FernFolio » British Columbia

Stanley at Sea by Linda Bailey and Bill Slavin

fernfolio — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:51:44 +0000

Ordered to “Get!” when he begs at the picnic table for food, Stanley wanders down to the river and finds his good friends Alice and Nutsy and Gassy Jack. Bored and hungry, the dogs discover a trash can filled to the brim with all sorts of delicious treats, only to watch as the garbage truck carts away their feast. Then Stanley sniffs out a ham sandwich left in a rowboat tied to a dock. When the dogs pile in to get the sandwich, the boat comes untied and they find themselves carried down river and out to sea.
Where are they going, his friends ask Stanley, and, in a moment of inspiration, he tells them that they are off to find the fence at the end of Outside. What awaits for them there is the stuff that dogs’ dreams are made of!
Engagingly told from a dog’s perspective and illustrated by Bill Slavin’s wonderful pictures, Linda Bailey’s Stanley at Sea is a terrific sequel to Stanley’s Party and Stanley’s Wild Ride!
FernFolio Editor

Reading the Bones by Gina McMurchy-Barber

fernfolio — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:37:24 +0000

Sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her widowed mother goes to Toronto to look for a job, twelve-year old Peggy Henderson resigns herself to a summer of listening to Aunt Margaret’s endless lectures, and her determined efforts to get Peggy out and making friends with other kids. She prefers helping Uncle Stu dig the hole in the backyard for the new koi pond to neatly folding her laundry or cleaning her bedroom, and has found all of the friendship she needs in Mrs. Hobbs, the elderly woman with whom she goes shell-hunting on the beach.
Then Peggy finds a human skull in that hole in the backyard and the police’s forensic team determines that the remains are several thousand years old. Though her aunt is annoyed to find her koi pond has become an archaeological excavation, Peggy rapidly becomes involved in investigating and documenting the site. She helps Eddy, the wise, comfortable and plain-speaking old archaeologist who arrives to work on the excavation, and finds herself learning more than she could possibly have imagined about the Coast Salish elder laid to rest in that hole thousands of years before.
Peggy discovers that, while Eddy and Mrs Hobbs, and others, believe that the artefacts found in these ancient burial sites ought to be preserved for study by museums and other agencies, the descendants of the elderly man want to ensure that his remains are once again laid to rest, and the owner of a local store selling native artefacts is prepared to pay cash for any interesting items that he can then turn around and sell at a profit.
Told from the perspective of Peggy, whose strong feelings and personal preoccupations help to drive the plot, Reading the Bones is a good story about a girl’s struggle to understand the past and its lessons for the present and future.
FernFolio Editor

Wolf Pack by Edo Van Belkom

fernfolio — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:21:01 +0000

In the midst of fighting a forest fire in the interior of British Columbia, Forest Ranger Garrett Brock notices something usual, a she-wolf moving in and out of the fire, carrying something in her mouth. After the fire is out, Brock stumbles upon the she-wolf’s cache, and finds her four newborn wolf cubs. Concluding that the she’wolf has been killed in the forest fire, Brock takes the cubs home to his wife, Phyllis, who prepares a warm box for them in the garage. When Phyllis checks on the cubs later, she is shocked to discover they are now human babies. She and Brock adopt the small werewolves and raise them as their own children.
At sixteen, Noble, Argus, Harlan, and their sister, Tora, are normal, well-adjusted teenagers, or as normal as can be expected when you harbour a big secret and have to contend with hair issues that give a whole new meaning to the expression ‘bad hair day’. Anytime the pressure starts getting to them, the pack head into the forest for a long run and to reconnect with nature.
One afternoon the four young werewolves are caught on video tape transforming from human to wolf form. Dr. Edward Monk, the scientist who films them, recognizes the chance filming as his ticket to fame and fortune, and immediately makes plans to capture one of the ‘creatures’. Within twenty-four hours, he has constructed a trap, and caught Tora in it. While Dr. Monk and his crew make arrangements to transfer their captured prize to a research facility in Vancouver, the wolf pack race against time to free Tora and destroy the tapes that document their shape-shifting abilities.
Are Brock and Phyllis prepared to break the law to rescue Tora? Are Noble, Argus and Harlan willing to go as far as killing in order to save their sister? Is there anyone outside the Brock household whom they dare trust to help them? Wolf Pack is an exciting story from beginning to end!
FernFolio Editor

