FernFolio » history

Haunted by Barbara Haworth-Attard

fernfolio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:39:16 +0000

When the bones of a young girl are found on the mountain, buried under the tree where she used to play, and four years after many believed that she had run away with her lover, shock and grief soon turn to suspicion.
For fourteen-year Dee Vale, an illegitimate child living her with her stern and unemotional Gran, the body’s discovery begins a dark and difficult period. Her Gran, whose help during childbirth and whose teas and potions are asked for and consumed by neighbours too poor to call upon Dr. Hughes, the local physician, is called a witch by these same neighbours and, as the police investigation stalls, is accused of murder. Her long-time friend, Billy, suddenly announces he supposes he’ll marry her, before taking up with Vivien, a sly and unpredictable girl whose family has moved into the abandoned house next door. As she and her friend Clooey begin their final year at the school at Price’s Corners, Dee starts to dream of the two of them continuing onto the high school in the nearby town of Wallen, and of one day becoming a nurse, though she knows her Gran expects her to remain at home. She makes friends with Clarence, a young soldier who has returned from the trenches missing parts of his mind and memories.
Gifted, or cursed, with the Sight and able from her earliest childhood to see ghosts, Dee becomes aware of the presence of a dark shadow up on the mountain, a shadow that seems to creep ever closer to her home, one that starts to stalk her. Gradually, Dee becomes aware that a number of young girls have disappeared from the area around Price’s Corners and Wallen during recent years. Her Gift allows Dee to read the resting place of one girl, and to relive the death of one of another, and she begins to realise that she might be the only person able to uncover the identity of the monster killing these young girls. As the community’s mood turns ugly, and vigilantes threaten to take justice into their own hands, Dee must take a difficult stand against her Gran, her friends and neighbours, and risk her own safety, to find and stop a murderer before he can kill again.
Set in Ontario just after World War I, Haunted unfolds against the backdrop of small-town and small-minded fears and prejudice. Dee, whose give name is Defiance, is a strong and remarkable young girl whose steadfast belief in herself and her friends, in the face of ugly rumours and accusations, is a testament to friendship and courage. A tale that will haunt the reader…
FernFolio Editor

Greener Grass by Caroline Pignat

fernfolio — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:56:04 +0000

During Ireland’s Great Famine, in the 1840’s, the potato crops were struck with blight and turned to rotten mush in the fields. For poor tenant farmers, who for generations had planted potatoes as their only crop, the blight spelled disaster. Without food to fed their families, or a crop to sell for money to buy goods and pay their rent, Irish men left to look for jobs in England, but soon there was no jobs to be had, and people starved.
With her da off in England looking for work, Kit Byrne, fourteen, works long hours as a maid in the house of Lord Fraser, the English landowner, and helps her mother with little Annie, while her brother, Jack, helps old Lizzie, the village wise woman and healer, for an egg a day. Though times are difficult, her mam’s devote belief that God will provide and her abiding hope in the future, help Kit and her brother and sister in the face of growing adversity. Kit delights in her friendship with Millie, and enjoys stolen moments with Tom Lynch, son of the Frasers’ middleman.
But this winter, things turn harder, faster, than the winter before. Kit is fired along with many of the other household servants by Lynch as a cost cutting measure. Though she finds work helping Lizzie alongside Jack, she watches in growing alarm as no letter arrives from her father, and her mam and siblings get thinner.
In the year that follows, Kit watches as, unable to pay their rent, friends and neighbours are evicted from their houses by Lynch, others say good-bye before boarding ships to Canada, Australia and America, and other, too many others, die of starvation, overwork, fever, or grief.
Forced by bitter circumstance to become the head of her own family, Kit discovers in herself the determination to do anything it takes to ensure her loved ones’ safety and survival, even if it means imprisonment or death.
Written by Caroline Pignat, author of the wonderful Egghead, Greener Grass is a gripping account of one girl’s struggle to survive the Irish Potato Famines. Pignat’s story is rich in historic detail, yet simply and movingly told. Terrific!
FernFolio Editor

