Eighteen-year-old Tillie Shantz is soon to be married to Simon Goudie, a spiritually intense young man from her Mennonite community in southwestern Ontario. When the young couple undergo their own transformative experiences, Tillie's interests start to wander to the outside world. Refusing one day to join her family at church, she stands alone, "feeling life tingle through her arms as she stretched them to some unknown compass point . . . in an ecstasy of well-being." Tillie wrestles with both the personal and spiritual consequences of her actions, eventually leaving the community to live in a nearby city, where she begins a forbidden relationship with a boy outside the Mennonite faith. Filled with heartbreak, tragedy, and loss, this is also a story of self-discovery and hope during a young woman's most formative years.

Author Luella Creighton, wife of historian Donald Creighton, had one foot in the Mennonite community through her troubled relationship with her stepmother. She published High Bright Buggy Wheels in 1951, presenting a fascinating look inside the Ontario Mennonite community. Through characters who live insular yet spiritually connected lives, Creighton wonderfully depicts the deep sense of belonging and community underneath the arduous work and ongoing sense of distrust. Her writing can be considered a predecessor to the works of Miriam Toews, Barbara Smucker, and Rudy Wiebe. The Wynford edition is introduced by Cynthia Flood, award-winning writer and daughter of the author.

Luella Creighton's profile page

Cynthia Flood’s stories have won numerous awards, including The Journey Prize and National Magazine awards, and have been widely anthologized. Her novel Making a Stone of the Heart was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Prize in 2002. She is the author of the acclaimed short story collections The Animals in Their Elements (1987) and My Father Took a Cake to France (1992). She lives on Vancouver’s East side.

Cynthia Flood's profile page

"Through delicate and skilled characterization, Mrs. Creighton portrays the conflict between pure though narrow goodness and the spiritual happiness of rejoicing in all beauty." --Ethel Sealy, reviewer

"As I laid the book aside, I wondered at the power of its author and felt strangely stirred and proud that a Canadian woman had written a novel of such merit." --Gertrude Green, editor

"Mrs. Creighton has surmounted the dangers and difficulties of her subject with great skill, partly because she has concentrated on character rather than on theme. Her story is intensely interesting and alive." --Roderick Kennedy, editor

"Sensitively written, this moving story of separation, estrangement, and reconciliation between a Mennonite patriarch and his daughter is all the more poignant because the author shows deep and sympathetic understanding of both the old and the new. The problem, while sharpened by its localization, is in fact universal." --J.D. Robins, author

"Creighton has much skill as a story-teller; this book . . . [is] hard to put down." --Canadian Forum

"The Mennonites are not peculiar to the district Luella Creighton knows; in an exaggerated form they are the non-conformists of Ontario, and what has happened to them has happened to all of us who have moved from the country to the city. We have all been lured to George's drugstore or suffered the awful fate of Simon. To me this is as near to being the novel about the Ontario our generation knows as we are likely to have." --Harold Innis, author and economist

"This is a very interesting first novel. The story itself holds the reader, but the fresh and vital characters give the greatest promise for the author's future as a novelist." --Malcolm W. Wallace, professor emeritus, University of Toronto

"Competent handling of idiom and background throws into relief characters who live on in the mind when the book is reluctantly closed." --Edith Honey, librarian