LILACS in the DUST BOWL (Lukia's Family Saga Series)

LILACS in the DUST BOWL (Lukia's Family Saga Series)

A uthor Diana Stevan's sequel to the award-winning Sunflowers Under Fire. Lukia's story continues in Lilacs in the Dust Bowl, an inspirational family saga about love and heartache during the Great Depression. In 1929, when Lukia Mazurets, a widow and a Ukrainian peasant farmer, immigrates to Canada with her four children, she has no idea the stock market is about to crash and throw the world into a deep depression. Falling grain prices, the ravages of nature, and unexpected family conflicts threaten to smash her dreams of family unity in a strange land. And when love knocks on her door again, awakening desire she thought was long gone, Lukia has to choose between having a man in her life or the children she’s sacrificed everything for. Diana Stevan is also the author of the novels, A Cry from The Deep and The Rubber Fence and the novelette The Blue Nightgown . A former family therapist, she is the mother of two daughters and lives with her husband Robert in West Vancouver and on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Lilacs in the Dust Bowl is a triumph of family storytelling. Stevan's remarkable achievement in this second novel about Lukia Mazurets and her family is to have brought to vivid and believable life a family saga of immigration to western Canada that, in the annals of Ukrainian-Canadian stories, covers exciting new ground. We are familiar with the settler stories of the first wave immigrants from Galicia 1890-1914 who overwhelmingly settled in Saskatchewan and Alberta on the proverbial quarter-section of "virgin soil". But the Mazurets family, arriving from Volyn (a district in the north-west of Ukraine), goes no further than a farm near Winnipeg, just in time for drought, locusts and Depression. Farming overlaps with menial jobs in Winnipeg and Stevan does a terrific job of "you are there" with Lukia and Dolly in the vibrant North End with its immigrant shops, a Ukrainian-Orthodox church, and inside the homes of the women's employers. Let's hope there is a sequel that carries forward the adventures of another generation of Mazurets, the indomitable Lukia's Canadian descendants. Myrna Kostash, author of Ghosts in a Photograph Heart-wrenching and Uplifting Family Saga This series is a compelling, inspiring story of an immigrant family's trials and tribulations. It follows Lukia Mazuret's journey just before (and during) the Great Depression, as she and her children migrate from the Ukraine to North America. It is so well told and moving, and the detailed landscape made me feel right in the story. A great book club read, with lots of issues to contemplate and discuss. Martha Conway, author of The Physician's Daughter . Diana Stevan likes to joke that she's a Jill of all trades as she's not only worked as a clinical social worker, but also as a teacher, librarian, model, actress and sports writer-broadcaster for CBC television. With writing her passion, she's published fitness and travel articles for newspapers, poetry in the U.K. journal DreamCatcher, and a short story in the anthology, Escape.  Her novels cross genres: A Cry from the Deep , a romantic mystery/adventure; T he Rubber Fence , psychological fiction; the award-winning Sunflowers Under Fire , historical fiction, and its sequels, Lilacs in the Dust Bowl and Paper Roses on Stony Mountain . She's also written a novelette, The Blue Nightgown. When she isn't writing, Diana likes to travel, garden, take walks in the forest and visit with her family. The mother of two grown daughters, she lives with her husband, Robert, on Vancouver Island and in West Vancouver, British Columbia.