Book Reviews by J. Patrick Boyer

The Villages of Muskoka

Port Sydney Past –George H. Johnson
Windermere –Richard Tatley
Rosseau: The Early Years –Rosseau Historical Society
Rosseau: Then and Now –Rosseau Historical Society

Many Muskoka villages are blessed with local histories describing their colourful stories, courageous families, good fortunes, and tragic twists from 1800s settlement to recent times.

Richard Tatley, the Gravenhurst historian widely known for his books on Muskoka's steamboats, turned his assiduous attention to a village which came into existence thanks to steamboat traffic and in 1999 published the results of his researches in Windermere: The Jewel of Lake Rosseau.

Theatrical Muskoka glows in the spotlight

The Many Stages of Our Lives –Joe Stratford
Straw Hats and Greasepaint: 50 Years of Theatre in the Summer Colony. The Actors’ Colony Story, 1934–1942 –Scott McClellan

Behind the stage sets of Muskoka's long-running theatre scene are many additional dramas and plots. A number of Muskoka authors share these back-stage sagas and off-stage adventures in the course of telling the remarkable tale of how legitimate theatre has assumed many forms within Muskoka from the district's inception.

Tom Thomson books

Tom Thomson's bold renditions of northern scenes connect Canadians to a more heroic image of ourselves and our country. Thomson's inspiration led his artist friends to form the Group of Seven, the most important school in the evolution of Canadian painting. His controversial death at Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake in 1917 endures as Canada's greatest mystery.

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Bala

A Love Story of the North Woods

Jack Hutton and Linda Jackson-Hutton

Bala boasts a museum celebrating best-selling Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Created by Jack and Linda Hutton, this museum for the world-renowned writer was inspired during their honeymoon in PEI, when they discovered the place overrun by tour buses to L.M. Montgomery shrines. The couple seized upon the fact it was in Muskoka, at Bala, where Montgomery summered in 1922 and wrote My Blue Castle.

Tree Fever

Karen Hood-Caddy

Muskoka's pioneer days pitted loggers against settlers but tree wars and land-use conflicts are hardly a thing of the past. Anyone dismayed by recent eyesores of clear-cutting knows the fever that caused Jessie Dearborn to place her own body between beloved century-old trees and a condominium developer's rapacious chainsaw.