When an elderly Inuit woman, who is frequently forced to rely upon her neighbours for food, finds a small orphaned bear cub, she adopts him as her son and names him Kunikdjuaq. The little bear shares the old woman’s meager meals, plays with the village children, and forms a deep and abiding attachment to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In recent years the community of Parkdale, in Toronto, has become home to many immigrants from Tibet. In 2006, with the help and encouragement of their school principal and some teachers as well as adults from the Tibetan community, a group of students at Parkdale formed the Tibetan Book Club and set out to [...]
Most of us have dreamed about writing and publishing our own book but my friends Martha and Molly have done so! Following her purchase of a magnificent Victorian doll’s house about a year ago, Martha Davis conceived and wrote The Maples on the Move!, a novella about the Maples whose house becomes too small [...]
Estranged from his mother, neglected by his truck-driver father, and entirely responsible for his eleven year-old deaf sister, Kat, fifteen year-old Darcy struggles to cope with almost overwhelming emotional pain. Despite the efforts of his teacher, Ms. Rose, at the alternative school where he’s been sent because of his unwillingness - or inability - [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Thirteen-year-old Rosa has lived with her Uncle for almost as long as she can remember. Together, they travel from village to town, supported by Uncle’s begging and petty thievery, while he looks for the opportunity, the deal, the swindle, that will change his luck and land him on easy street.
Yet Rosa knows that her name [...]
Hussein is a young boy growing up in a small village in Bulgaria. He lives with his mother and father and his younger brother Hassan, and is surrounded by the familiar and loving embrace of his grandparents, and his aunts and uncles and cousins.
Hussein and his family are Roma, or Gypsies, and have been [...]
