Afraid of getting close to someone who might prove dangerous, Scaredy Squirrel has never had a friend. But, bored and tired of thinking up activities to do by himself, Scaredy leaps at the opportunity to make friends with the goldfish who lives in the fountain near his nut tree. While the goldfish might [...]
When the kingdom of Thibodeau announces the birth of a royal baby, the Queen of Iddison sets out to gather the finest gifts both from her own kingdom and from the lands between her kingdom and that of Thibodeau. She composes a long list of items and eight great carts, pulled by eight elephants, are [...]
At eight years old, after she stood on a kitchen chair to read the names of paint colours off a chart posted on the wall, Saffron Casson discovered that she was adopted. She learned that her sisters, Caddy and Rose, and her brother, Indigo, were, in fact, her cousins, and that, following her mother’s [...]
In their house at the end of the road down in Hog’s Hollow, that year of 1965, the River family dreams. While Flo writes her epic of life in pre-Civil War America, she dreams of fame and fortune and of moving her family to a mansion in the South. Twelve year-old Beau builds [...]
Twelve year-old Jim Hawkins lives with his widowed mother who struggles to run the Admiral Anson Inn, which has fallen on hard times that are made all the more difficult when the Moehners, a wealthy and influential local family, decide they want to buy up the inn and redevelop it as part of a new [...]
Eleven year-old Jess Aaron’s life is a hard one. The family farm can’t support them, so he and his four sisters and parents struggle to make ends meet on what his father can earn working in construction. They are a poor family in a community of poor families; money is tight and there [...]
This is a collection of nine short stories. The young people who inhabit Wynne-Jones’ tales are independent thinkers, often wise beyond their years, who react to the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary events of their lives in ways that reflect their unique and complex personalities. Rich in the small observations that evoke the reader’s [...]
This is the story of Maria, a young HIV-positive girl living in the South American country of Suriname. Told in the first person, the book relates the experiences of Maria and her younger sister, Willy, who live with their very sick mother in the home of their uncle, until their mother’s death from AIDS. [...]
9-year-old Jeremy really wants a pet, but his parents are concerned that he isn’t old enough to look after one properly. Jeremy decides to offer pet-sitting services, so that he can demonstrate just how responsible he can be.
Soon friends and neighbours are dropping off their animals, and Jeremy is learning that caring for pets, [...]
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 [...]