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

fernfolio — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:20:21 +0000

Fifteen-year old Ned Marriner wanders the deserted chapels and aisles of the ancient cathedral at Aix-en-Provence, passing the time while his famous photographer father sets up his photo shoot outside. Though he is glad to be out of school two months early, and enjoys watching his father and his team of assistants plan the pictures for a coffee table book of Provence, one of France’s most beautiful and storied regions, he is too worried by his mother’s work with Médicins-Sans-Frontières to get involved.
Instead, Ned reads the signs posted throughout the cathedral’s interior that indicate that parts of this building are over a thousand years old, and that beneath it lie the ruins of a Roman arena. He is surprised to see a girl of about his age enter the cathedral from a side door, and learns that the girl, Kate Wenger, is an American exchange student who has found the door from the cloister unlocked. As they talk together, Ned and Kate hear a scraping noise and watch as a strange scarred man climbs out of a hole in the cathedral floor. When they challenge the stranger, he reveals that, though he has killed children before, he has no wish to kill them. So begins Ned’s and Kate’s strange adventure with three individuals, two men and a beautiful and elusive woman, whose story of love and revenge has spanned over twenty-five hundred years.
Ned’s meeting with the scarred man in Saint-Sauveur Cathedral awakens in him an unexpected gift, the ability to sense forces that remain unseen by most mortals. Drawn into a deadly game between two ancient rivals who have repeatedly returned to Provence over the centuries to fight for a woman they both love, Ned needs Kate’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Provence’s history to try and sort out what is going on. When Melanie, his father’s bright and funny assistant, disappears on Beltane, the night that, for the ancient Celts, marked the beginning of summer, Ned and Kate find themselves in a desperate race against time to rescue the young assistant before she is lost forever.
Set in Provence, a region steeped in thousands of years of history, Ysabel pulls back some of its many layers, and draws the reader into a story that is both never and constantly changing. Ned, caught between the present and the shadowy past, between the rational science of his practical mother and a new and unnerving gift of second sight, finds himself thrown from the certainty and reassurance of childhood into unsettling adulthood. A story that will be sure to capture the imaginations of young adult readers!
FernFolio Editor

Eye of the Crow by Shane Peacock

fernfolio — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:04:37 +0000

Capital of England and the 19th century world, the proud and beautiful city of London of the late 1860s is also a city full of bigotry, hatred and despair, something young Sherlock Holmes knows only too well. The product of a runaway marriage between the daughter of a well-to-do country squire and a brilliant but impoverished Jewish university student, Sherlock has grown up in genteel and almost desperate poverty. While his father tends the birds at the Crystal Palace, his mother teaches singing lessons and takes in sewing. The two are clearly devoted to each other, and to their bright and observant son, but grown old before their time, ground down by their hard lives.
It is his parents’ fondest wish that Sherlock get a good education so that he can aspire to a more comfortable life than theirs, but the young teenager has not attended school in months, ever since he was attacked by school bullies who see in him an easy mark for their racist taunts. Instead, he spends his days in Trafalgar Square, observing the people around him, and honing his almost eery ability to read in their faces and mannerisms, speech and clothing, the most intimate details of their lives.
After reading about the murder of a young woman in Whitechapel and the subsequent arrest of Mohammad Adalji, a young Arab butcher, Sherlock’s curiosity takes him to Old Bailey for the arraignment of the accused killer. A long-time victim of anti-Semitic epithets and well versed in the vicious impulses of a bloodthirsty mob, Sherlock finds himself feeling a certain sympathy for the accused and, when the young man sees him in the crowd and whispers to the boy, “I didn’t do it!”, Sherlock decides that he will have to save Adalji from the hangman’s noose.
Observed by police when he visits the site of the murder, Sherlock finds that he himself has fallen under suspicion. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard has decided that he and Adalji were working together robbing people the night that the young woman was murdered, and soon Sherlock is running for his life, determined to stay out of police custody and to find the real killer before Adalji’s, and his own, time runs out.
Eye of the Crow is a story about a brilliant and complicated young man whose skills and attitudes have been indelibly marked by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Beautifully written and richly detailed, this novel will challenge young readers to think about the effects of prejudice both on the people of Sherlock’s world and of our own.
FernFolio Editor

