• A multi-perspective, layered historical novel about the trials of British home children, who come to care for each other as family despite their hardships and troubled pasts, only to be separated and placed into employment across rural Canada.
• A challenging yet insightful look into the lives of children in the past, interspersed with fictional newspaper articles that educate on historical context, exploring themes of class, poverty and scarcity, survival, migration, independence, and the financial and moral struggles that charity programs face.
• This novel is rooted in a specific chapter of Canadian history: “Between 1869 and 1932, over 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada through assisted juvenile emigration” (Government of Canada Library Archives).
• The novel also touches on the experience of “the Georgetown Boys, or Canada’s Noble Experiment,” which was “the first humanitarian act on an international scale by the country. In 1923, 50 orphans arrived in Georgetown, eventually numbering 109, survivors of the Armenian Genocide” (GeorgetownOn Magazine)
• Caroline Fernandez, a celebrated children’s author, has been commended with a Forest of Reading Silver Birch Honour Book Award and a Purple Dragonfly Award.