After his veterinarian father is killed in action during World War I, 17-year-old Will Ryan is sent from Yorkshire to live with his uncle on Vancouver Island. He arrives in the mining town of Cumberland, where his uncle is a mine manager, and discovers that his proper middle-class English upbringing has not prepared him for [...]
It’s 1943. At seventeen, Natalie is living through a fourth year of war, when she decides to start keeping a journal, which she names Dolores. To Dolores, Natalie describes life in Toronto during wartime, the shortages of gas and stockings and shampoo, food rationing, and the almost constant trips to Union Station to say good-bye [...]
After more than a decade of persecution and countless imprisonments and deaths, the scientists and technological experts of 24th century and their survivors emerge from their prisons and from their places of safety to begin the very difficult task of re-establishing democracy in the semi-autonomous city-states of what used to be Canada.
Blake Raintree, has come [...]
A letter from brother Hector’s commanding officer brings the news that he has been killed in battle, and so, despite his father’s objections, 16-year-old Edward lies about his age and enlists with the Canadian infantry, determined to take up his brother’s fight with the Hun. A chance meeting with an old friend of his father’s [...]
When Will’s Grade 9 history teacher introduces a lesson about the plague by recalling the old nursery rhyme reputed to be about this scourge of the middle ages, she warns the class that, in the United States of 2001, people enjoy “a level of protection that makes them feel secure, almost immune.”
These words come back [...]
It’s August 1959. 12 year-old Rosalie finds herself at the turning point between the innocence of childhood and the awareness of adolescence. She looks around to find herself, the baby of a large family, alone with “the oldest mother in the world” and a father whom she calls Norman, all of her older siblings gone [...]
“Se parakalo,” whispers the ancient Greek corpse when 12-year-old Alex falls into its coffin, “Please”. And so begins Alex’ quest to help a long-dead soul cross the River Styx and win a place in the Elysian Fields, the ancient Greek heaven. Along with his cousin Freddie, Alex must finds a gold coin, the payment demanded [...]
When disease strikes his Crow clan, Kyp loses his entire family and finds himself very ill, and in new and unfamiliar territory. He meets Katakata, a thief crow, who has been banished from his own clan, and who decides that anyone who flies as skillfully as Kyp is worth sticking with. Together Kyp and Kata [...]
