Scent from Above
Little Patti Post has just been adopted by a disillusioned railroad engineer, a fainthearted homemaker and a slightly derailed, older brother. Add a collection of rural relatives, a knot of uneducated educators, a gaggle of ghosts, a witch or two, and a dutiful doctor who diagnoses her rare psychic ability to smell people's secrets as a form of epilepsy, and you have the prescription for a spellbinding memoir. Patti has arrived back on the Earthly Plane, for the twelfth time, with a sarcastic sense of humour and the energy and determination of a lone ant at a church picnic. At seventeen, attempting to escape the monotony of a one-caboose Canadian railway town, she marries an American soldier who convinces her that he will die if he returns to Vietnam. It's no surprise that more than the ice cracks up in the spring of 1979, when after being buried for a decade in the Big Snowbank at the top of the world, her little family is suddenly forced to head south. After regrouping, more spellbinding surprises are in store for Patti as she picks up on the scent of her biological beginnings