Dorene Meyer's Far North Canada Series
Award winning novelist, Dorene Meyer's fourteen novel series is set in a fictional Canadian First Nation community similar to the one in 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.
After decades of owning Goldrock Press, editing, publishing, and teaching writing at a university, Dorene has retired and now travels in Canada and the U.S. with her husband, John, in their motorhome, visiting family and friends.
Dorene's Far North Canada series:
About This 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 recent 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 teen or adult readers, but two of them, Pilot Error and Get Lost!, can also be enjoyed by a younger audience.
The seven Group Healing books 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 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 find healing. The seven steps are: 1. Face the Problem 2. Break the Silence and 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.
Bannock and Sweet Tea is not part of the series. It is a fictional story, told poetically, based in Canada when First Nations children were being taken to boarding schools to be trained away from their families and their culture. No contact nor speaking in their native languages was allowed. When these traumatized Residential School survivors returned to their communities in the 1960s and attempted to raise families of their own, many of their children were “scooped” up into non-Native homes to be fostered or adopted, thus creating a whole next generation of traumatized children. This latter tragic time is called the “sixties scoop.”
THE GROUP sub series
As noted above, the last seven books, covering our final seven weeks in this Rabbit Lake community, make up the sub series "THE GROUP," a seven week healing chronicle.
NOTE: To get the most enjoyment out of this Far North Canada series and The Group sub series, it is best to read all 14 of the books in order.
