Lorina Stephens
Lulu Publishing
ISBN 978-1-4303-1789-0
158 pages
Trade Paperback
$24.95 Retail Price

What makes Recipes of a Dumb Housewife (RoaDH) different from the plethora of celebrity and health-wise cookbooks is that it’s the Everyman’s cookbook with a pinch of quirk.

Lorina Stephens, author of RoaDH declares herself a simple domestic cook. But don’t mistake simple for dull or even dumb. Her cooking philosophy is simple ingredients treated simply, working in harmony with the demands of flavour, quality, nutrition and the demands of time and budget.

While treating her readers to such wonderful recipes as: Green Goo Pasta, Eggs Lorina, and I Capezzolo di Venere (Nipples of Venus), she offers a light-hearted window into her world through delightful, and often insightful anecdotes about her journey not only to the recipe, but raising a family, juggling career and domestic responsibilities as well as health issues.

Lorina Stephens has written the Everyman’s cookbook.

Cable 6 News

Full of great kid- and family-tested recipes!

Cheryl Weedmark

A Channel Morning

Recipes of a Dumb Housewife – catchy title, yummy dishes…. With this possible inspiration maybe families as well as individuals will try and get away from fast food and boxed food.

Matthew Uhrig

The (Hanover) Post

Don’t let the name fool you. There’s nothing dumb about this housewife. Or the cookbook. Peppered between some tried and true recipes are anecdotes about life and family and stories about the recipes.

Joanne Shuttleworth

Guelph Mercury

Lulu Publishing

ISBN 978-1-4303-1294-9

252 pages

Trade Paperback

$18.50 Retail Price

In a sea of American literature comes the truly Canadian voice of Lorina Stephens, author of Shadow Song, the fourth publication and first novel of this Ontario born and raised author. Written in the tradition of Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint, Shadow Song is set amid the economic ruin that occurred to so many émigrés and British pensioned officers of the 1830s. It is full of psychological and cultural contrasts of two cultures at odds with one another, and an intimate familiarity with the geography of the novel, from the immigrants’ miserable landing stage at Grosse Isle into the dark reaches of Superior’s North Shore.

Danielle Michele Fleming, daughter of a French aristocratic mother, and the second son of English gentry, finds herself caught in the economic ruin that surrounds the failure of the Bourbon Monarchy. Without the surety of her mother’s lands in France, Danielle’s uncle forecloses on loans he holds for his brother. Her privileged life erodes into abject poverty and orphan. She finds herself aboard ship, destined for the Queen’s Bush of Upper Canada and a life with the catalyst of her doom, her uncle, Edgar Fleming.

Burdened by guilt of her visions and the mortal sin they represent, life on the edge of the pioneer village of Hornings Mills creates for her a world of fear, pain and eventually flight into the very soul of what she has been taught is evil – that of the pagan society of Upper Canada’s native people. She seeks sanctuary with the shaman Shadow Song only to find herself hunted by her uncle. She seeks family among her adopted clan only to find herself ostracized once she reaches womanhood. She seeks love, which is realized with Shadow Song, only to have it torn from her as all else, and once again, through the long arm of her uncle. Relentless in his hunt for her, he has her tracked not only by bounty hunters, but in the end through another shaman of evil intent and a blood-debt to settle with Shadow Song.

Reviews

Lorina Stephens has proven herself an engaging author.

The (Hanover) Post

The book, Shadow Song is as diverse as the woman who wrote it.

Susan Doolan
The Barrie Examiner

Lorina’s career as a writer spans 27 years, with book publication credits of Shadow Song and Recipes of a Dumb Housewife, published by Lulu Publishing, and Touring the Giant’s Rib: A Guide to the Niagara Escarpment, and Credit River Valley, published by Boston Mills Press;

She has had several short fiction pieces appear in Canada’s acclaimed On Spec magazine and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s fantasy anthology Sword & Sorceress X.

She has worked as editor, freelance journalist for Canadian national and regional print media, been a festival organizer, publicist, lectures on many historical topics from textiles to domestic technologies, teaches, and continues to work as a writer, artist and textile conservator.

Lorina lives with her husband of three-plus-decades, and two cats, in a historic stone house in Neustadt, Ontario.

Lorina is available for book signings, readings and lectures.

How to Purchase

Available online directly from the author at: Five Rivers
Chapters

W.H.Smith
Lulu
in-store at Chapters, Barrie
in-store at Chapters, Guelph
in-store at Smith Books, Owen Sound
in-store at BookLore, Orangeville
in-store at Millennia Books, Hanover