Old Maude is a disfigured and much maligned and misunderstood Micmac medicine woman who lives in an abandoned gold mine in Nova Scotia in the 1940s. Several village children have an adventure which leads them to Maude and an eventual understanding of her healing powers.

In Swamp Robin, the author retraces her steps through a traumatic young life, reliving the few happy times and remembering her struggles through the bad. The story exposes the sordid details of her mother's desire for revenge after being abandoned by the biological father of her illegitimate child. Her resentment, contempt, and guilt threaten to destroy the child. From Halifax to Harlem and places in between, Lizzie leads her vulnerable daughter through a peripatetic, almost-Dickensian, existence for the better part of eighteen years. In sharp contrast, the author lovingly recounts times...