Driving with her Dad to visit Aunt May is his idea of how to help Tina out of a depression that's lasted months. But the highway is boring, the weather is hot, and she's seen enough rocks and sticks for a lifetime. Tina is so preoccupied with her thoughts and memories that she hardly sees the world changing around her. When Tina and her Dad stop in a small town that hasn't changed much since 1918, it's a chance for her thoughts and memories to shuffle into an order that might make a little more sense. As Tina says, Local stories. There could be a lot of them, especially if you didn't need them to be about guns and crimes but maybe about sports or inventing things. Or just ordinary life but as if it counted.
New from Doublejoy Books is the short novel Plum Tree, a story of transition from place to place and time to time. There's no fanfare or surprise when Tina meets young Tim, who lost his mother to the Spanish flu. As she shifts from childhood to youth, from present to past and future, she's thinking of how to connect her music with people.
"I enjoyed Plum Tree. I was reminded a little of Ann Walsh's books for young people -- do you know them? My kids loved Your Time, My Time, maybe because of family trips to Barkerville and the sense of time's layers on its quiet streets."
- Theresa Kishkan, author of Blue Portugal and Euclid's Orchard
Paula Johanson is a Canadian writer. A graduate of the University of Victoria, she has worked as a security guard, a short order cook, a teacher, newspaper writer, and more. As well as editing books and teaching materials, she has run an organic-method small farm with her spouse, raised gifted twins, and cleaned university dormitories. In addition to novels and stories, she is the author of forty-two books written for educational publishers, among them The Paleolithic Revolution and Women Writers from the series Defying Convention: Women Who Changed The World. Johanson is an active member of SF Canada, the national association of science fiction and fantasy authors.
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