Silver River Shadow

Written by Jane Thomas

Illustrations by Sarah Jane Dock

The beginning is the moment before it all goes wrong…

In 1946, Barney and Marion Lamm climbed into their two-seater plane and flew deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness. Then one day the wonderful life they created was ripped apart.

Over seventy years later, their great-granddaughter Lizzie follows in their footsteps. Nobody ever tells Lizzie anything. Her mother’s dead and her father’s hiding in his work. Determined to know her family history, the truths she uncovers are laced with dangerous secrets

Nobody must be allowed to know what happened. And nobody wants to take the blame.

Staring in front of her, Lizzie faces a long boring summer holiday,  after starting on her school summer project to research her family’s roots Lizzie befriends Bobby , and together they set about discovering Lizzie’s family history, they uncover old letters that lead to a mystery that needs solving.

 Their adventure explores mercury poisoning and its impact on native people.

This is a true story and the effects on the people involved.

I love how alot of research went into this book, and reading this you can tell this, you can also tell that the author really cares about these people and she wanted to get everything right for the memories of the people involved.

I’d never heard of mercury poisoning so I found this really interesting,reading this you can tell the author really knows what she is talking about. After reading this I found myself on Google, finding out more information.

There are little side stories that are happening at the same time, Lizzie’s father is always so busy and she feels alone a lot of the time.  Her mother died when she was a baby and wonders a lot about her and wishes her father would talk about her.

Bobby,her new friend latches on to her , he is also lonely with a lot of family pressure, helping on the family farm, awaiting a new sibling. These two seem to blend well together and I feel they need each other.

Bobby seems to surprise Lizzie with how much he knows. I loved Bobby and he was my favourite character.

This is an amazing read and I’m looking forward to Jane’s next book.

I was lucky enough to have spoken a lot to Jane via email and you can tell how passionate she is. I asked her to write a piece for the blog and I was lucky enough to have received this.

It was one of those interactions that immediately felt as if it would lead me somewhere exciting.

Rochelle was bursting with stories and came with a ready supply of whip-smart comments. We met a few times, exchanging ideas and experiences, but it wasn’t until lockdown – when we both had a chance to be still for the first time in what somehow felt like forever – that the real discussions began.

“I want to tell my family’s story,” she said. “And I want you to write it for me.”

And so, with her perched on her porch in Los Angeles and me curled up by the fireside in France – my sips of wine matching hers of coffee – she told me. She told me about her father, Barney, and his obsession with flying. She told me how, after the war, he gathered up his new wife and together they flew to the heart of the Canadian wilderness. She told me how, with the help of the local indigenous community, the Ojibway, they created Canada’s finest hunting and fishing lodge of its generation.

Politicians, sports stars, even Mafia bosses turned up at Ball Lake Lodge. Rochelle grew up there alongside her sisters, a place made magical by its very remoteness and the generosity of her parents.

But then, she told me, it all went wrong. In the 1960s a paper mill started pouring tonnes of mercury into one of the most pristine river systems in the world: upstream from Ball Lake, the fish that the rich and famous came to catch didn’t take long to reach a point where they contained dangerous levels of mercury.

Rochelle sent me articles and documents, painstakingly gathered by her parents. The government tried to cover up the environmental disaster, unwilling to lose the tourist revenue derived from the lodge and dozens of others in the area. It was Barney who insisted on flying in experts from

Minimata in Japan, the place of known industrial mercury poisoning that had devastating consequences to both the environment and the human population. It was Barney who insisted on closing the lodges, saying it wasn’t safe for the Ojibway staff. It was Barney who, made unpopular by his demands and investigations, was hung in effigy in the local town.

The story rumbled on for half a century. A few people poked around with it here and there. Some scientists tried to offer suggestions and solutions. Meanwhile, the local Ojibway community was destroyed: their jobs were gone, their land was unsafe, and they had all consumed dangerous quantities of mercury for what was now generations.

It wasn’t hard to get me on board, to be honest. The more I researched and the more I heard, the more my heart broke for a group of people I had never met – and would in all likelihood never have heard of if it hadn’t been for Rochelle reaching out.

Two characters were born, Lizzie and Bobby, and my determined, stubborn, kind and adventurous creations set off to uncover the truth of the mercury poisoning. At its heart, ‘Silver River Shadow’ bears all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned adventure story: I grew up on a diet of ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Swallows and Amazons’, after all. But what they uncover is truly significant, and it’s unbelievably important that children around the world have access to this story. The last fifty years have shown that people currently wielding all the power simply don’t care enough to make a difference; we need to show children what can happen, why this happened, and how to ensure it never happens again.

Lizzie and Bobby became a significant part of my lockdown life. I spent so much time with them that they insisted they should appear in more books – and so they shall. The sequel will come out a year to the day after ‘Silver River Shadow’ was first published. On 8 th August 2023, ‘Whispers of a Million Elephants’ sees my daring duo head to a different corner of the world on yet another adventure that inadvertently spills them into the path of very real yet very hidden truths.

The ‘Little Yellow Plane Adventure’ series will continue for as long as I have stories to tell – and after two decades travelling the world, living and working in some obscure corners, there is a lot to be revealed.

I hope young readers take away from these books the spirit of adventure, the sense that there is always something new to uncover, and the reality that anyone – however small, however isolated, however insignificant they may feel – can have a huge impact on the world. It just takes being interested in others and a determination to leave things a little better than you found them. I think that’s all anyone can hope for, to be honest. To know that, as a result of living, we have given more than we have taken. The stories reveal some of the world’s darkest secrets, ones that many politicians and leaders would love to keep buried. But ultimately, I believe, they are stories of optimism, survival and hope. They’re needed. They’re important. And they’re cracking.