I'm also fascinated with the idea of home and shelter and how our mothers are our first 'home.' Lost mothers and relationships with mothers are themes that resonate through all of my books. The survival story is one of my favourite genres, especially ones featuring girls and women. A story of resilience and survival, Red Fox Road is about thirteen-year-old Francie (of course!) who is stranded alone on a remote road in the Oregon wilderness after the family's truck breaks down. Red Fox Road, a novel for middle grade readers, was written to the girl in the crawlspace, writing her book in a Hilroy scribbler.

The story involved an attic, a girl and a mystery. At about age 11, when we moved to Winnipeg, I wrote my first novel, on a desk made of boards, in the crawlspace of our house. I can remember climbing under the thickest cover of grape vines to read and write stories in the long grass there. It is an exquisitely written ode to sisters, mothers, daughters, and to a woman’s responsibility to herself and those she loves.įollow me on Instagram was born in the Niagara Peninsula and grew up playing in the orchards and vineyards around our family's farm. Heartwarming and lushly imagined, Shelter celebrates the love between two sisters and the complicated bonds of family.

Even as the sisters struggle to understand how their mother could abandon them, they keep alive the hope that she is fighting her way back to the daughters who adore her and who need her so desperately. With deep compassion and sparkling prose, Frances Greenslade’s mesmerizing debut takes us inside the extraordinary strength of these two girls as they are propelled from the quiet, natural freedom in which they were raised to a world they can’t begin to fathom. Then her worst fears come true: Not long after Maggie’s tenth birthday, their father is killed in a logging accident, and a few months later, their mother abruptly drops the girls at a neighbor’s house, promising to return. But at night, Maggie-a born worrier-would count the freckles on her father’s weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother’s laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. A gorgeous, poetic literary debut from award-winning author Frances Greenslade, Shelter is a brilliant coming-of-age story of two strong, brave sisters searching for their mother.įor sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect.

Shelter by Frances Greenslade