Early one July morning, a seventeen-year old girl named Del Thigpin sneaks out of the home of her foster parents, and down the street to where she has parked her 1983 Datsun, purchased secretly with the money she’s earned working at a video store. After staging her own death from drowning at a nearby beach, [...]
With her mouse-brown hair, glasses and braces, her sliding grades, and her penchant for getting into scuffles at school, Meg feels like the odd person out in the Murray family. Her beautiful scientist mother manages a household of four children while carrying out experiments in the old dairy off the kitchen, her physicist father is [...]
Ten year-old Lucky Trimble lives with her guardian Brigitte in a cobbled-together trailer home on the edge of Hard Pan, California, population 43. Perched in the Mojave Desert, on the site of an old gold mining town, Hard Pan is home to an odd collection of individuals who have known hard times. The Captain, a [...]
When Mélanie Watt, the award-winning author and illustrator of Scaredy Squirrel, tries to write a book about a mouse, her story is taken over by a large tortoiseshell cat named Chester. Armed with a red marker, Chester packs the mouse onto an air plane destined for someplace far, far away, and moves into the story. [...]
What’s a guy to do when the girl he likes gives him a box of note paper and stamped envelopes before she moves away to a nearby town? If you’re Owen Skye, you start writing her letters telling her about life, about your two brothers, Andy and Leonard, about your dog, Sylvester, who has a [...]
While the other people in their village celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, Tara and her seven-year old brother Suraj sit watching from the front step of the family hut, mourning the anniversary of their mother’s disappearance. One year earlier, the kind and beautiful Parvati had crept to Tara before dawn and told her that [...]
Worried and hurt when her boyfriend Nick takes off without a word to anyone, Robyn Hunter decides, after some fruitless searching, that she needs to find a new preoccupation in life. Her friend Billy, a dedicated do-gooder, suggests that she volunteer at a local drop-in centre for homeless people and so Robyn finds herself helping [...]
When Kataujaq was small, she loved her mother. She loved sniffing her, because that is the way that the Inuit kiss, and hugging her. In the spring, she loved holding onto her mother while they travelled across the melting sea ice in a canoe tied to the dogsled, slipping precariously from ice to [...]
Born in 1948, Normee Ekoomiak lived in a snow house in the winter and in a tent made of animal skins during the summer months. With his family, he followed the animals, moving to the sea ice in the winter to hunt seal, to the river in the spring to fish for Arctic char, [...]
When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert request an orphan boy to help around the farm, they are sent, instead, a little girl named Anne Shirley. The child has red hair and freckles and big green eyes, and possesses plenty of spirit and imagination. Shy, gentle Matthew Cuthbert, who is sent to fetch the orphan [...]
