An author with Battlefords connections will be in the community to launch her latest book next week.
Elinor Florence will be in Battleford at the Saskatchewan launch of her novel Bird's Eye View at Fred Light Museum Friday, Oct. 31 from 1 to 3 p.m. She then heads to Crandleberry's on Saturday, Nov. 1 from 2 to 5 p.m. for a book reading and signing there.
Florence is also going to be in Cut Knife at the Afternoon Delight from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday Nov. 3, hosted by the Cut Knife Historical Society.
She then goes to Saskatoon for her last appearance at McNally Robinson Booksellers from 7 to 9 p.m., that day.
Her book will be available for sale at all these venues. It will also be available for sale online at Chapters-Indigo and Amazon.
Florence has deep roots in the Battlefords. She grew up on a farm near Brada on one of the two wartime relief airfields, with her family home located in one of the barracks buildings on the property.
The University of Saskatchewan graduate started her career in journalism with the Advertiser-Post in North Battleford, and her brother Robert and his wife Wendy Florence still own the family farm in the area.
Her career has taken her to the Western Producer, Red Deer Advocate, Winnipeg Sun and Vancouver Province before becoming a regular contributor to Reader's Digest. She now lives in Invermere, B.C. and writes a weekly blog called Wartime Wednesdays that tells the stories of Canadians during wartime. It can be found on the News-Optimist website (www.newsoptimist.ca).
While the story in Bird's Eye View is fictional, those in the Battlefords and area will find familiar many of the locations and situations in the novel.
"Although I fictionalized the setting - I fictionalized the town of Touchwood, Saskatchewan - I think that people from the Battlefords may recognize some of the places described in the book and certainly they'll recognize the prairie landscape, which I talk about quite a bit," said Florence.
"My mother was the postmaster's daughter in Battleford and one of the characters is the postmaster's daughter in Touchwood. So I certainly drew on my family's experiences and my own experiences growing up on a farm outside of town to create the book."
North Battleford itself was a vital part of the Allied war effort as a location for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Many people today don't appreciate how big a role Canada played in the Second World War, Florence laments.
"The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was Canada's major contribution to the war effort and North Battleford was one of only 105 stations across Canada."
"Not only did we contribute to the war morally and ethically, but the existence of an air training base in North Battleford had a tremendous effect on the local economy."
New restaurants opened, theatres were full of people, and there were "a lot of lifelong friendships made, marriages. A lot of the British guys came back to North Battleford after the war because they liked it so much."
She said she also researched Canadian wartime history, so it is "as factually correct as one could get."
The book has been in the works for years, said Florence, and focuses its story on the efforts of a woman who enlists in the air force to aid the war effort.
According to the press release, "Bird's Eye View tells the story of a young woman from Saskatchewan whose fictional home town of Touchwood becomes an air training base. Fired with patriotism, she joins the air force herself - one of 50,000 Canadian women who enlisted to support the fighting men. Rose Jolliffe travels overseas and becomes an interpreter of aerial photographs, spying on the enemy from the sky, searching out camouflaged munitions factories and bomb targets on the continent."
Throughout the war, Rose has "a bird's eye view of the Canadian experience - at Dieppe, in the skies over Germany, on the beaches of Normandy - and finally, when our country shared in the Allied victory."
Florence said she is proud to be able to launch her novel in Saskatchewan.
"Although my heroine is from this town in Saskatchewan and goes overseas, and most of the action takes place in England, there's a very close connection throughout the book with her home in Saskatchewan, because she's constantly receiving letters from her mother back home and her mother is describing everything that's going on on the home front."
For more information you can find the author's blog at elinorflorence.com/blog, and her website at elinorflorence.com. She is also on Facebook at Facebook.com/elinorflorenceauthor.
