Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss by Beth Powning
new edition now available in paperback, Vintage Canada

REVIEWS

Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War - "Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her "apprenticeship in love and loss," a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through."

The Telegraph Journal, Saint John - "A beautifully written work. The words fly from the page and pierce the heart....Uplifting."

The Gazette, Montreal - "Shadow Child is about more than a tragic personal loss; it manages somehow to be about all losses, the painful and inevitable letting go that makes us human."

Toronto Star - "It's refreshing to read how an ordinary life can still be magical."

Library Journal - "Superbly written...Powning skillfully chronicles her personal metamorphosis as she learns to accept herself and penetrates the complexities of relationships in family and community."

National Post - "Haunting...Shadow Child rings of the truth. Intimate, generous, but never confessional, Powning, in shimmering prose, comes to understand love and loss as 'inseparable as light and dark, and that one does not exist without the other.' There is so much here, a celebration of selfhood, grief and renewal, and the spiritual solace of nature, that it would be a shame if readers turned away because of the sombreness of the subject. One thing it isn't is therapy on the page."

Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy after War - "Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her 'apprenticeship in love and loss,' a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through."

Publisher's Weekly - "Anyone who has experienced the loss of a child will relate to Powning's painful and healing search for meaning in (her child's) death."

The Globe and Mail - "Powning's story is poignant and deeply felt."

Kirkus Reviews - "Powning...tells the story with incantatory grace, awe, and an ache a mile wide....Life, captured here in all its keenness."

Moncton Times and Transcript - "Rich in detail and description, its lyrical prose often (reads) like poetry."