Telling the stories of those who cannot speak for themselves.
Andrea Thalasinos
Born and raised in New York, Andrea would secretly feed and care for stray dogs, hoping to keep them hidden behind the building away from her Greek parents who were not keen on animals.
After taking a creative writing class in high school, she began to skip class and hitchhike to the beach to sit beside the ocean and write.
Andrea completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in Sociology of Art and remembers telling a friend, “Glad that’s over with, now I can learn to write fiction and get a dog.” She compares the excavation of history and forgotten peoples to “discovering diamonds in places where no one would suspect there are stories to tell.”
Currently, Andrea lives in Madison, Wisconsin along with her two Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers.
Making the connections between animals and people.
Evocative
Giving words to the emotional connection we have with our animals.
Genuine
Drawing on her own life experience as an owner and dogsled musher of 6 huskies.
Inspirational
Andrea’s characters overcome great challenges.
Book Details
Andrea’s debut novel is an inspiring story of how a single act of kindness can transform many lives.
Rosalie MacKenzie is headed nowhere fast until she spots Smokey, a Siberian Husky suffering from neglect. Rosalie drums up the courage to rescue the animal, but it comes at a price greater than she’d anticipated but not greater than the bond of love that forms between them.
Rosalie and Smokey become immersed in the world of competitive dogsled racing. Her days are filled with training runs, the woosh of runners on snow and the stark beauty of rural Wisconsin when she discovers that behind the modern sport lies a tragic history of the Chukchi People of Siberia. In 1929 when Stalin’s Red Army displaced the Chukchi People, many were killed, others lost their homeland as well as their beloved Guardians—the dogs that were the soul of their people and way of life.
Alternating between past and present, An Echo Through the Snow tells of a struggling Chukchi family and a young woman discovering herself. An Echo Through the Snow takes readers on a gripping and profound dogsled ride on a journey of survival and healing.
Book Details
On the day that marine biologist Amelia Drakos receives word from the National Science Foundation that she’s lost funding for her beloved Seahorse Laboratory in Rhode Island, she also learns that her deceased father might have lived a double life.
With foreclosure and unemployment looming, along with fallout from a brief, confusing love affair, Amelia reluctantly accepts a job offer as curator for Minnesota’s Mall of America Sea Life Aquarium. And while it’s both a professional and personal fall from grace for the scientist, her misfortune is followed by a string of perplexing emails that arrive from Ted Drakos, a man with the same name as her late father who claims to be her half-brother. Amelia is skeptical as Ted mentions that he needs to meet with her to discuss information regarding an inherited property on Lake Superior.
When Amelia and Bryce, her long-time friend and lab partner drive in a snowstorm to check out the property they find two-week-old, orphaned wolf pups struggling to survive under a dilapidated porch. With no other choice, Amelia reluctantly contacts Ted Drakos, a wildlife biologist who lives nearby. He shows her how to care for the pups and Amelia opts to bring them back to Minneapolis where they introduce chaos into her already wobbly life.
With both of her parents gone and no other siblings, Amelia leaves the Mall Aquarium in Minneapolis and moves north to the inherited property near Ted. She becomes enthralled by the Northwoods, the diversity of wildlife and the chilling lonely howls of local wolfpacks as they call for lost relatives. As she reaches out to Ted, he proves to be a difficult character. Though gruff and rude with scores to settle that predate Amelia, she is undaunted and persists despite his manner. As Amelia nurses the wolf pups along, her training as a scientist enables her to see the looming environmental crisis that reinstatement of the wolf hunt would wreak on the delicate balance of the area’s wolf packs as well as the fragile ecosystem of the Northwoods.
While she joins forces with Ted against local poachers when the political debate rages, Amelia, and her older brother tangle with the personal issues of identity, abandonment, and she wonders if they can ever reconcile their father’s deception and find peace with each other. In Fly by Night Amelia and Ted grapple with the realization that resistance is often strongest precisely because something new is about to be born.
Book Details
Paula Makaikis is as bewildered by her marriage as she is by a puzzling set of events. Pushed out of the bedroom by husband Roger’s compulsive hoarding, Paula’s spent years sleeping alone downstairs on a ratty sofa. Feeling uninspired by everything, including her job as a Demographer at New York University, Paula is more enlivened by feeding the house sparrows, goldfinches and mourning doves that land on the ledge of her office window than she is by new revelations contained in a data set, that is, until a phone call from her best friend Celeste changes everything.
Celeste, a New York City social worker, urges her to come translate for a homeless elderly Greek man who is dying at a Queens hospital. The man is distressed and afraid for Fotis his dog who bit one of the police officers as the ailing man was being loaded into an ambulance. He reveals strange and unsettling information from Paula’s childhood that knocks her off-guard as he exacts her promise to find the dog. Stunned by the encounter, she searches the shelters and finds the dog. As Fotis enters her life, she takes a break from her confusing marriage, demanding job and leaves on an eight-week leave of absence to drive West.
While parked at a roadside rest stop in Northern Minnesota to let Fotis out, she randomly picks up a discarded newspaper and, on a lark, answers a classified ad for a wildlife rehabilitation specialist. Hard up for good help, Rick, the director, reluctantly agrees to hire her on a temporary basis. On her first day while holding an eagle as the director of the Center begins its treatment for lead poisoning, Paula realizes that there’s nothing else she’d rather do. Soon she’s joined in Grand Marais, Minnesota by her mother Eleni, who confesses to having been fired the previous week when the woman’s failing eyesight caused her to make a costly mistake on the job with the NYC furrier she’s worked for since her arrival in the United States. It’s then that the mother-daughter relationship begins to blossom. Her mother befriends Sigmund, an amorous turkey vulture along with many of the townspeople and as Eleni settles in to live in the Northwoods, she shares a revelation about the identity of the deceased elderly man and his dog. After Roger lures Paula back to New York after eight weeks with promises of having gotten help, against her better judgement, Paula toys with believing him.
Traveling Light is an inspiring story about fate, family, and forgiveness. It explores what is possible when we cut the burdensome ties that weigh us down so that our hearts are free to soar.