By reading this small, beautifully bound, book, you will experience part of the personal life of Caterina Edwards and her mother, Rosa. Caterina, a childhood immigrant to Canada (with her English father and her Istrian/Venetian mother), has been rejected and misunderstood by her mother all her life. Rosa, who life has displaced from her childhood home of Istria, the from her young adult place in Venice, to England as a war bride, and then to the Canadian prairies, is not known by her daughter. Rosa’s Allzheimer’s disease causes her to lose her memory, and caring for her mother causes Caterina to begin to look for the truth of her mother’s life. Caterina’s journey takes the reader into the land of mothers and daughters, through the land of Rosa’s childhood, into one family’s experience of the damage of two World Wars, and to the beginning of a search for the truth of Istria’s history, where, like damaged brain cells, many official records have been destroyed. Every chapter rewards the reader with new understandings of mothers, of childhood, of immigration, of the personal experience of the Balkanization of Europe... The personal becomes political in a very moving, and simply told way. The simplicity and clarity of the style holds a rewarding depth of feeling, understanding, and peace. Despite the cliché, Finding Rosa is a joy to read.

Caterina Edwards' new book, FINDING ROSA, is an astonishingly candid account of the author's search for her mother's past while bearing witness to the wretched corrosion and disintegration of her mother's present. The insidious and odious disease of Alzheimer's robs Edwards of the opportunity to finally indulge in a desire to ask about the unknown details of her mother's life. As is often the case, Edwards realizes it is just when we are ready to look back upon lives lived that we find roadblocks that make our search for answers difficult, if not impossible: people become ill, people die. As she reminds us a couple of times in the book :"The death of an old man or woman is the destruction of a library." When her father dies and her mother is disgnosed with the disease, Edwards realizes she has come to that point. As she says in her prologue, "As I observed my mother's mind, then her body, fail, I began to want to know her, Rosa Pia Pagan Edwards - to know the woman she used to be.
In this remarkable book, however, Edwards does not let her mother's disability impede her struggle to piece together history - both personal family history and the history of her mother's people: the Italians of Istria. Thus, FINDING ROSA, becomes not only the accounting of a mother's decline into Alzheimer's but also and perhaps foremost a book of history.

As always, mother/daughter relationships can be difficult - this one is no different. Caterina Edwards paints an honest, many times painful, picture of the struggle between a daughter determined to do the right thing despite difficult circumstances and a very ill, very unhappy mother as she deteriorates further in her illness. The author does not paint herself as a saint but these must have been very trying times and the temptation to give up very strong. This is beautifully written, often riveting and completely heartfelt.

This book should be put forward for and win many awards. It is a beautifully written and moving memoir of trying to recover the lost history of a displaced people and of the writer's struggles with her mother's losses Alzheimers. The combination works so well here because it is in the hands of a very fine, thoughtful, and honest wordsmith. And it has universal appeal because the circumstances, alas, reflect the experience of people from many lands, and of those struggling as care givers for others with terminal or otherwise incapacitating illnesses.
Edwards may have encouraged us to discover Istria as a tourist destination too. I'd love to visit those islands having had a taste of the region in this memoir.
Producers take note, please: this memoir has film potential too.
Well worth reading and memorable.