Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
Paula Johanson’s foray into the realm of fantasy is given new life in the revised edition of Tower in the Crooked Wood. In Johanson’s own words, this book is “one story, as seen by one person, learning about her world.” (2015 interview)
About the Book
They were stolen in the dark to work for a night and a day, building a tower for the wizard Krummholz on faraway Copper Island, in a place where the trees grow twisted in a poisoned bog.
Some of the unwilling workers were returned bewildered, bruised and marked by whips—others died as the uncaring wizard called new workers to his tower. Now Jenia is the only one left of her family willing to leave her orchards and walk five hundred miles in search of her abductor, and the answers to questions burning inside her.
Why was she stolen out of the dark? What is wrong at the heart of the tower? And why does the magic twisting the very trees strike a strangely familiar note? All Jenia knows for sure is that she will not let herself be made a prisoner again, not by magic nor by force of arms. When a soldier tries to trap her in a lord’s garden, and a village of gentle people tell her to give up her hopeless quest, Jenia has to choose where to place her trust: in friends, in strength, or in the cunning in her own two hands.
And then the wizard Krummholz sends his call out again….
About the Author
For over twenty-five years, Paula Johanson has worked as a writer, teacher, and editor. Among her twenty-nine books on science, health, and literature the most recent are Love Poetry: How Do I Love Thee? (Enslow Publishers), What Is Energy? from the series Let’s Find Out! (Rosen Publishing), and the science fiction anthology Opus 6 (Reality Skimming Press). She also recently completed an MA in Canadian Literature at the University of Victoria.
Praise for the Book
“A wealth of realistic detail lends authenticity to this engrossing tale of a young arborist, ‘a scholar of trees.’ Paula Johanson has created a magical alternative world both mythic in feel, and hauntingly evocative of our own.” – Eileen Kernaghan
