Joan Bodger, author of the popular How the Heather Looks and several children’s books, grew up absorbing stories – first the yarns of her Welsh-born mother, then the world’s collected legends and folk tales. Accordingly, she aligns her own life story with the archetypal myth of the battling hero. She fights against prejudice and bigotry, losing some battles, winning others, but always sustained by the power of stories.

Her odyssey begins in California and Washington, where her father serves in the coast guard, shifts to Wales for an extended visit to her mother’s ancestral home, and then returns to the U.S., this time in the segregated South. Finally in the 1970s she starts a new life in Toronto.

Along the way she witnesses the effects of the FBI’s pact to allow the Mafia to peddle drugs to the black community, serves in the army, participates in Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, establishes the first Head Start program for underprivileged preschoolers, starts the Storytelling School in Toronto, and becomes a Gestalt therapist.

Bodger’s storytelling gifts give her personal story the impact of a novel full of drama, confrontation, suspense, and tragedy. She sees her first marriage crumble because of her husband’s mental illness, and loses a daughter to cancer and a son to the drug culture of the 1960s. When she was in shock after her daughter’s death, another woman warned, “No one will tell you this, but your womb will go crazy.” Much of this book is in that same spirit of “No one will tell you this.” The life of a woman told against the upheavals of the 20th century is an oft-told tale, but Joan Bodger’s frankness and verve make her version of it unusually compelling.