Cathedral of Stars: A Memoir of Home & Faith on the Moveby Gloria EngelPublished by YNWPReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 9781988783901 Cathedral of Stars: A Memoir of Home & Faith on the Move by SK-born Gloria Engel is utterly fascinating. The stories about her peripatetic life—and constant faith—as a linguist with Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics is indeed hard to put down. The intrepid author asks and adeptly answers this question: “How can you find a sense of belonging in home and church when you’re constantly on the move?” Much of this global zinger of a book takes place in Guatemala, and Engel paints a colourful portrait of the family’s authentic experiences there. Now in her eighties, the joy-filled wife, mother of four boys, linguist, writer and dancer (a verboten activity re: her strict Lutheran upbringing) experienced “forty-five changes of residence in five countries,” before settling in Biggar, SK. The anecdotes about her resourceful family and rural SK upbringing (no indoor plumbing; folks said her father “could hold machinery together with macaroni”) are compelling, but the Guatemalan accounts left me gasping. First came linguistics training at the University of North Dakota. Orientation sessions took place…

My Daughter’s Heartby Kim JaskenPublished by Your Nickle’s Worth PublishingReview by Michelle Shaw$24.95 ISBN 9781778690167 Spring of 2020 was a strange and frightening time for everyone. For the Jasken family, the uncertainty of the early days of the pandemic were exacerbated when their eleven-year-old daughter suddenly collapsed, and they discovered the cause was heart failure. Dealing with a desperately ill child in a world where everything has changed brings a new level of fear. Sierra was initially treated at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) but was soon transferred by plane to the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton for more specialized care. Kim Jasken’s account of their family’s experience is detailed and absorbing. Her sometimes wry descriptions allow you to live through the exultant highs as well as the moments of utter despair when it all seems too much. She describes each situation so clearly that you ride the emotional roller coaster with her. I related to the story on two levels. On the one hand it’s a harrowing story of a family’s health crisis. But it’s also a specific moment in time in Saskatoon. I could relate to the school closures, stocking up…

The School of the Haunted River by Colleen GerwingPublished by Endless Sky BooksReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.99 ISBN 9781989398869 What a surprise. It’s poetic, actually. During my Saskatoon years, each time I’d launch a book, an affable but unassuming woman I knew only by sight would attend and we’d make minimal small talk while she had her copy signed. I moved. Several years passed. I never thought of her again. Last week a newly-released autobiographical novel arrived in the mail. The School of the Haunted River concerns outdoorswoman Jay, who takes her college-aged niece, Dilly, on a two-week snowshoeing and camping trip in northern Saskatchewan. I flipped to the author bio and photo before beginning the novel, and there she was, Colleen Gerwing, the woman who’d attended all of my Saskatoon launches. I never even knew she was writing. And I certainly never knew she’d died in 2021; this sad fact made reading her fine stories-within-a-story even more bittersweet. In her “real” life, Gerwing, I learned, grew up on a farm near Lake Lenore, SK, and her love of adventure was evident from childhood. In 1977 she hitchhiked to the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming, and later worked for…