We have received quite a few new books this week, but we are especially excited about two titles with local connections: Children of the Kootenays: Memories of Mining Towns by Shirley (Hall) Stainton, who spent her early years moving around the Slocan Valley, and A West Coast Summer – a beautiful children’s book by former New Denver resident Caroline Woodward, author of The Village of Many Hats.
From the publisher of Children of the Kootenays: “When young Shirley Doris Hall and her family moved to BC’s West Kootenay region in 1927, the area was a hub of mining activity. Shirley’s father, a cook, had no problem finding work at the mining camps, and the family dutifully followed him from town to town as his services were sought after. For Shirley and her brother, Ray—described as both her confidant and her nemesis—mining camps were the backdrop of their youth. The instant close-knit communities that formed around them; the freedom of barely tamed wilderness; and the struggles of the Depression years and the war that followed created an unlikely environment for a happy childhood. Yet Shirley’s memories reveal that it was indeed a magical time and place in which to grow up. Children of the Kootenays paints a lively portrait of this forgotten period in BC history—of mining towns that are now ghost towns—told from the unique perspective of a young girl.”
From the publisher of A West Coast Summer: “Pairing two dozen of Carol Evans’s wonderful watercolours with a lilting rhyming story by Caroline Woodward, A West Coast Summer tells of a timeless, idyllic season where ‘Sea salt in the air floats everywhere / and cedars smell so sweet beside the shore.’ Children race bikes along sand flats, search under logs and in tide pools for tiny creatures, jig at the dock for herring, dance at a totem raising ceremony, pick berries, make memories and leave footprints in the sand.”
