Kirjahaku

It was the dirty thirties when Hazel was dropped off at the door of an orphanage. She learned right then and there at the tender age of nine how to make lemonade from lemons. After suffering a serious burn at her workhouse as a teenager, she receives plastic surgery from one of Toronto's first plastic surgeons at East General Hospital. She goes on to discover her birth certificate that had been hidden away, and she accepts her First Nations status up at Manitoulin Island. Hazel G was a war-time bride with stars in her eyes. She moved into her first real home at Eldon Avenue, just off Danforth Avenue in 1946. The reader finds her a few years later, a widow with four hungry stomachs to feed. After burying two husbands, she reconnects with a Canadian Armed Forces colonel who brings an entirely new viewpoint into her life.

7 Russell Hill Road is a multi-generational story of humble beginnings in France, a camp in Germany after World War II, rural Jamaica, Vietnam, Sweden, USA, and an old farm north of Toronto, Canada. By 2007, through sheer circumstance, the individuals of the culturally and racially diverse Canadian family eventually find themselves living on a leafy street in an upscale neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. The central character, a Supreme Court justice, is hiding from life within the Canadian Witness Protection Program. He meets a single woman who has knocked around the world her whole life without attachments and who is quite unable to form them. Their crippling trust issues force them to choose the wrong fork in the road, time and time again.

49 Parkwood Avenue is the second book in the series of a Toronto, Canada, immigrant family saga. By 2008, the multi-generational members of this growing family still find themselves mired in the ups and downs of life in a complicated, diverse family structure.The central character, Nigella Hansson, is introduced to the reader as a baby born in 1975 to a single parent, who was a profoundly deaf woman who grew up in a Swedish orphanage. Armed with the experience of being brought up on welfare and many meals that came from the back door of restaurants at closing time, our protagonist earns a scholarship and graduates with a law degree. She finds her birth father at the age of thirty and embarks on a new life with a five-year-old daughter in tow. She turns her back on her law degree and decides to grab all life has to offer on her own terms, come hell or high water. Learn more at sandrabenns.com