Day 10 - A Canadian Lit Memory from My Childhood

Day 10. Enjoy. :)

Today's post is a little different. Instead of a review or a guest post from an author, it's more like a guest post from me. Or a feature on a series by a well-known Canadian author that I relished when I was younger.

I don't remember how old I was when I first read this series (but I know it was before I turned 13), and I don't remember how I first discovered it (probably some kind of present), but one of the best series I ever read when I was a kid was Kit Pearson's Guests of War series. During World War II, thousands of children from Britain were sent to Canada. This series is the story of two such children, Norah and her younger brother Gavin, sent to Canada by their parents to keep them safe during the war. They end up in the care of a rich, elderly widow and her daughter, and are introduced to a brand new world in 1940's Toronto. The three books, The Sky is Falling, Looking at the Moon and The Lights Go On Again, take place over the span of about 5 years and are a coming-of-age for Norah and Gavin. Well, more Norah in the first two books and Gavin in the third.

There was something so fascinating about this series when I read it as a kid. I imagine it was the realism and the drawing from real events that did it. I could only imagine what it would be like to be Norah or Gavin and be forced to leave my parents at such a young age, and to have to go to a different country, too. It's times like this I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and watch me read this series for the first time so I could ask myself why I loved it so much. And also why I had two copies of the third book.

Earlier this year, I re-read the second book, Looking at the Moon, mostly because it was my favourite of the three. In it, Norah is on the cusp of becoming a teenager, and a woman, in her eyes. Anything can happen when you're thirteen, the world is your oyster. It was just as I remembered. Norah and Gavin, the massive family that accepts them as theirs, the cabin, the lake, the simplicity but also the danger of the 1940's. I read this book over and over and over again because I adored it so much

For all the historical source material and setting, for all its realism, this series is so magical in my eyes. I'd recommend this series to anyone who's a fan of Kit Person, to anyone interested in the time period, and to anyone with a 10 year old daughter hungry to read about a girl her own age. To me, these books were the kind that kept me reading, that showed me what different worlds you can discover in books.