Making a Stone of the Heart by Cynthia Flood (Key Porter) is about history too: the history of Vancouver, a city that is generally thought to have been born yesterday. Compared to our eastern neighbours like Ottawa, Toronto and Halifax, Vancouver can seem shiny and new, but Making a Stone of the Heart takes us back to a time when a man who wanted to leave town undetected had to struggle through underbrush and steal a rowboat so that he could paddle across Burrard Inlet to the North Shore. The story is written in several voices, and it moves around in time (from 19 to 1987) and place (among several Vancouver neighbourhoods) as it follows Dora Dow and Owen Jones, two of the most cantankerous and enjoyable characters I’ve ever met in a book, through their overlapping lives. The complex story structure kept me on my toes, and in the end I was rewarded with a many-layered picture of both early Vancouver and the people who lived there.