Shades of War — Michele Carter

CLARE TATE, a thirty-one-year-old war widow from Toronto has not recovered from the death of her soldier husband two years earlier in 1915, so she pours herself into her suffrage work to avoid feeling her grief. Clare actively fights the political system from the front lines of the women's suffrage movement. She has written a book entitled Women's Battle for Justice and has arrived in Rockwater, the last stop on her Canadian lecture tour, to give a speech on “The Advent of Women into Civilization.” Over Easter weekend, she finds herself drawn into an unusual family who enlists her help in solving a murder. Gradually, these apparently rustic townspeople unintentionally arouse her emotions even though she is determined to keep her heart closed, and the pain from her loss suppressed. By the end of the weekend, the Canadian soldiers have won the battle at Vimy Ridge on the Western Front, and Clare has opened her heart to a possible new romance.

“The most striking features of Shades of War are Carter's vividly realized characters, her masterful handling of multiple, shifting points of view in the telling, which recalls the early Modernist narrative experiments of Virginia Woolf, and the meticulous absence of any ‘out of period' anachronistic references in the narrative or dialogue.”--The North Shore News

“In a sparkling debut as a novelist, Michele Carter proves an apt and descriptive storyteller in her tale about romance and mystery in a Canadian frontier town in 1917. Extremely interesting is the collection of cross-cultural characters, so detailed and so true to the way the West was settled. Central to the time period are the letters which come from faraway France where the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge is dulled by the loss of a loved one. Sure to capture the imagination are a thrust of ghostly adventures, a woman's belief in feminism virtually before its time, and one resident's attempt to put a little opera music into his dull life.”--Saskatoon Star Phoenix