This book brings together some of the most haunting cases in Canadian history and invites readers to look closely at the places where personal tragedy and systemic failure come together. These chapters revisit stories that once dominated national conversation and others that were nearly forgotten, each one revealing something important about violence, trauma, and the silence that allowed harm to continue.
Through careful research and clear storytelling, the book explores cases like Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, which forced Canada to confront difficult questions about justice and manipulation, as well as tragedies shaped by untreated mental illness and missed warning signs, such as the heartbreaking case of Elaine Campione. These stories show how human struggle, social pressure, and institutional neglect can collide with devastating results.
Alongside these well-known events are lesser-known tragedies, including the deaths connected to the Ideal Maternity Home and the life of Minnie McGee, whose years of grief and poverty led to an act that stunned her community. Each chapter asks readers to look past the headlines and toward the deeper human realities beneath them.
In the end, this is more than a true crime collection. It is an honest look at the complexity behind each life and each loss, and a reminder of how often warning signs go unanswered and how important it is to understand the truth, even when the truth is difficult to face.
Canadian Female Killers
If you grew up in a home shaped by addiction, taught again and again that you owed your silence, your forgiveness, and your loyalty, and that protecting yourself was somehow a betrayal. This book exists to help you step out of that message and finally understand that you are allowed to choose yourself.
But She Is Still Your Mother looks closely at what happens when a family revolves around the addict, and everyone else learns to disappear in order to keep the peace. It speaks openly about denial and blame shifting and the quiet expectation that you should protect the family image instead of the truth, and it helps you recognize the roles you were placed in, the responsible one, the peacekeeper, the child who stayed quiet because it felt safer than speaking.
This is not a book that centers the addict. It is a book that turns toward you and the weight you carried, and how your body learned to live in confusion and tension, and how guilt still shows up even when you have every right to feel free. It offers the understanding that protecting yourself is not selfish but necessary, and that your life does not have to bend around someone else’s addiction anymore.
What you will find here is a steady and patient voice that believes you. It walks with you as you consider boundaries, as you let go of duty that was never yours, and as you begin to imagine a life with more clarity and more peace, a life where you are finally allowed to take up space without apology.
But She is Still Your Mother
The Island We Don’t Talk About
This book is a raw, unflinching exploration of what it means to grow up in rural Prince Edward Island in the shadow of unspoken rules, generational silence, and emotional survival. Told through layered narratives, lived experience, and cultural insight, it uncovers the quiet tragedies and ordinary dysfunction that shaped a generation.
From cold kitchens to rigid mothers, from rooms without doors to voices that never softened, this is not just a memoir, it is a mirror for every adult who walked through childhood learning to shrink.
With stark honesty and a deeply human voice, The Island We Don’t Talk About names the truths behind tidy curtains and smiling family photos. It invites readers to remember, and begin again.
Her Name Was Clara
On the far edge of Prince Edward Island, where poverty settles in like weather and silence passes for good manners, Ruth Blake finds an old wool sweater at the back of her shed and breaks a family rule. She says her sister’s name.
Maggie was “sent away,” and after that the house learned to talk in unfinished thoughts. The town nodded in that tired, knowing way, conversations thinned out, and the mantel lost its photographs. With the sweater on her chair and years of questions caught in her throat, Ruth begins to ask where a girl can go and simply vanish. She finds locked cabinets, wrong names on forms, and the kind of smile that means she has reached the end of what she is allowed to know. A retired matron repeats, “They were treated well for the time.” A ringing bell in a care home shakes the shine off that claim. A quiet worker tells her, “Try the old women’s guild records,” and something shifts.
Threaded through hidden rooms, borrowed babies, and records shaped to protect everyone except the girls themselves, Her Name Was Clara follows a sister who refuses to let paperwork settle the truth. Here, love leaves its own evidence. A single red stitch tucked into the hem of a baby gown. A sweater that carries the shape of its owner. A seam that remembers what the files tried to forget.
Spare and haunting, steeped in rural Island detail, this novel asks what justice can look like when the past refuses to stay buried and what it costs to keep saying seven in a place that prefers six. For readers who love quiet and devastating stories about women, old systems, and the small mercies that outlast them, Her Name Was Clara is an act of witness and a hand held out in the dark.
Letting Go of Who They Were
Letting Go of Who They Were is a healing guide for anyone who has faced the painful choice of stepping back from a parent, sibling, or family member whose behavior has caused lasting harm. It is written for the person who has tried for years to make the relationship work and who now needs permission to stop carrying the weight alone. This book helps you untangle love from obligation and understand that choosing your own well being is not abandonment but survival.
Through reflective insights and compassionate storytelling, it offers a place to rest and to make sense of what happened, especially when others dismiss your experience or pressure you to stay loyal no matter the cost. It reminds you that your story matters, your boundaries are valid, and your healing does not require anyone else’s approval.
If you have ever felt guilty for stepping away or unsure how to move forward, this book gives you language, clarity, and comfort as you rebuild a life that no longer asks you to shrink in order to belong.