When the Cherry Blossoms Fell

This is the story of nine-year-old Michiko Minagawa.  She wants to be proud of her Japanese heritage but can’t.  Canada is at war. The Government has taken unprecedented actions against her community and treating all Japanese-Canadians as enemy aliens.

The night before her birthday celebration, the police arrest her father. Within days he must leave for labor camp in the mountains.

Michiko’s mother, with the help of a stranger, moves her family to a farmhouse in the country.  Michiko, her Grandfather, Aunt Sadie, and baby brother Hiro all endure hunger, hardship, racial taunts and the worst Canadian winter in forty years.

Throughout it all, Michiko is uncertain of her origin. Should she be proud or hide it?

Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Jennifer came from a book loving family. She worked as a library helper in the old red brick library on Victoria Avenue in the summers while at Valley Way public school. Her childhood ambition was to have a book with her name on the spine.

Writing as Jennifer Travis, she made her mark with award winning educational materials for The Peel District School Board and the Ontario Ministry of Education. She is one of the authors of Explorations a mathematics program for Addison-Wesley of Canada. For TVO’s Mathica’s Mathshop, Jennifer received the Federation of Women Teachers Writing Award. For the Kindergarten Curriculum materials, Stepping Into Kindergarten. Jennifer won the National School Public Relations Association Award along with The Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association of Communications in Education.

After retiring as school principal for the Peel District School Board, Jennifer became a student herself. She is a graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature and the Humber School of Writers summer program. She began publishing short stories for children in Aquila, LadyBug, Zamooph and Wee Ones magazines. In May 2009, Napoleon Publishing released her debut novel for children, When the Cherry Blossoms Fell.

Jennifer is also member of CANSCAIP (Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers) and SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators).

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In recent years, Reva Stern has brought her love of writing to the forefront as her primary career. Writing and editing professionally for the past decade, she has been encouraged by three writing award nominations. Her first published novel “The Water Buffalo That Shed Her Girdle.”

Additionally, her manuscript "The Prescott Journals" was optioned for the screen prior to publication, and is now slated to become her second published novel.
Reva has also compiled a collection of short stories and a series of Children's books titled "Tales from Grandma's Cupboard". Her additional publishing credits include extensive freelance writing for periodicals, magazines and newspapers including the National Post, and several years as an editor for Wellness Way Publications.

SYNOPSIS: MEMORIES OF A WATER BUFFALO By Reva Stern

After living through a monumentally acrimonious divorce, Rachel Morgenstein was pretty certain that the very worst thing that could ever happen to her had already happened. She was wrong.

She soon ascertained that the sudden, fierce, and absolute estrangement by her youngest child was the singular most excruciating event of her life.
It was an elusive mystery, without an obvious villain or even a foreshadowing conflict.

It is just a matter of days until her son will be married and she is not welcome to attend. And so the story begins with Rachel contemplating a virtual shopping list of alternative suicide options. After exhausting each deadly proposition as unworthy or just plain messy, Rachel resorts to investigating this injustice by searching the cold files of her memory. That is, she reaches as far back into her past as is humanly possible in the hope of finding some cryptically hidden answers to this anomaly.

Her history unravels as we travel with her into the lost innocence of the fifties and the zeal of the sixties. We wince over the garishness of the seventies and are numbed by the sudden changes in our heroine as she braves her way through the next couple of decades only to end up facing the deadly “list”. Does she find alternatives?

Although “Water Buffalo” is a painful journey for Rachel, it is a funny, thoughtful and often wry story of love gone mad.


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