New Year, New Contest, Enter to win
First prize: your choice of one print book and two ebooks from any of our BWL Authors
Second prize: your choice of one print book and one ebook from any of our BWL Authors
Third prize: your choice of three ebooks from any of our BWL Authors. Visit http://bookswelove.net and scroll down the page for the entry form.
Have you read the Canadian Historical Brides series. These books tell Canadian history in every province from the perspective of the women who joined their husbands to form the foundation of Canada, a free and democratic society open and welcoming to people of all races and beliefs. A multi-cultural society that now flourishes because of the strength and determination of the women whose stories are told in these books; one for every province and territory in Canada.
CANADIAN HISTORICAL BRIDES
To purchase any of these books from your favorite bookstore, visit the BWL website and click the book covers.
http://bookswelove.net/canadian-historical-brides/
January 2017 – Brides of Banff Springs (Alberta) Author Victoria Chatham
In
the Dirty Thirties jobs were hard to come by. Having lost her father
and her home in southern Alberta, Tilly McCormack is thrilled when her
application for a position as a chambermaid at the prestigious Banff
Springs Hotel, one of Canada’s great railway hotels, is accepted. Tilly
loves her new life in the Rocky Mountain town and the people she meets
there. Local trail guide Ryan Blake it quite taken with Tilly’s
sparkling blue eyes and mischievous sense of humor. His work with a
guiding and outfitting company keeps him busy but he makes time for
Tilly at every opportunity and he intends to make her his bride. On the
night he plans to propose to Tilly another bride-to-be, whose wedding
is being held at the Hotel, disappears.
Tilly
has an idea where she might have gone and together with Ryan sets out
to search for her. Will they find the missing bride and will Tilly
accept Ryan’s proposal?
March 2017 – His Brothers Bride (Ontario) Author Nancy M. Bell
The
youngest child of the local doctor and evangelical preacher, Annie
Baldwin was expected to work hard and not protest. Life on a pioneer
farm was tough so neighbors helped each other.
George
Richardson the underage Doctor Bernardo Boy, orphaned and shipped to
Canada a few years earlier, is loaned to the Baldwins to help bring in
the hay. Younger brother Peter Richardson was placed with another
neighbor, so the brothers stayed in touch with each other. The Great War
brought a lot of changes to life even in the back woods of Ontario. In
spite of the differences in their social standing, George and Annie fell
in love.
When
George departed for France they had an understanding and he promised to
return to her when the war was over. Alas, fate had other ideas. After a
long silence, Annie received the much anticipated letter. But it wasn’t
from George, but from his brother, Peter. Also in the trenches of
France. George was killed during the final push on August 8, 1918 at
Marcelcave near Amiens. The two who loved him form a long distance bond
via censored letters. When Peter is sent back to Canada, rather than
return him to the east where he enlisted, he is discharged in Vancouver.
Sick
from mustard gas poisoning and penniless, Peter finds work at Fraser
Mills. Once he could save enough money he planned to return to the small
farm in the northern Ontario bush, but before he does, he sends Annie a
box of chocolates in the mail. Inside the box he hid an engagement
ring. Bound together by their love for George, they find solace in each
other. Will it be enough to last?
May 2017 ~ Romancing the Klondike (Yukon) Author Joan Donaldson-Yarmey It
is 1896 and nineteen-year-old Pearl Owens wants adventure just like her
idols Anna Leonowens and Annie “Londonderry” Choen Kopchovsky. In the
1860s, Anna Leonowens taught the wives, concubines, and children of the
King of Siam, while during the years 1894-1895, Annie “Londonderry”
Choen Kopchovsky became the first woman to travel around the world on a
bicycle. She was testing a woman’s ability to look after herself. To
fulfill her dream Pearl is on her to the Yukon River area with her
cousin, Emma, to write articles and do illustrations about the woman and
men who are looking for gold in the far north. Sam
Owens, Pearl’s cousin and Emma’s brother, has been searching for gold
with two friends, Gordon and Donald, for five years without success.
Gordon and Donald have decided their quest is futile and it is time to
return home. But Sam wants to stay a while longer. Then they hear word
of a new gold find on Rabbit Creek. Over the next ten months, the lives of all five are changed due to love, gold, and tragedy.
June 2017 ~ Barkerville Beginnings (British Columbia) Author A.M. Westerling
Faced
with financial ruin and the loss of her good name, Rose Chadwick
decides to make a new start for herself and her young daughter Hannah in
the rough and tumble gold rush town of Barkerville, British Columbia.
