge or for research for my own (a few on war brides and several on the 1917 Halifax explosion). Of the remainder, I’ve chosen three to tell you about—all fiction. I’ll save my nonfiction favorites for another column.

Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan, may not appeal to you much if you’re not already a fan of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. If you are, you don’t want to miss it. In this clever story set in 1950, Margaret Devonshire (Megs) is a seventeen-year-old math student at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother, George, asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s simply a story for children. Homebound due to his illness, George remains fixated on his favorite books. He presses Megs to ask the author of the recently released novel, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” a question: “Where did Narnia come from?”

Despite her fear of approaching the famous author (a professor at her school), Megs soon finds herself taking tea with C.S. Lewis and his brother Warnie, begging them for answers.

Rather than directly telling her where Narnia came from, Lewis encourages Megs to form her own conclusion as he gradually tells her the little-known stories from his life that led to his inspiration. As she takes these stories home to George, the boy travels farther in his imagination than he ever could in real life.

Lewis’s answers reveal to Megs and her family many truths that science and math cannot. The gift she thought she was giving her brother—the story behind Narnia—turns out to be his gift to her instead—hope.

Until Leaves Fall in Paris by Sarah Sundin is only one of her many faith-based WWII stories, but readers are praising it as her best yet. I agree. When the Nazis march toward Paris, American ballerina Lucie Girard buys her favorite English-language bookstore to allow the Jewish owners to escape. Though the Nazis make it difficult for her to keep Green Leaf Books afloat, she must if she is to continue aiding the resistance by passing secret messages between the pages of her books.

Meanwhile, widower Paul Aubrey wants nothing more than to return to America with his little girl, but the US Army convinces him to keep his factory running and obtain military information from his German customers. As the war rages on, Paul offers his own resistance by sabotaging his product and hiding British airmen in his factory. But to carry out his mission, he must appear to support the occupation—which does not win him any sympathy when he meets Lucie in the bookstore. I loved how the action builds, the details resolve, and the characters grow.


The German Wife by Kelly Rimmer made my list over some other great books because of the way it portrays both sides of the story so completely. In a manner becoming increasingly popular in books and movies, this story jumps back and forth in time, which fascinates me both as a reader and a writer. 

Despite the title, the book is equally about a German woman and an American woman, following two very different lives. Sofie marries a German rocket scientist during World War II. Lizzie, who lived in the Texas panhandle during the dust bowl of the 1930s, marries an American rocket scientist. The two women unpleasantly collide in Huntsville, Alabama in the 1950s when their husbands work together for NASA. The power is all in the backstory.

Three great stories for your winter reading pleasure. Let me know what you think of them!

Another Canadian Hero

On October 19, 1920, Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen was born on a farm in the Russian Ukraine. While Ike was still an infant, his father died, leaving his mother to run the farm in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. Mrs. Friesen sold the family farm and fled to Manitoba. Ike attended a four-room school where he completed grade eight before becoming a farm laborer to help support his mother. He briefly tried working on a sugar beet farm, but joining the armed forces seemed a better option.

He took basic training as a member of the Eighteenth Manitoba Reconnaissance Regiment at Shilo and was later recruited by the Winnipeg Grenadiers.

When Prime Minister Churchill requested that Canadian troops be sent to defend the British colony of Hong Kong, Ike and other members of ‘C’ Force from the east traveled across Canada by CPR troop train, arriving in Vancouver on October 27, 1941. From there, he sailed on the New Zealand Liner, the AWATEA. After brief stops in Honolulu and Manila, they arrived in Hong Kong on November 16. On arrival, all troops were quartered at Nanking Barracks, Sham Shui Po Camp, in Kowloon.

Many of the soldiers reported that their first three weeks felt like a holiday, except for practice drills in readiness for a Japanese attack. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the Battle of Hong Kong commenced. Ike and the others found themselves thrust into a conflict for which they were ill prepared. On Christmas Day, the Allies surrendered. The Japanese Imperial Army took captive the surviving Canadian soldiers. Ike ended up back at the now decimated Sham Shui Po camp and was later transferred to another POW camp in Japan.

In an interview with Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) years later, Ike described some of his experiences.

