In Walking Through Mirrors, his second memoir, John Dominelli returns to the rooms, streets, train tracks, and creek beds of his childhood, tracing his life from a fraught birth in an immigrant household to the threshold of the three-year spiritual journey that he chronicled in his initial book, Words Between Worlds.The first Canadian-born son in a large Italian family, John watches as his parents' old world instincts collide with the new world of suburban Vancouver and learns to straddle both realities. Employing humor, insight, and a decidedly literary eye, John remembers it all-the dream that sent his father across the ocean; the fateful deception his mother crafted, so the family would follow; the raucous dinner table where myths, music, and Catholic terror mixed with laughter; the Port Coquitlam yards and creeks where an immigrant kid learned to be Canadian; and the odd, shimmering moments when a child first realizes he has a self and that time, death, faith, language, and desire are all mysteries to be explored. With a musician's ear and a comic's timing, he turns family legends and his own formative experiences into a bigger meditation on memory, belonging, and the meaning that threads itself through ordinary lives. Read more