Richard, one of the participants in John Mutford's Canadian Book Challenges, has touted this author. I'm game. I tried and tried to find one of her books at my local booksellers and at bookstores further afield on my summer road trip through the US and western Canada. No luck!

So today I just happened to spend a few minutes perusing the used books at the Millennium Library sale. The sale has been on since June 2 and I've been there umpteen times. Gasp! Look what I found!

Never mind that it's September, this story has come in on a summer breeze and tickled my senses.

---to be continued---

I have two criticisms of this book, so let's just get them out of the way. First, I did not care for the conversations between Margaret and her maternal grandmother. They came across as forced, simplistic and trite. At first I was prepared to overlook this given that Anne would be creating these conversations herself. I gave her all kinds of excuses/reasons as to why she might have deliberately kept them simple and text book clean, but ultimately I would have preferred them to be more lively and colloquial.

I also did not care for the author's/Anne's habit of intruding into Margaret's story in "real time". I'm okay with her remembering or creating the past. She just can't be there.

But those criticisms aside this was a lovely and sensuous read. I almost wish I had been born in the Nicola Valley area so that it would be a true homecoming for me. I didn't already know what the bunch grass was like at Nicola Lake, what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like. Or the sunlight. Or the moths. Or the birds. Or flowers and trees. Or the cattle and horses. Or the water. Not truly. The author's descriptions were so exquisite. If I had known these things, been born into them, I'm sure I would have been transported there. And I was, almost. But not quite there.

Instead I remembered the softness of my own buckskin jacket passed down to me by my mother from her mother, the press of sharp stones on the soles of my feet on my own dusty gravel road and chilling cold of dew wet grass on the morning dash to the outhouse, the sun-warmed sand on the afternoon's beach, the buzzing of bees, the wail of the loon and the seagulls' ruckus, the frogs' chorus, and the flutter of poplar and the whish of spruce in the breeze and always, always, the scent of pine and sumac and milkweed and clover and bulrush and lilypad and moss and fish and fishflies and granite that welcomes me home, wherever I am.

Thank you, Theresa Kishkan. And thanks, Richard for the introduction.

This is my eight book by a Canadian woman and twelfth overall for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge, Eh?

Connections. How interesting they are, those that we have by birth and those that we form for ourselves. What possible connection would a 54 year-old Canadian woman have with a 19 year-old Belgian woman whom she has never met? Well none really. Except that there I was on September 29, 2008 wandering into the Dutch forum on the BookCrossing site, quite by chance, not knowing a single Dutch word. And it was there that I "met" Yellow-star, the aforementioned young woman, who, I learned, is very ill. Thankfully the Dutch BookCrossers know more English than I know Dutch and were warm and gracious to this interloper in their world and they told me of her. Now to be truthful I did not meet Yellow-star in person so as to talk to her, virtually or otherwise. But I met her in all the yellow stars the Dutch BookCrossers had chosen to wear as their "wings" and in all the books they had released in Yellow-star's honour.

So I release this book for you, Yellow-Star on the Canadian prairie. It is a fitting book I think. It is the story of a modern day museum curator in central British Columbia who finds a box of mementos saved by a young woman, Margaret Stuart, who lived in the area one hundred years ago. As the curator sorts through the letters and photographs and other treasures belonging to the other woman and walks over the same country side and breathes in the same scented air she reconstructs Margaret's life.

Although I have never been to the Nicola Valley in Central British Columbia, the author connects me to it with her vivid and sensual descriptions of that place. I am connected through my own sensory experience of the place that I know best, the place of my birth in Northwestern Ontario.

Between B.C and Ontario lie hundreds of miles of prairie with its windblown grasses and open skies. And there is, as it happens, a variety of grass that grows on the prairie known as yellow star grass. So it is among the prairie grasses that I will release this book. And, while it is October now and I don't know if yellow star grass blooms in October, I am confident that it will in the spring.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I plan to leave this book on one of the nature paths. Perhaps I'll be so lucky as to find some yellow star grass blooming.

Edited to add:

I did! While I'm not sure whether the flowers I found blooming were yellow star grass (the interpretive centre itself was closed, so I took the self-guided prairie path) but I left the book somewhere between trail markers 4 and 6, in a clump of yellow star shaped flowers (much like the ones in journal entry 4).

It was a beautiful sunny day and I walked the entire length of the trail (and some little offshoots too). When they say tall grass prairie, they really mean it. Some of the grasses were taller than me. Little birds were flitting along the path keeping just ahead of me and there were lots of chirping insects and even some butterflies. I had an absolutely lovely afternoon (playing hookie from work). :)

This book is released for Yellow-star in Belgium.

I hope whoever finds it enjoys it as much as I did.