Jardine Miller books are all 'CANADIAN MUST READS'. They don't provide magic cures or solutions to your problems. They do captivate, involve, enlighten and expand your horizons -- and they make great reading and discussion for book clubs.

From Ragged London to the Garden of Eden - Two children desperately try to keep their family together in a slum in Victorian Bromley-by-Bow. On their mother's death, they are taken to Annie Macpherson's House of Industry leaving their small sister and baby brother with their only relative. After spending the winter and spring in the relative comfort of Macpherson's 'Beehive', they sail for Canada with one of the early parties of children destined for life on Ontario farms. Apprehensive at first, as the years go by they both come to appreciate the fulfilling lives they are able to attain by taking the opportunities offered to them by the people who take them in.

The Family History - The parallels between her twenty-first century bereaved Canadian family and its mid-Victorian London counterpart become empathetically evident when Holly traces her family history through census records, and finds her imagination captured by glimpses into her ancestors’ lives in the crowded Thames-side streets and alleys.

Daffodil Dancing - Terri is having difficulty working for her sister-in-law in the family's store franchising operation and social anxiety is turning Alison into a recluse. The two buy a store franchise for themselves and with a lot of hard work turn it into the fast-growing Canadian chain's flagship store. But that is just the beginning of Alison's fight to free herself from fear...

Fate and Angus McGrath - Marilyn might break with tradition and refuse to bestow the traditional McGrath first name on either of her sons, but her brother-in-law is not so superstitious. His child's journey, through childhood ADHD and adolescent rebellion, teen prostitution and drug addiction, rehabilitation and relapse, to eventual maturity and a too-early death, continually surfaces to impact on the lives of all the McGraths.

The Lifeline Anxiety Disorder Newsletter Website is an information centre for people - and families of people - who suffer from the panic brought about by fears, anxieties and phobias.The newsletter was published for twenty years, beginning in 1994 when there was very little information available to the public on anxiety disorders. The website, developed in 1996, was one of the first dealing with the subject and remained the only one from Canada for many years.

Until the late 1970s all anxiety and panic-related disorders were grouped loosely together as neuroses. Panic attacks had begun to be recognized, during the sixties, as being triggered by something other than general chronic anxiety, but panic disorder did not become recognized as a specific condition until 1980. Agoraphobia was not even considered as being linked to anxiety disorders until the late 1980s.

Back in 1865 these conditions, previously referred to as nervous exhaustion, became classified as neurasthenia. By the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud was using the term anxiety neurosis but it was not until 1926 that he stopped attributing it to sexual repression. Between then and the late 1970s, various theories were put forth, but it was not until the 1990s that great advances were made, among them recognition of the fact that children have anxiety disorders. Two discoveries ended all the psychological theorizing on the causes of anxiety disorders, and enabled us to better understand their origins, by proving them to be biologically based. Serotonin levels were proven to impact upon mood, and the amygdala, part of the limbic system of the brain, was shown to be the brain's fear conditioning centre.

Today, cognitive-behavioural and exposure therapies, as well as medications, are continually being improved upon now that brain chemistry, memory programming and the genetics involved in anxiety disorders are so much closer to being understood.