Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows
by Sylvia Barnard

---

Hurtling up Highway 69 toward Sudbury in her VW bug, Kate Dumont Walker decides she’s going to keep her baby. After all, it’s the 1980s. That is, until she is unexpectedly plunged 100 years into the past, without her Amelia, to the early days of her Northern Ontario community. Unable to return to her own time, she eventually learns to stop living as a visitor and settles into life with Claude, the devoted single father who lives in a log cabin that stands on the same property as her present-day family home. And yet, she is caught between two times and the fear she will lose everything again if she is drawn back to the future. Still knowledge of another tragedy consumes her––the Spanish River Train Disaster of 1910. Just a few miles from Nairn Centre, the train jumped its tracks, telescoped in the middle of the bridge, and sent the second and third cars over the edge and through the ice like a bullet. Almost all of the passengers were lost. Was it the screeching of the train she heard ringing in her ears as she travelled back in time? Puzzled by the connection between her family and the devastating derailment, she tries to shift the proposed Trans-Canada Railway route west of Sudbury. Will she be able to change history to prevent the tragedy, and at the same time save her family?

www.sbarnardauthor.ca

---

Sylvia Barnard shaped the lives of learners for forty years, as a classroom teacher, school principal, and superintendent of schools, ending her career as the President of Cambrian College in Ontario. In retirement, she has turned her hand to her life-long love of story-telling. Her short stories have appeared in CommuterLit and in Fifteen Stories High 2021, an anthology of short stories, published by the Canadian Authors Association, Niagara Branch. Barnard holds a Bachelor of Arts in French and German from Wilfrid Laurier University, a Bachelor and a Master of Education from the University of Toronto. She has also completed a graduate certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College. The child of immigrants, Barnard grew up north of Lake Superior. She avidly travels, hikes the woods in her backyard, kayaks, and produces stained glass art when she isn’t writing. She lives with her husband and two dogs near Penetanguishene, Ontario. Rhubarb, Strawberries, and Willows is her début novel.

---

Contributors

Author

Sylvia Barnard

---

Other eBook Editions

This book is also available in eBook format from these sites.

• Amazon Kindle Store
• Nook Store
• Kobo Store
• Apple Books
• Google Play