The Castaways by Iain Lawrence

fernfolio — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:47:17 +0000

Tom Tin and his four teenaged companions find themselves in desperate straits; aboard a stripped down, lumbering hulk of a steamboat lost on the ocean in the southern hemisphere, half a world away from England, and rapidly running out of water, food and fuel to run the steam engine. It seems they have escaped from an island inhabited by cannibals only to die of dehydration at sea.
When a great three-masted sailing ship appears on the horizon, Tom is at first filled with relief but, when he describes the approaching vessel to Measley, his blind and yet oddly insightful friend seems convinced that this ship is, in fact, the famous Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship whose captain is doomed to sail the seas for all time plucking shipwrecked sailors from the ocean. Tom, Measley, Weedle, Penny and Boggis climb aboard to find that they seem to be alone on the ship. Alone, save for the ghostly groans of its phantom crew.
The boys take shelter on the ship’s deck, too repelled by the stink of rotting fruit and by the accompanying clouds of fruit flies to explore the rest of the vessel. True to Measley’s dark predictions, they find themselves unable to turn the ship from its southern course and soon find themselves in the iceberg filled waters off Antarctica. It is there that the ship comes upon two men standing back to back upon an ice floe, fighting off vicious fish that are throwing themselves out of the water at the pair.
As soon as they come aboard the men, who identify themselves as Mr. Beezley and Mr. Moyle, take charge of the ship and set the boys to work unfouling the rigging as they prepare to lay a course for America where, rumours have it, gold has been found. But it soon becomes obvious that Beezley and Moyle’s plans for becoming wealthy do not include the five boys, and that they know far more about the ship, and its cargo, than they have been letting on.
The third of a trilogy that includes The Convicts, and The Cannibals, The Castaways is a breathtaking adventure full of excitement and danger. Lawrence’s deft descriptions bring the sea and the great sailing ship to life; the plot will have you wanting to read ahead, just to find out how it all ends!
FernFolio Editor

Tuk and the Whale by Raquel Rivera

fernfolio — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:49:03 +0000

“They are here,” states Tuk’s grandfather, as he pauses in his work. The Inuit elder has dreamed of the arrival of a great umiak, a boat so large that it could hold many families, one that is made entirely of wood. Out in the bay, now becoming navigable with the arrival of spring, appears a boat crested by two upthrust spears, like the tusk of the narwhal, from which flap the white skins that, grandfather says, carry the boat on the wind.
Excited, Tuk runs to find alert the camp, and eagerly joins his father and grandfather on the beach to greet the Qallunaat who come ashore, despite the worried disapproval of his mother. The strangers are tall and thin and strangely dressed. They have faces covered in fur and smell bad. Though Arvik, Tuk’s father, has travelled widely and speaks many dialects, he struggles to communicate with them.
It seems to Tuk that the Qallunaat are just as nervous about his people as the Inuit hunters are about them, but grandfather has said that these strangers will need their help, and that aboard their great wooden boat they have many useful things to trade. When one of the Qallunaat notices Tuk, he smiles and offers the boy a gift, a knife with a wooden handle and a metal blade. Tuk is thrilled with the knife, though he remains apprehensive about the presence of the strangers, particularly when his friend Samik explains that his father fears they will attack the camp and take over their hunting territories.
It soon becomes clear that the Qallunaat want the Inuits’ help to hunt the bowhead whale, and that they are prepared to trade metal kettles, knifes, sewing needles and other useful items for this assistance. Whale hunting is very dangerous, since the great whale are strong and can easily sink the flimsy boats of the hunters, killing all aboard, but the chance to trade for metal objects is too good to pass up. So Tuk, his father Amrik, and two other Inuit hunters join the Qallunaat on a whale-hunting adventure that will become the stuff of legend.
Based on author Raquel Rivera’s readings about first contact between the Inuit and European whalers, Tuk and the Whale is set in the 16th century. It celebrates the strength of Inuit culture and traditions, while exploring the beginnings of what would bring great change to the people of Canada’s North. Rivera’s depiction of Inuit life is both fascinating and inspiring. Tuk, his little sister Unat, their father, Amrik, and their wise and farseeing grandfather come to life through her story.
FernFolio Editor

