The Roads of Go Home Lake
A novel

The Roads of Go Home Lake is the long-awaited sequel to Christina Kilbourne’s award winning novel Day of the Dog-Tooth Violets. When Winnie finds herself suddenly widowed and an unemployed mother of six, she is forced to change her life in order to keep her family together. Illiterate, shy and inexperienced in the ways of the white man’s world, Winnie relies on her eldest son and the strength of her Chippewan ancestors to give her the courage to find help. The Roads of Go Home Lake follows Winnie’s journey as she faces her darkest secrets and recalls the bittersweet memories of growing up in an abandoned logging town in the 1950's. Here she finds the strength to forgive her parents their weaknesses and cruelties, gives herself permission to remember their tenderness and pride, and is compelled to search for the family she long ago fled. The Roads of Go Home Lake is a novel of heritage and blood, it is a novel of courage and healing, it is a novel of inner growth and universal hope.

Kilbourne mines memory and voices in ways that are startlingly similar to Margaret Laurence, that Canadian touchstone of small-town feeling. She is a promising writer who gives her characters a respectful fragility.
—University of Toronto Quarterly

In "The Roads of Go Home Lake", the inner strength and personal growth of Winnie from abused daughter and wife to a self-sustaining confident person serves both as personal and inspirational and reveals how effects of generational violence, illiteracy and racism can be overcome.
—Muskoka Magazine

"The Roads of Go Home Lake" holds great surprises. Kilbourne is the only author other than James Bartleman to write with authority on native life in Ontario.
—Muskoka Today

AUTHOR

Christina Kilbourne was born in Southwestern, Ontario, but spent her elementary and high school years in Muskoka, a resort area two hours north of Toronto.

She graduated with an Honours BA in English Literature and Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario and her Masters degree in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Windsor, Ontario.

Upon graduating Christina Kilbourne travelled across Africa, Mexico, Central and South America and has lived two years in New Zealand, her husband’s home country.

She has worked in various jobs writing and designing newsletters, brochures, handbooks reports and websites for such organizations as CIBC, the Auckland University of Technology, the Regional Municipality of York, and most recently, Conservation Ontario.

Christina Kilbourne currently lives with her husband, two children and various four-legged creatures near Mount Albert, Ontario.

DETAILS

Publisher: BookLand Press, 2006
Category: Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-9780838-1-6
Price: $21.95 CDN/USA paperback
Format: 313 pages 5.5 x 8.5 in