When thirteen year-old Pauline Carelli-Bloom wins a school short story-writing prize of Roget’s Thesaurus and You Too Can Write a Great Novel!, she concludes that she is going to grow up to be a writer. As it is the first day of the summer holidays, she decides to waste no time in beginning her [...]
Thirteen year-old Maleeka Madison is laughed at and called names by her classmates. Tall and reed-thin and black, she is called beanpole and taunted because of her skin colour. To make matters worse, she wears clothes made by her mother, which often don’t fit properly, and she’s been a straight A student, a [...]
Living with her family in Gaza City, eleven year-old Malaak knows the family stories about their lives in Jerusalem and in Palestine before 1948. Loss of their lands following the creation of the state of Israel and the presence of ever more numerous Jewish settlers in Gaza leaves a bitter taste in the mouths [...]
Twelve year-old Asia has lived with Ira and Maggy on their farm at Cold Creek for as long as she can remember. Abandoned by her mother at age three, she has found everything she needs in the elderly couple, their small house heated by its wood stove, and the fields of hay and sheep [...]
Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the [...]
The first thing Tom remembers is walking, his back and backside screaming in pain. He has forgotten everything that came before, family, friends, school, his last name. In his backpack he finds a notebook with notes about Mozart and a candy heart imprinted with the words You are nice, so he concludes that [...]
Fifteen year-old Tamura Tierney is determined to become a model. Obsessed with fashion, make up, hair and clothes, she’s not going to let the fact that she’s living in her third foster home, with the kind but style-challenged Shirl and Herb stop her from fulfilling her dreams.
Eighty-nine year old Miss Jean Barclay, may be [...]
Princess Esmeralda is the despair of her mother. Lacking in the social graces, clumsy and bored by self-absorbed suitors, she prefers exploring the flora and fauna of the swamp and visiting her aunt Grassina, a witch, to attending formal balls. When she trips and frightens away some grasshoppers in the swamp one day, [...]
On their fourteenth birthday, three girls are told that they are not who they imagined themselves to be, are given stones of power, and are sent out into the world to fulfil their destiny. Meeting for the first time under the branches of flowering tree, Jade, Opal and Amber have grown up in very different [...]
Fourteen year-old Dana is a runaway, living on the streets of Toronto. Begging for spare change to buy coffee and a doughnut, and protecting her rapidly dwindling possessions from thieves is a far cry from her comfortable life in the suburbs, but she cannot go home.
Fortunately, Dana is adopted into a street family. [...]
