How can Enid move forward when her marriage, as well as the world she has known, simultaneously fall apart? In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, Enid Alger Kimble, protagonist of Bromwich’s first novel, Not Your Penance,seeks to reconcile with her past, and finds, through ruin, rebirth. Having returned to Canada and to work as a lawyer, Enid leaves her surgeon husband, Dr. Arthur Kimble. Trying to find healing and a purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother about which she has felt so ambivalent, Enid travels physically and metaphorically through the ruins of her marriage, the ruins of Classical Greece in the Aegean, and finally the remnants of her own prairie childhood. Enid undertakes a long overdue homecoming to accept the Blackfoot Nation’s offer of COVID 19 vaccinations, as she journeys into single parenting her five children. As far flung and diverse as the first novel in the series is claustrophobic and tense, Ruin offers fresh perspectives on law, midlife, mothering and divorce. It is a windswept, hope-filled story of reconciliation and redemption through the COVID 19 pandemic, midlife, law, and divorce.

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich has a B.A. (Hon.) in social/ cultural anthropology from the University of Calgary, an LL.B. and an LL.M. from Queen’s and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati. This book is adapted from her Ph.D. dissertation, which she completed at Carleton University, in the Department of Legal Studies. In her Ph.D. research, Rebecca is working towards an understanding of what insights from the field of critical studies and cultural theory of girls studies can bring to law and legal studies.Called to the Bar of Ontario in 2003, Rebecca works as a lawyer, and has previously researched and published in a variety of areas, including youth criminal justice law, law practice management and equality issues relating to women and members of other historically marginalized groups in the legal profession as well as contributing as author and co-editor to several Demeter Press anthologies. She is a Contract Instructor at Carleton’s Department of Law and Legal Studies, a PartTime Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, and a staff lawyer, legislation and law reform with the Canadian Bar Association. All views expressed in this book are hers alone and do not reflect the views of any organization with which she is or has ever been affiliated.

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