Discovering Emily by Jacqueline Pearce

fernfolio — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:33:45 +0000

Living in Victoria, British Columbia in the 1880s, Emily Carr struggles to conform to her family’s, and society’s, expectations of her. Young girls should be obedient, quiet, neat and godly. They need to learn to be good wives and mothers. But Emily is neither obedient, nor quiet, nor neat. Though she tries hard to listen in church, she finds it difficult to remember what the sermon was about. Rather, she sees the evidence of God’s presence in the trees and plants and animals around her. And, if being a wife and mother means that she is going to have to act like a lady, then she’d just as soon not bother with a husband or children.
Surrounded by four older sisters, whose behaviour is unimpeachable, and parents who try hard to instil proper manners, Emily chafes at the restrictions placed upon her. Whenever possible, she slips the leash and explores the world around her, often coming home wet and bedraggled to another scolding.
However, when her father sees a charcoal sketch she has made of the family dog, he decides that Emily should have art lessons and, for the first time in her young life, Emily discovers that, just perhaps, there is something she can be really good at. Emily sets up an easel in her bedroom and works hard to improve her drawing abilities, saving up her pocket money to buy plaster casts of body parts to practice sketching. She is angered and confused by the first real artists she ever meets, because they assert that Canada is not fit landscape for drawing. Emily decides, for a time, that maybe she hasn’t got what is takes to be an artist, but eventually her passion for art will prevail!
Jacqueline Pearce has written a fictional account of the early years of one of Canada’s most beloved and celebrated painters, British Columbia’s Emily Carr. Her story of this great artist’s life continues in Emily’s Dream!
FernFolio Editor

Odd Man Out by Sarah Ellis

fernfolio — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:29:01 +0000

Sent to spend the summer on the west coast with his Gran and four girls cousins while his mother honeymoons with her new husband, twelve year-old Kip finds himself rather overwhelmed by this first meeting with his extended family. Since her big, rambling house by the sea is due to be torn down at the end of the summer, Gran encourages Kip and the girls to express themselves, by decorating its walls with lists in magic marker and poems and maps of mythical places, and by anticipating its destruction by taking a hammer to the doors and plastered walls.
Kip is delighted to win his first choice of places to sleep in the room lottery, the attic space in which he finds sequences of numbers painted around light fixtures and doorways in his dead father’s careful printing. When he finds an old three-ringed binder hidden away on the top shelf of a cupboard and recognises his father’s writing, Kip realises that, through the story told in the binder’s pages, he is going to be able to spend a summer with the father who died in a traffic accident when he was still very small.
Odd Man Out is a warm and funny and thought-provoking tale about family, about growing up and about saying good-bye to things and people we love.
FernFolio Editor

Thumb on a Diamond by Ken Roberts

fernfolio — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:05:26 +0000

New Auckland is a small town perched on the rocky coast of British Columbia. The houses and other buildings of the town are squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the pebbled beach. The residents live with the sea at their back doors and the Rockies at the front. New Auckland is a great place to grow up in. Though life isn’t easy for its 138 inhabitants and the only way in or out of the town is by sea, the adults and children form a tight-knit community, one in which jobs such as gathering firewood to heat their houses during the winter is shared by all of the residents, both old and young.
There are nine kids living in and around New Auckland between the ages of 11 and and 14, and they share a dream. They want to go on a school trip to Vancouver, a city none of them has ever visited. None of them but Thumb, the son of the school principal. It is Thumb who comes up with a plan to get himself and his friends to Vancouver. They will put together a baseball team, challenge the other communities along the coast to games, which they will win by default because none of the other communities has a baseball team, and then the school board will pay for them to travel to Vancouver for the provincial championships.
There is only two problems with this plan. The first is that none of the kids in New Auckland has ever played baseball, because the second problem is that there is no open, flat stretch of land big enough in or around the town on which to practice or play baseball. But these drawbacks don’t stop Thumb or his friends. They read books about baseball, and watch videos about baseball, and they practice pitching and catching and hitting on the beach and main street of town, putting up fishing nets to keep the balls from escaping.
Soon they are on their way to Vancouver where they travel, as Susan says excitedly, in something with wheels, spend countless hours traveling up and down the escalator, and learn to order from a menu in a restaurant. Before they know it, however, it’s time for the kids from New Auckland to play their first game. What follows has got to be one of the most hilarious sporting events ever committed to print, possibly only excelled by their second, and final game, against the top Vancouver baseball team!
See if you can keep from laughing aloud!
I am eager to find and read the first story in this series, The Thumb in the Box!
FernFolio Editor

Terror at Turtle Mountain by Penny Draper

fernfolio — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 22:41:55 +0000

During the early hours of April 29, 1903, the top of Turtle Mountain come crashing down, sealing the mine entrance, burying part of the town of Frank, Alberta, and taking out the CPR rail lines, shortly before the Spokane Flyer was due to come through.
13 year-old Natalie Vaughan rushes to help in the rescue efforts. Although, her widowed mother has warned her to expect the worst, Natalie is determined to search for her missing friends and their families, and to comfort those who have lost loved ones both in town and in the mine. Though Natalie has struggled all her life to the knowledge that she is a disappointment to her mother’s family, she shows, by her courage, that she is a fighter.
FernFolio Editor