Little By Little

by Dawn Davis

Overview

Dilys Frank is adrift in her grief. A tough and capable young woman, recent circumstance has spilled the wind from her sails, and she now finds herself gambling away her nights and wasting her days behind the counter of an unlicensed pharmacy on Church Street one of many shady ventures run by her father.

When she is summoned to the house on Rose Park Avenue, she is drawn into something she had once considered a flight of fancy-a wild tale born of her father's love of gin. Through a quaint architectural folly, the tower of the house on Rose Park holds the key to doors unimagined, and drawn through them, Dilys unwittingly finds herself on the streets of pre-Civil War Buffalo, where her wits and determination will help her redefine her purpose, affording her an opportunity for love and possibly even redemption.

Little by Little is the third book of the Tower Room series. The series began with The Tree of Life and was followed by Falling, which was a Foreword Indies Finalist in the Adult Fantasy category in 2017.

Look for the fourth and final book in the Tower Room series: There is Something I Forgot to Tell You, coming soon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781525555275
Publisher:	FriesenPress
Publication date:	11/06/2019
Series:	Tower Room
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dawn Davis was born in Chicago, Illinois and moved to Canada when she was nineteen. She lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario.
For more information, please visit: www.towerroomseries.com.

Editorial Reviews

2019-12-19
In this third book in her Tower Room fantasy series, Davis (Falling, 2017, etc.) takes her Canadian protagonist from 1920s Toronto to 1850s Buffalo, New York, right in the middle of an Underground Railroad escape.It's 1929, and Dilys Frank feels exhausted and spiritually empty. Once a nurse for Toronto General Hospital, she now lazily keeps the doors open at the unlicensed Makeshift Pharmacy on behalf of her father, Gus Frank, a gambling photographer, con artist, and thief.Her stress about her father's shady activities is exacerbated by the recent loss of her baby daughter, Pearl, who was born out of wedlock and lived only a few short weeks. When Gus invites her to his home to show her evidence of his previous time travel, Dilys is skeptical and angry. But when she snoops around the magical tower room, it takes her on her own adventure—landing her in Buffalo in 1850. Once there, she meets Caleb Breneman, a kindly Quaker who needs a nurse to attend a wounded child whom he's helping along the Underground Railroad. She quickly discovers that she's not a slave, but the disguised white daughter of a plantation owner named Caroline, who fled with her young friend, a slave named Jackson. When Caroline's father comes to town, the need to secret the children away to Canada becomes more urgent. Over the course of the novel, Davis presents a story that's well written, well researched, and features an intriguing central conflict. Although this installment in the series may easily be read as a stand-alone novel, readers will get helpful context if they start from the beginning; the time-travel device, for example, ties the overarching story together, but it's hardly explained here. Also, some readers may find the white-savior narrative structure, which puts Dilys at the heart of a slave-rescue story, to be distasteful. Overall, though, the novel does effectively manage to bring some historical injustices to light.

An often engaging novel with a touch of magic, hampered by a problematic trope at its center.

Kirkus Reviews