Save the date! Joint book launch at the GAC on Aug. 20.

Hope to see you at our joint launch! Although our books are in different genres – mine a novel, Gloria's a memoir – they are both coming-of-age stories with historical themes. Looking forward to your questions and comments. Should be great fun.

The Hotelkeeper’s Daughter, Gloria Levi's fictionalized memoir spanning the period from the late Depression to 1948, is a moving account of her childhood in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, and her disrupted life as the “hotelkeeper’s daughter” in a series of Catskills and New Jersey hotels rented seasonally and later bought by her entrepreneurial mother to pull the family out of poverty. This coming-of-age story is told from two perspectives: through the eyes of Gilda, the youngest in her family, who clashes with her mother, and through the eyes of the author on Gabriola as she reflects on the life lessons she has learned over her nine decades.

My contemporary coming-of-age novel, Love and Courage in Troubled Times, deals with the persecution of the Cathars in 13th century France from the perspective of a Vancouver teen. When she is forced to accompany her family to a Cathar village in the South of France so her father can finish his book on the Cathars, she starts seeing flashes of the tragic events that happened centuries earlier and gets caught up in a series of adventures that remind us that troubled times are always with us.