by J. Marshall (Author)
What if the path to healing your past begins with accepting your child for who they truly are?
Collective Souls is a powerful, fictionalized account of four women learning to reclaim their voices. Set in rural 1980s Canada, the story unfolds through interwoven narratives of the women as girls, grappling with poverty, displacement, and generational trauma-setting the stage for who they will become as mothers.
Each protagonist-fierce, flawed, and mother to an LGBTQ+ child-wrestles with where she fits: within her family, her community, and most of all, herself. All are determined to protect their children, even if it means facing truths that they have buried deep. This is a novel about motherhood as advocacy, about parenting not from perfection but from the desire to heal what you never had. It's about the shift from silent shame to finding your voice, from survival to agency.
With tenderness and grit, Collective Souls invites you into these women's kitchens, barns, bars, and backroads-and into the hearts of women learning, at last, to belong to themselves.