The Long Road Home
Liz Jansen recently released her third book, a memoir entitled Crash Landing. It’s a story of personal healing and self-discovery via the memories she has of and the stories she’s been told about both sets of grandparents and the hardships they endured as they came to Canada in the early 1920s as Russian refugees fleeing the Russian Civil War.
Approaching her 60th birthday, Jansen set forth in the quest to discover her roots in 2014, while on an extended motorcycle trip she called the Ancestor Trail to discover the prairie lands that her grandparents settled on.
Unfortunately, a bad motorcycle crash ended the trip unexpectedly. After a couple of years of recovery, she got back in the saddle of her new Triumph Tiger to resume the search that took her from her southern Ontario home to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Her story is entertaining and well written, and is interspersed with the travels and difficulties that her German Mennonite ancestors endured while seeking a new life on the Canadian Prairies and simply trying to survive in a strange and foreign land.
The book is a roller coaster of emotions and thoughts as Jansen describes her upbringing, and as any spiritual road trip into a person’s past could be, with a great deal of motorcycle travel thrown in for good measure.
If you’ve ever wondered about your lineage or how your past has shaped who you are as the person you are today, you’ll want to read Liz Jansen’s latest book.
Get it at lizjansen.com, Amazon and Indigo for $19.95 for the 264-page paperback or $7.90 for all formats of ebook. ISBN 978-1987853087
