Shortlisted for the Whistler Book Awards

After releasing Within This Darkness in February, I began to keep my eyes open for contests where the book might do well, and I entered Within in several contests throughout spring 2025.
And one date I marked on my calendar was June 3 - which was when the Whistler Independent Book Awards were to announce their shortlist. And I'm happy (ecstatic) to point out the following:

Yay!  :)
Honestly, I'm truly thrilled about this. Thank you so much to the folks at WIBA!
Whistler lumps young adult fiction in with general (adult) fiction  - so presumably it is a fairly big category with lots of entries, so I am sincerely thrilled to have made the fiction shortlist.
The book is doing fairly well on Goodreads, and one review that caught my eye recently was one which seemed to recognize the "Canadian landscape" feeling that I hoped would be a deep presence in Within This Darkness, with echoes of the old Farley Mowat young adult classics. 
This is part of Emily's review on May 2, 2025, on Goodreads:
And then there is the setting—a deeply Canadian novel that embraces its landscape, its isolation, its quiet, lingering histories. The forests aren’t just a backdrop; they breathe life into the story, shaping its tension and atmosphere with a raw, untamed energy. Tomasini writes with a reverence for the land, his prose infused with the spirit of old stories passed down through time. 

Thank you kindly, Emily :)

And to finish, here is a photo of my local lake at sunrise, on May 28, 2025:

Just before wildfire smoke became more prevalent in the sky, and morning sunrises, on theoretically "clear" mornings, began to look more like this one below (taken on June 3, 2025).  Good luck to everyone in Saskatchewan and Manitoba right now.  :(