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The author, Susanna Moodie, is an extremely intelligent, compassionate and observant person with a marked talent for writing and for poetry. It is no surprise that her book had been a bestseller in its day. It is even today of the greatest interest, especially to a Canadian. I liked most particularly her very sympathetic vignettes of Canada's native peoples that she had encountered. The incredible hardships and poverty endured by Canada's early pioneers, so vividly described by the author, are a phase of history one tends to gloss over in modern times.



Her remark in the early part of the book, which I copied and reproduce here, made me understand so much better my own parents' feelings as immigrants to this same land, whom I had as a youth classified cavalierly and harshly as perpetual exiles: "My heart yearned intensely for my absent home. Home! The word had ceased to belong to my present. It was doomed to live forever in the past. For what immigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home? To the land that he has left that name belongs forever, and in no instance does he bestow it upon another. 'I have got a letter from home ...'; 'I have seen a friend from home...'; 'I dreamt last night that I was at home...'; are expressions of everyday occurrence to prove that the heart acknowledges no other home than the land of its birth". How aptly, how penetratingly put!



The reader, Moira Fogarty, with a most agreeable voice, does a superlative job. One gets the feeling at times that it is, in fact, Susanna Moodie herself speaking the lines of her own work. I cannot recomment this book too highly, it is such a worthwhile read!

- October 19, 2011An Outstanding Work