The Vancouver Crown Prosecutor is still at her job some 20-odd-years later. Her choice was not the easiest route to take in the legal profession, because as she soon discovered, "The workload was unbelievable back in those days; on my worst day I had conduct of 12 criminal trials and one of the 12 had 17 witnesses!" She still finds her work presents challenges. "I'll never know it all. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it," she admitted. "I consistently love my colleagues, though, and they have a lot to do with why I'm still here."

Banning, it seems, likes challenges. Writing books for children who are just about to enter the teen years is not an easy task. She did not exactly set out to write her book, Out on a Limb, for the pre-teen plus crowd. It started years ago when her daughter was still very young and told her mother, "Wouldn't it be fun to live in a tree house." This prompted Banning to start a picture book about such a possibility, "but I never finished it. I couldn't finish anything non-essential in those days," Banning stated.

Some years later her daughter asked her what had happened to the tree-house books. "Because I was supposed to be modeling finishing-what-you-start, I had another go at the story, as a chapter book this time, since my kids had grown older." Banning finished the manuscript and "sent it off unsolicited to the publishing world." As is so often the case, she found herself facing publishers who considered the book, but "ultimately rejected it."

Obviously not someone who gives up easily, Banning revised her work after each rejection, "always writing for the ages that my kids were at the time." Fortunately, she managed to find an agent, who placed the book with Key Porter, "and my editor, Linda Pruessen, suggested that I aim for a 12-plus audience, which I was happy to do, because wouldn't you know it, my kids had gotten older still!!"

Banning said she is grateful for the earlier rejections of her book. "Otherwise, Out on a Limb would not have evolved into a book for older kids." Still, she also tried to create a story in its final version that appeals to smaller children, the ones she had originally in mind. "I do think that kids who are too young to read the book themselves would like hearing it read out loud." Having read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, I can certainly concur with this statement. Out on a Limb is the kind of story that can easily be read to inquisitive youngsters not yet able to read, especially if they have an adventurous mind.

Although some of the descriptions of climatic conditions and setting indicate that the story is set in Vancouver, Banning never says so in the story. "I mixed and matched parts of Vancouver for the setting. But I also left out important features of Vancouver, like the ocean and the mountains, because they were irrelevant to the story, and would have been lily-gilding. So it didn't seem quite right to call the setting Vancouver," she wrote back in her e-mail.