“If you didn’t want to do what they wanted you to do, they’d make you stand to attention and beat you up and give you a rifle butt in the side of the face or right in the middle of your face at the front. I got my teeth knocked out here with a rifle butt.

“I picked up the language quite well. I could communicate with them by this time. One day they picked on me for some reason and I kind of resented that and let them know. The guy marched me in front of a big boulder … and he bat me in the face with his fist. And then every time I would jar back or get off balance and step back, two other guards would push me toward the rock again. And if I didn’t move, I’d feel the bayonet in my back. So I got beat up pretty bad that day. The guys had to help me back into camp.”

After four years under such conditions, Isaac Friesen joined the ranks of survivors who returned to Canada. He passed away at the age of 80 in 2001. His niece, Anita Gemmell, is a friend of mine. I “stumbled across” Isaac’s story one Remembrance Day when Anita posted a tribute to her Uncle Ike’s memory. I happened to be in search of stories like his for a book I was writing. I’m pleased to tell you that novel, Rose Among Thornes, releases later this summer and is now available for pre-ordering in print and eBook form, from almost anywhere you order books. 

The Battle of Hong Kong monument in Ottawa

A Little Good News Today

Everybody needs a little good news. I’d love to tell you the pandemic is over or that our city is having a crime-free year or that cancer has been eradicated. Can’t say any of that and you wouldn’t believe me if I tried.

I do have a morsel of good news, though.

You may recall reading about my journey with a novel I titled Rose Among Thornes. In it, a young Japanese Canadian girl named Rose is relocated from her home in Vancouver to a Manitoba sugar beet farm during World War II. It’s also the story of Private Russell Thorne, a Canadian soldier who spends most of the war in a Japanese P.O.W. camp, wishing more than anything that he was still on his family’s sugar beet farm back in Manitoba.

In a blog post a year ago, I told about how I fought writing this book, believing it wasn’t my story to tell. How the idea wouldn’t let me go. How God showed me that it was mine to write, though it meant more research and study than I’d ever tackled. How I finally completed the 100,000-word manuscript, not knowing whether it would ever be picked up by a publisher.

Backtrack a bit further to spring of 2019. My agent encouraged me to participate in something called a Twitter Pitch. I hate Twitter. I can’t make sense of it and rarely use it. But I had three different stories to pitch, one of them Rose Among Thornes. I wrote four different pitches for each book (12 in all, each limited to 280 characters) and added appropriate hashtags. Then, as the rules allowed, I tweeted these pitches, scattering them throughout the twelve-hour window of opportunity. Here’s how it works: if any editors are interested in seeing more, they “like” your pitch, which is an invitation to send them more information about your book.

I didn’t get one “like.” Not one. I thought I must be messing up with the technology, but when I tweeted a question, one of the organizers confirmed I’d done it correctly. So much for Twitter pitches. I chalked it up to a dreadful waste of a day.

In reality, I guess it was a case of right place, wrong time.

When a whole year went by and my agent still hadn’t found a home for any of these novels, I initially ignored the Twitter pitch when it came around again this past June. Why waste my time? But for some reason, I changed my mind—with stipulations. I would pitch ONLY Rose Among Thornes, and I would use the exact pitches I’d used the previous year. I didn’t want to waste a minute reworking them, and I didn’t know how to improve them in any case.

I anticipated zero responses because, as we all know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting different results.

I may need to redefine insanity.

By the end of the day, five editors had “liked” my rerun pitches.

By the next day, two had asked to see the full manuscript.

By the following week, I was offered a contract.

And so, my good news is, Rose Among Thornes is set to release from Iron Stream Media next summer. I’m more excited to see this book in readers’ hands than anything I’ve written.

The lesson here? God’s timing. There’s no earthly explanation for why my same old Twitter pitches should have generated interest in the midst of a pandemic when they had not done so in 2019, except for one truth. It’s wrapped up in Habakkuk 2:3. “But these things I plan won’t happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely, the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled. If it seems slow, do not despair, for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient! They will not be overdue a single day!” (The Message)

I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but take heart. You can trust God’s timing. He’s never late. He knows best. He’s on your side.

Take it from my little bit of good news.