In an Emergency Librarian interview, Martha Brooks claims that "isolation gives you an artist's eye and makes you an observer because you feel as though you're really on the outside." She knows of what she speaks. Although she was born in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1944, Brooks lived the first seventeen years of her life on the grounds of the Manitoba Sanitarium for tuberculosis patients at Ninette, where her father, Alfred Leroy Paine, was the superintendent and chief surgeon. Her mother, Theodis (maiden name Marteinsson), also worked at the sanitarium, as a nurse. There were few other children in Ninette, and Brooks's older sister left the community for university when Brooks was nine. Brooks herself was ill for long periods as a child, but she found great comfort and pleasure in books, such as The Wind in the Willows, the Pooh books, and...