This is a lively and touching act of memory and affirmation, as vivid, theatrical and perceptive as Granirer's paintings themselves. It shows both an artist's eye for the telling detail and a historian's awareness of social and political context. Despite life's vicissitudes, she retains a freshness and sense of wonder as we travel from her origins in a tumultuous Europe through army service in Israel to her eventual place of safety and fulfilment among like-minded friends in Canada. --Max Wyman, Critic and cultural commentator

Pnina Granirer takes us deep within a child's revelations of wonderment and beauty that have not deserted the artist almost a lifetime later. From our privileged vantage we experience through her remarkable journey the power of an artist's ceaseless investigation of the world without and within. The reader is carried by the emotion of what is here a constant interplay of immediate perception, remembrance and the dream-like yearning that singularly marks the human consciousness. --Salem Alaton, Humber College Professor of Journalism, Former Globe and Mail New York arts correspondent

We see her grow from humble beginnings as an illustrator in Israel into a prolific artist in Canada. The tug of war that family and career represent for women is vividly expressed in these pages. She shares her moments of doubt and uncertainty with the reader, as well as her decision to follow her own course, regardless of the cost.

The memoir comes full circle when she returns to Romania after an absence of 65 years and her three wishes are fulfilled.

Pnina Granirer's exhibition Legends showcased the series Medea and The Cannibal Bird Suite at our museum since July 2017. --Natalia Fernández, Director Museum Fundación Eugenio Granell Santiago de Compostela, Spain

For me, the standouts of the book are its moments of graphic memory, some sensory, some sensationally sad and curious. After confiscating her father's library of leather-bound books, a Nazi official has them stacked on the shelves in his office, not to be read, but to make them look good and him important. A fabulous black woman, Lulu Belle, staring at me out of a surreal drawing across the counter of her antique curio shop in Urbana, Illinois.

Although Pnina Granirer calls the book her "visual diary," many fine, sensory turns of phrase lingered after I finished reading it . . . "the perfume of pencils," for example. Anyone who can come up with that and revive my own memories of inkwells and my wooden desk and lead (graphite) in the pencil I held between my childish fingers has me involved with all five senses in her life story. --George McWhirter Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, University of British Columbia, author of numerous works of fiction

Judy Chicago's statement that no woman artist can ever make it big if she has a family resonated and propelled Granirer into her most ambitious work so far.... each step in Granirer's career is illustrated with her work -- from the drawings she made of places and people in Israel and the midwest to the ambitious paintings of her final period. The visual component adds a rich dimension to this artist's account of living and creating through eight decades of monumental upheaval and change. --Joan Givner, BC BookWorld

This thoughtful and fascinating memoir would appeal to anyone interested in the creative life and how it was lived by one gifted and determined artist through the vicissitudes of the 20th century and into the 21st. --Graham Good, Professor Emeritus of English, University of British Columbia, author of The Observing Self