"Dora Dueck outdoes herself with every book that she writes. I marvel at her craft. Every word counts and every trope (like the one in the title!) illuminates the territory. This is the kind of writing that invites a reader to slow down, to savour the beauty while pondering the intersections of history and poetry. Dora Dueck is surely one of Canada's finest writers of both fiction and creative non-fiction." --Magdalene Redekop, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto "The essays show an exacting, determined, frame of mind. And they illustrate that, like Rudy Wiebe in Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest , Dora Dueck will use the materials of her youth, her culture, her faith as ingredients for the ideas that have been visiting her since her youth.The reader will do well to look for undulating motion in the essays.

There's a dance between then and now, certainty and uncertainty, wondering and knowing, the author's story and the story of others in her life, and between places and landscapes in Canada and in Paraguay.This is a book to savor. Read it carefully, the way it was created. I am quite sure, if you do, that you too will feel jolts of insight." --Shirley Showalter, author of Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World "Dora Dueck's Return Stroke: essays & memoir is a gift. If there is one word to encompass the collection it is integrity--intellectual, spiritual, emotional and something else, something to do with a blend of steadiness and risk, a vibrancy in containment, a clarity without melancholy. A must-read for those interested in Mennonite history, to be sure, this collection expands our thinking and merits a vast readership and new admirers. Former Winnipegger Dueck threads in references to a wide range of thinkers and writers, drawing on invigorating debates among biographers, theologians, feminists, historians and fellow fiction writers.

Reading Return Stroke engenders the best kind of stillness: we are thinking and often feeling, but in concert with our intellect, alert to the act of reading itself. May Dueck be assured that the return stroke, that lightning flash back between her words and her readers, will be achieved many times over; a gift from her and our good fortune in turn." --Sara Harms, Winnipeg Free Press.