When I first peeked into the Jalna books, I discovered that Mazo de la Roche's biographers depended heavily upon Ringing the Changes, her autobiography, which I was pleased to find in the library. It's that kind of old book whose pages have been turned so often that they are softer
The table of contents is simple but thrilling for me, the book's five chapters all themes and topics of great interest: Books and Islands, Islands, Rock Paintings, Books, and Home. If the other titles in the series (from National Geographic) are even half of what this volume appears to be,
In 1944, Mazo de la Roche published The Building of Jalna, nearly twenty years after she began to work with the Whiteoak family on the page. The beginning grew out of the middle, you might say. Jalna was actually written first, begun in 1925 and published in 1927: the fifth
The snow has melted from all but the most sheltered parts of the yards and the temperature has hovered above zero for so long that any fresh flakes that fall do not accumulate on the ground. The earth has warmed, the daylight lingers well past five o'clock, and sometimes it smells
For years, vaguely since I collected The Bingo Palace with a university course in mind (but there was never enough time to read all the books I planned to read for papers) and intensely since falling in love with The Last Miracle at Little No Horse, I've wanted to go
