Liv grew up in Elk Horn, Iowa where the tall corn grows and her Danish roots are proudly displayed in small communities and the Danish Immigrant Museum. She liked to point out her Danish heritage to her German-rooted relatives.

Her life is mundane and carefree until a family tragedy strikes when she is an adolescent. She goes to college at Northwestern, gets her degree, but can’t stand the thought of teaching music at an Iowa high school as a lifetime career.

She doesn’t want to end up as a wizened, shrewish spinster. She opts to join the Red Cross as a volunteer and ends up in Korea during the war where she has a torrid love affair with one of the Doctors.

The vitriolic racism in 1950s and 1960s America, the hypocrisy of the middle class, the plight of unwed mothers and the suffering of the mentally ill in our hospitals sculpt her deeply. Her connection to British Honduras later known as Belize, and her wedding to a kind, older English chap enable her to find happiness.

Throughout the book she is connected to Iowa through her mother and her high school boyfriend. Korean War chaos, Japanese pearl diving, Cuban underwater follies, and cave diving in Belize are just some of the adventures of this novel.

Dan Pedrick is a retired attorney and mental health judge. In his sixteen years of retirement he has driven for Meals on Wheels, played guitar and sung at senior living centers, tutored elementary school children, finished his third book and recorded 12 of his original songs on a CD entitled “So Many Lifetimes in One Life.

” He has traveled extensively during those years with his family, and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico near Old Town with his lovely wife Gayle and their impish black Brussels Griffon, Boris. They live near their two daughters of whom they are extremely proud.

Their family has been very blessed and they have tried to give back. .