Paging through The Sketchbook is like opening a time capsule into a period of both deep affection and deprivation for the author and her family. The book is based on fact as told from the perspective of the artist's daughter, who is the keeper of the sketches and love letters, now becoming more fragile as time passes. Highlighted are the years many Germans and Italians spent in internment camps in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the Second World War. The loss of her father set the author's family, her mother and brother, on a trajectory of homelessness, tempered by the resolute determination of the mother to have her children succeed against these odds.