Martha Brooks

Set in a Tuberculosis Sanitarium in rural Manitoba, Canada, the year 1947. The author constructs the book as a series of diary entries and letters. Signy, the protagonist in this book has been locked up as a TB patient for nine years, since the age of thirteen. It explores the thoughts and emotions of someone who has tasted life only through books and interactions with other patients but dreams of a better, richer life if she can ever get well and get released from the sanitarium. She meets a newspaper reporter, gets hired on as the paper's "Dear Miss Lovelorn' and sets about writing answers of avice to letters that the newspaper readers send in. Through all of this, she and the newspaper reporter fall in love.
It's all a bit of a stretch but is is a window into the horrible disease that was tuberculosis and the lives of the sanitarium patients.… (more)