However, making a new life is not so easy when it’s built on lies. And,
long suppressed emotions within her are stirred when she meets a
handsome young Englishman.
Viscount
Harrison St. John knows he’s expected to marry well to bolster his
family fortunes. Instead, he leaves England to pursue riches in the gold
fields of a frontier town in the far off wilds of Canada. Soured on
love because of a betrayal by his former fiancé, Harrison resists the
attraction he has for Rose. Particularly considering she appears to be a
happily married woman with a daughter of her own. Will dark secrets
from Rose’s past keep them apart? Or will they find love, happiness and a
new life together in the bustling town of Barkerville?
July 2017 – Pillars of Avalon (Newfoundland) Authors Katherine Pym and Jude Pittman
David
and Sara Kirke live in a time of upheaval under the reign of King
Charles I who gives, then takes. He gives David the nod of approval to
range up and down the French Canadian shores, burning colonies and
pillaging ships that are loaded with goods meant for the French. When
King Louis of France shouts his outrage, King Charles reneges. He takes
David’s prizes and returns them to the French, putting David and his
family in dire straits.
Undeterred,
David and Sara will not be denied. After years, the king relents. He
knights David and grants him the Province of Avalon (Ferryland), a large
tract of land on the southeast coast of Newfoundland. There David and
Sara build a prosperous plantation. They trade fish and fish oil with
English, Europeans, and New England colonists. They thrive while England
is torn in two by the civil wars.
Soon,
these troubles engulf his family. David is carried in chains back to
England to stand trial. He leaves Sara to manage the plantation, a
daunting task but with a strength that defies a stalwart man, she digs
in and prospers, becoming the first female entrepreneur of North
America.
September 2017 ~ Fields of Gold Beneath Prairie Skies (Saskatchewan) Author Suzanne deMontigny
French-Canadian
soldier, Napoleon, proposes to Lea during WWI, promising golden fields
of wheat as far as the eye can see. After the armistice, he sends money
for her passage, and she journeys far from her family and the
conveniences of a modern country to join him on a homestead in
Saskatchewan. There, she works hard to build their dream of a prospering
farm, clearing fields alongside her husband through several pregnancies
and even after suffering a terrible loss.
When
the stock market crashes in ’29, the prairies are stricken by a long
and abysmal drought. Thrown into poverty, she struggles to survive in a
world where work is scarce, death is abundant, and hope dwindles. Will
she and her family survive the Great Depression?
October 20, 2017
Elsie Nuefeld loves
to sit on her porch and watch the children grow in the Mennonite
community near Landmark, MB. Returning to the area after moving to
Paraguay for a time, Elsie is happy to be living on the wild rose dotted
prairie of south-eastern Manitoba. Her granddaughters are growing up
and getting married, it's an exciting time. Secure in her long standing
marriage to Ike, Elsie is content to observe the community from the
sidelines and rejoice in the joys of the young ones. She often walks
with her daughters and granddaughters through the graveyard abloom with
wild roses and shares the stories of the ancestors sleeping there. It’s
important, she feels, for the younger generation to feel connected to
those who went before.
Elsie hopes when she
joins those resting beneath the Landmark roses the tradition of
honouring the memory of the forebearers continues.
December 1, 2017
Yaotl and Sascho
splashed along the shores of the behchà, spears hefted, watching for
the flash of fin to rise to the surface and sparkle in the sunlight.
Tender feelings, barely discovered, flushed their faces. Waving their
spears they laughed and teased one another with sprays of newly melted
ice water.
In the distance, the warning about the kw'ahtıı
sounds, but on this fatal day it goes unheard; Yaotl and Sascho fall
into the hands of the Indian Agents. Transport to Fort Providence
residential school is only the beginning of their ordeal, for the
teachers believe it is their sworn duty to “kill the Indian inside.”
All
attempts at escape are severely punished, but Yaotl and Sascho, along
with two others, will try, beginning a journey of 900 Kilometers along
the Mackenzie River. Like wild geese, brave hearts together, they are
homeward bound.
In
1784, Englishwoman Amelia Latimer sails to the new colony of New
Brunswick in faraway Canada. She’s to marry a man chosen by her soldier
father. Amelia is repulsed by her betrothed, refuses to marry, then
meets the handsome Acadian trader, Gilbert, a man beneath her in status.
Gilbert must protect his mother who was attacked by an English soldier.
He fights to hold on to their property, to keep it from the Loyalists
who have flooded the colony, desperate men chased from the south after
the American Revolution. In a land fraught with hardship, Amelia and
Gilbert struggle to overcome prejudice, political upheaval, while
forging a life in a remote country where events seek to destroy their
love and lives.
