Dorene Meyer's Far North Canada Series
Award winning novelist, Dorene Meyer's 14-novel series is set in a fictional Canadian First Nation community similar to her hometown area in northern Ontario. Her characters in her novels are like the people she went to school with and the ones her mother fostered in their home.
These books are riveting. Watch out, you might lose a night's sleep while reading one of the thick ones. They are very hard to put down, especially the first one, Rachel's Children. There's suspense and near tragedy in every book, but also plenty of love and hope. It is so fulfilling to watch the characters and their children develop during the series; to watch them make hard decisions, learn whom to trust, gain confidence in themselves, fall in love, heal from abuse, and become valuable members of their far north community. All the situations are so true to real life because the stories are born out of experiences Dorene observed in her own community. You will be so glad you had the opportunity to read this Far North Canada series.
More About The Far North Canada Series:
Dorene Meyer grew up in the First Nations communities of Lac Seul and Sioux Lookout, Ontario where she was a foster sister to hundreds of First Nations children. She has also lived in Red Lake, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Indiana, Michigan, and Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba.
Following Mark Twain’s advice to “write what you know,” Dorene has written a 14 book series set in a fictional First Nations community in Canada’s far north. Her books follow her many characters’ lives and their children’s lives as they grow up and get married and have children of their own. Written before the early 2010s explosion of technology, and reliance on the Internet for communication and information, the characters in this series nonetheless face the day to day joys and sorrows we all experience in life. In addition, they encounter more challenging situations, such as, living remotely in the arctic cold, doing undercover work, facing frightening danger and false legal accusations, organizing missing person searches and water rescues, raising foster children, recovering from child sexual abuse, and living with a disability.
Most of the books are geared for adult or teen readers, but two of them, Pilot Error and Get Lost!, can also be enjoyed by a younger audience.
The last seven books in The Group healing subseries each have discussion/study questions at the end (for personal or support group use) based on seven steps toward healing from mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. This whole series realistically depicts the longterm mental and emotional damage abuse causes. Our hope is that in seeing how these survivors suffer and how at first they are not taking the steps toward healing but then later learn to do so, that many readers will also begin to find healing.
The seven steps are:
1. Face the Problem
2. Break the Silence, Tell Your Story
3. Stop Blaming Yourself for a crime you did not commit
4. Confront the Abuser
5. Leave Room For God's Vengeance and His Mercy
6. See Ourselves as God Sees Us
7. Minister to Others.
THE GROUP subseries
As noted above, the last seven books, covering our final seven weeks in this Rabbit Lake community, make up the subseries "THE GROUP," a seven week healing chronicle.
NOTE: To get the most enjoyment out of this Far North Canada series and The Group subseries, it is best to read all 14 of the books in order. [Click on "SORT BY Name: A to Z" to see them in order here.]
