As noted in the post before this one, Canadian author Carol Windley writes about fictional homeschooling families in her new book, titled Home Schooling. Here’s additional information from the publisher’s press release:

Home Schooling
by Carol Windley

From the acclaimed author of Visible Light comes a collection of seven outstanding stories, each set against the rural landscape of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. In these stories the memories and dreams of characters are examined, revealing them to be both cages and keys to the cages.

The life-lessons learned by the characters are often as complicated and painful as they are illuminating. In the title story, two sisters fall in love with their math tutor on one of the Gulf Islands, inhabited equally by the ghosts of the misfits and Hollywood stars who came to live there, and the children of an alternative school, run by the girls’ criminally optimistic father. In “Sand and Frost,” a young girl drops out of UBC, returns home, and discovers that her domineering grandmother is the sole survivor of a shocking act of family violence. In “What Saffi Knows,” a child, unable to explain to her self-involved parents, struggles with the knowledge of the whereabouts of another missing child. In these remarkable seven stories, Carol Windley creates a sense of place and of people that breathe the cool wet air of a spring morning on Gabriola Island.

About the author:
Carol Windley’s Visible Light won the 1993 Bumbershoot Award (Weyehauser’s fiction prize), and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The stories in Home Schooling have been published in several literary magazines on the West Coast (Event and Malaspina) and one of the stories, “What Saffi Knows,” won the Western Magazine Award for Fiction in 2002. Carol lives in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

There’s an excerpt from one of the stories at the Giller Prize site (the Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most prestigious literary award).

Home Schooling
ISBN: 1896951910
Author: Windley, Carol
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Binding: Trade paper
Price: $22.95
Pages: 300

This entry was posted on October 21, 2006 at 3:11 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.