Robin and her Animal Friends: Adventures in Long Term Care

When Robin's world becomes smaller, her imagination opens the door to somewhere much larger.

After two broken hips leave Robin living in long-term care and her memory begins to fade, Anne creates stories to entertain and comfort her. Into those stories come a lively collection of stuffed-animal friends, each with a personality of its own-and before long, Robin and her companions are setting off on adventures together.

There is Denis the Dog, with his humorous verses and observations; Cloudy the Snow Leopard; Lumb the Lamb; Blind Bunny; Ears; and an ever-growing company of remarkable friends. Their journeys take them far beyond Robin's room, from the Himalayas to the Baja Peninsula and into a world where animals talk, unexpected things happen, and even an elephant may suddenly become very small.

Some adventures grow from places Anne and Robin actually travelled; others spring entirely from imagination. Along the way are encounters with nature, celebrations and birthdays, small discoveries about the world, and the pleasures-and occasional complications-of friendship.

Yet beneath the playfulness lies something deeper. These stories grew out of Anne's determination to remain connected with the woman she loved as Robin's recollection diminished. Told with simplicity, humour, tenderness, and a delight in the absurd, they became a shared world in which Robin could continue to participate, laugh, wonder, and belong.

Robin and her Animal Friends is therefore more than a collection of whimsical animal adventures. It is a book about companionship, kindness, memory, imagination, and the many forms that caring can take.

Warm, eccentric, and deeply affectionate, it invites readers of any age into Robin's extraordinary little world-where a stuffed animal is never necessarily just a stuffed animal, and another adventure is always waiting to begin.