Kirjahaku

The Margo Chronicles is a playful romp through the first year of retirement for Margo and Michael, suburbanites who have unwittingly dropped themselves into a tiny, rural community in British Columbia. Their dream of escaping the city to pursue a simpler way of life in the country meets the reality of living in Wannatoka Springs, a remote community in the Kootenays.CJ has created a delightfully quirky cast of characters seen through the eyes of Margo, a newly retired teacher who finds her identity and her assumptions about retirement challenged at every turn. Tales of unlikely interactions with neighbours and unforeseen predicaments keep the reader chuckling at how this conventional couple handles the curve balls that come their way. Wannatoka Springs is a fictitious village in the Kootenays, but bears a distinct resemblance to the tiny, rural community in the Kootenays where the author and her partner retired. The adventures are based on the author's embellishments of (nearly) true-life experiences.

In The Margo Chronicles Too CJ intertwines her sense of humour with her sense of neighbourhood in a collection of stories that start out with very ordinary situations and put Margo in unexpected predicaments. A year in to retirement living in Wannatoka Springs, Margo and Michael and their neighbours, Tina and Joel, have settled somewhat comfortably in a tiny community in the hinterland of British Columbia. But Margo feels that something is missing. She doesn't yet know where she fits in this community - which is home to a diverse cross-cut of characters and cultures, whose only commonality with Margo and Michael may be that they, too, have chosen to live there. In her quest to find her niche in the neighbourhood, Margo tries on various hats for size, from starting an entrepreneurial venture selling cinnamon buns (that starts a turf war), to engaging a neighbourhood watch to find a lost parrot, and in organizing a community beautification project with the goal of winning an iconic Kootenay village contest - only to discover that her neighbours have minds of their own about what's iconic. Or is it ironic? Come along and join the adventures, or some would say, misadventures