Vancouver’s Lifeguard Legend

“Ruby Smith Diaz (l.) examines the life of Joe Fortes, a Black lifeguard in Vancouver, during a time of rampant racism, exploring his legacy and identity through research, personal reflections and poetry.FULL STORY

 

A match for Cumberbatch

March 13th, 2015

For those millions of people who can’t get enough of The Imitation Game, Elinor Florence has a story to tell. And she wrote it before the movie came out.

The hero is not a Cambridge mathematics alumnus. But it is a story about very smart people working secretly in an English mansion to stop the Nazis.

And she’ll be in Vancouver on April 25 to talk about it.

Elinor Florence of Invermere has a fine, first novel set during the Second World War, Bird’s Eye View (Dundurn $24.99), about an idealistic prairie farm girl who joins the air force and becomes an aerial photographic interpreter and views the war through a microscope. The protagonist Rose Jolliffe is part of an intelligence system that spies on the enemy from the sky from a converted mansion in England. When her commanding officer, Gideon Fowler, sets his sights on Rose, both professionally and personally, her prospects look bright. But can he be trusted? As she becomes increasingly disillusioned by the destruction of war, Rose’s world falls apart. Located about one north of London, the mansion was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force and renamed RAF Medmenham. Nowadays it’s a luxury hotel called Danesfield House. Florence also maintains a remarkable, extensive blog called Wartime Wednesdays in which she shares her research into Canada’s warttime history, concentrating on the two world wars.  9781459721432

Florence, Elinor West Vancouver Evite

www.elinorflorence.com/blog

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