Review: Score: 4.50 / 5 - Reviewer Top Pick
The year is 1784. Amelia sets sail to a new colony in Canada. Amelia's
father is choose a husband for her, but Amelia detests the man. But she
has luck on her side. She meets Gilbert who is a trader and a handsome
too. Gilbert is struggling to help his mother and save his property.
Amanda and Gilbert are working together to end the prejudice and the
wrongs of politics at the time. While doing this they are working hard
in this rough country to make a good life and fall in love. They seek
the strong to keep them going.
Historical romance readers will fall
in love with both Amelia and Gilbert. "On A Stormy Primeval Shore" was a
fabulous tale of life and hardship in historical Canada.
Link: https://www.nightowlreviews.com/v5/Reviews/Bemiown-reviews-On-A-Stormy-Primeval-Shore-New-Brunswick-by-Diane-Scott-Lewis-and-Nancy-M-Bell
Maggie
Conrad’s husband of ten days is sent overseas in WW1 and never comes
home. A second suitor is lost at sea in Nova Scotia’s August Gale.
Turning thirty, and on her own, she resolves to make a life for her
herself and her younger brother, Ivan.
Against her wishes,
Ivan goes to work for the rum runners and operates a surf boat bringing
shipments ashore. When war-veteran and Prohibition Preventative agent,
John Murdock, arrives undercover in the area he is referred to Maggie
for room and board.
With a rum runner
and a man she suspects is a policeman living under her roof, Maggie must
juggle law and justice, family loyalties and her growing attraction to
John as she decides whether marriage might be in the cards for her after
all.
When
she was twelve, Grace Aitken’s parents were killed in a carriage
accident in a London street and she became a ward of her father’s
business partner, Herbert MacKinnon and his wife and led a comfortable,
privileged, if restrictive life at their gothic mansion in Hampstead
village.
When Grace was seventeen, her pious father-in-law convinced her that
she owed him a debt of gratitude which could be expunged by marrying his
son, Frederick; a kind, sensitive youth two years her senior. However,
after five years of childless marriage – a fault placed squarely at
Grace’s door, Frederick died after a bout of pneumonia.
Now 23 and Frederick’s widow, her
in-laws assume she will take on the role of dependent housekeeper in a
home where her semi-invalid mother-in-law and two aunts adhere to the
view that Grace‘s “wicked ways” need to be corrected, despite the fact
these “sins” are no more outrageous than going for walks without a maid,
or reading a Women’s Suffrage pamphlet.
Grace resigns herself to being an upper
servant in her father in law’s house, when she discovers an inheritance
from her parents has been kept in trust for her until her 21st Birthday.
She concludes the MacKinnons have been lying to her and immediately
formulates her escape and books passage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the SS Parisian
from Liverpool On board she encounters Aoife [Eva] Doyle, an outspoken
Irish housemaid travelling steerage, who is being sponsored as a
mail-order bride for a farmer in Alberta.
The ship reaches Halifax harbour, and while they await the arrival of a pilot boat, another ship enters the port and rams the
SS Parisian
and holes it, causing panic. Grace's adventure takes another
mysterious turn when after becoming acquainted with Lucy Maud Montgomery
Grace finds herself destined for Prince Edward Island, the home of that
charming and outspoken young woman.
Will Grace’s plans for a new life in a foreign land finish before it has begun, or will she survive and forge her own way?
Where the River Narrows,
by Kathy Fischer Brown and Genevieve Montcombroux
Where the River Narrows,
by Kathy Fischer Brown and Genevieve Montcombroux
For many Loyalists during the American War for Independence, the
perilous journey to Canada is just the beginning of a long and arduous
struggle to find a new home and a new life amid the upheavals of war and
separation, death and privation. For Elisabeth Van Alen, it also means
finding new strength and the will to survive in a new country.
Married to an educated Mohawk warrior, she is distraught when he has
to go away shortly before the American rebels force her and her family
out of their ancestral home. He will find her while she flees through
the forest and, with their Mohawk friends, helps her reach
Kanien’kehá:ka, the Mohawk territory in Quebec.
Coming to a log cabin tucked away on a wooded island in Montreal is a
great shock for Elisabeth after the life she had known in the
comfortable house where she had been born. Undaunted, she takes on the
tasks of pioneer women and keeps her family together while waiting
anxiously to hear from her husband, Gerrit. Against his will, he has
been recruited by the British Army for a special mission. She suffers
losses and joys, upheavals and peacefulness. She begins to love her new
country where being married to a Mohawk is regarded as normal.
