Fiction / Romance / Historical / 20th Century > Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows
Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows
By Sylvia Barnard
Where to buy
Publish Date
August 06, 2021
Category
Fiction / Romance / Time Travel
Fiction / Historical
Price
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Hurtling up Highway 69 toward Sudbury in her VW bug, Kate Dumont Walker decides she's going to keep her baby. After all, it's the 1980s. That is, until she is unexpectedly plunged 100 years into the past, without her Amelia, to the early days of her Northern Ontario community. Unable to return to her own time, she eventually learns to stop living as a visitor and settles into life with Claude, the devoted single father who lives in a log cabin that stands on the same property as her present-day family home. And yet, she is caught between two times and the fear she will lose everything again if she is drawn back to the future.
Still knowledge of another tragedy consumes her--the Spanish River Train Disaster of 1910. Just a few miles from Nairn Centre, the train jumped its tracks, telescoped in the middle of the bridge, and sent the second and third cars over the edge and through the ice like a bullet. Almost all of the passengers were lost. Was it the screeching of the train she heard ringing in her ears as she travelled back in time?
Puzzled by the connection between her family and the devastating derailment, she tries to shift the proposed Trans-Canada Railway route west of Sudbury. Will she be able to change history to prevent the tragedy, and at the same time save her family?
In retirement, after a forty year career helping students achieve their aspirations through learning at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, I’ve rekindled my love of storytelling. I'm a recent graduate of the Humber College Creative Writing Post Graduate Certificate and sit on the Canadian Authors Association Board.
Rhubarb, Strawberries and Willows is my debut novel, an historical fiction with time travel, romance and science fiction set at the property on the Spanish River where I lived in Northern Ontario, while I wrote the book.
These days, I live with my husband under a canopy of maples, on a small lake near Penetanguishene, Ontario where I snowshoe, kayak and take long hikes with my dogs when I’m not writing.