The Pelee Project: One woman's escape from urban madness
by Jane Christmas
The day that Jane Christmas was in a car crash, her world changed.
Luckily, she was unhurt, but the near-death experience left her with a strong conviction: this was a wake up call.
As a long-time and devoted resident of Toronto, Jane was used to her fast paced modern life as a single mother and writer for the National Post.
However, following the accident, Jane began to wonder if there may be more to life than all that.
She believed that the accident was giving her a very clear and literal message to slow down, and she began to search for a way to escape the urban madness in which she found herself.
Jane's solution: find somewhere remote to spend the summer, living a slower, simpler life with her 10-year-old daughter.
She talked her employer at the Post into
letting her take a summer sabbatical, promising to write a series for the newspaper describing her experiences.
She found a cottage to rent in a little-known spot called Pelee Island the southernmost
populated point in Canada, located in the
western half of Lake Erie.
It was only by sheer fluke that Jane found out about Pelee Island, as it is not noted on most maps of Canada, and Jane herself had never in her life heard of the place, despite the fact that it is located a mere three hours from her
Toronto home.
During her time on Pelee, Jane first struggled with and then grew to love the people of the
island and the quiet simplicity of life there.
She chronicled her experience in a 15-part series originally published in the National Post while she was still living on Pelee.
The series was later adapted into a book, titled The Pelee Project: One woman's escape from urban madness.
This book tells of Jane's fascinating, heart-warming, and often humorous journey to adapt to life beyond the normal hustle and bustle of modern city life, and of her discovery of a new, more fulfilling kind of normal within a small
island community.
-- Reviewed by Teresa DeReis, reader's advisor at the Prince George Public Library