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

fernfolio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:53:16 +0000

Set in 1857 near Chatham, in Canada West, Elijah of Buxton is the story of Elijah who, at almost twelve years old, is the first freeborn resident of a settlement of former slaves. Though he is diligent in his school work, reliable about finishing his chores around the farm, and always ready to help a neighbour, Elijah struggles to throw off a reputation for being fragile. To his parents’ concern, he frightens too easily and cries too readily, and his mother is frequently heard to state that the boy would never have been able to stand up to the harshness of slavery.
To Elijah’s everlasting embarrassment, he is famous for having thrown up all over Frederick Douglass, a story that has grown to take on epic proportions. The fact that it occurred when Elijah was but a baby has in no way deterred people from pointing to it as added proof of his fragility. Elijah would prefer to be known for his skill at chucking stones, both with his right and left hands. He can throw stones so swiftly and accurately that he is able to fish in the local lake simply by luring fish to the surface of the water with horseflies and then taking aim.
With his best friend, Cooter, Elijah attends school and church, helps the residents of Buxton, where all members of the community are pledged to aid their neighbours to the best of their abilities, and plays rousing games of Slaver and Abolitionist. Both boys find school a little taxing since the teacher, Mr. Travis, is less than stimulating. When Cooter, having seen Mr. Travis write “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” on the chalkboard, jumps to a hilarious and completely erroneous conclusion about the subject for their upcoming lesson, both he and Elijah have reason to remember the lesson for years to come.
The men and women of Buxton have come to Canada West to begin new lives, signalled in the settlement by the ringing of the Liberty Bell for each new resident, five to signal the end of their old lives, and five to signal the beginning of their new lives. Some, such as Mrs. Holton and Mr. Leroy, have escaped slavery, but must live with the knowledge that their loved ones, spouses and children, remain enslaved. As Elijah’s pa says, each of the former slaves carries with them the scars of their experiences, some of them physical and terrible, others emotional and spiritual and always worse.
Elijah is weary of being treated as a child, and eager to prove that he has put his fragility behind him, but, when a local man offers to take the money Mr. Leroy has worked day and night for four years to raise so that he can buy his wife and children out of slavery and then disappears, the young boy feels that he has to see if he can’t help to make things right. With Mr. Leroy, Elijah sets out on a journey that tests everything he knows about right and wrong, and teaches him that sometimes all that you can grab onto, when dark clouds roll in, is the silver lining.
Elijah of Buxton will cause laughter and tears. It will catch you up and pull you into Elijah’s life and that of the residents of Buxton. Beautifully written, this book will resonate with you long after the last words are read. It is destined to be a classic.
FernFolio Editor

Arctic Memories by Normee Ekoomiak

fernfolio — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:39:39 +0000

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, and inland in pursuit of the caribou during the warmer months.
In Arctic Memories, he shares his childhood experiences of traditional Inuit life, and gives insight into the spiritual beliefs of his people through his art. Accompanied by his reflections in Inuktitut and English, are drawings, paintings and embroidered pieces that celebrate the daily lives of the Inuit, both children and adults. Ekoomiak’s work details life in the snow house, games to provide entertainment and build strong and healthy bodies, and the circle of nature among Arctic creatures.
It also explains the traditional Inuit spiritual beliefs through pictures of Sedna, goddess of the sea, and Okpik, who protects all living things in the North. Ekoomiak’s scenes of the nativity point to his Christian faith, one that exists side by side with his traditional Inuit beliefs.
Particularly interesting are Ekoomiak’s pictures, The Body Needs to Travel, in which he explains how the Inuit spread around the Arctic Circle, and Ancestral Hunters, where he depicts hunters killing a wooly mammoth in a painting completed a year before the remains of a wooly mammoth were discovered in the Arctic!
is a wonderful celebration of Inuit culture and history. Both the art and accompanying text provide a window into the lives and beliefs of the Inuit people.
FernFolio Editor

Woodenface by Gus Grinfell

fernfolio — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:29:43 +0000

The daughter of a Yorkshire weaver, Meg Lumb has learned to wash and dye and spin wool, and help her mother with her younger brother, but from her father she has also learned to carve wood. She creeps away to the churchyard during quiet moments to play with Dilly-Lal and Drum-a-Drum, two peg dolls she has fashioned, undisturbed by the presence of the ghosts that haunt the graves there. In her pocket she also carries Bolly-Bolly, a strange little face that she has carved out of a knot of wood that she found sawn from an ancient hawthorne tree. Bolly-Bolly has the ability to speak to Meg, and to show her visions of the places and people around her.
From Bolly-Bolly, Meg learns that Patience Sutcliffe, the daughter of the village cloth merchant, lies in her bed chamber seemingly possessed by evil spirits. When confronted by Reverend Eastwood, the puritanical minister, Patience names Meg as her tormentor, and the young girl realizes that she is accused of witchcraft.
Afraid for her life, Meg flees her village for Halifax, a nearby town, and the centre of Yorkshire’s woollen trade, hoping to find her father who has travelled there to sell his cloth. Instead, she finds that her father has been falsely accused of theft and thrown in the local jail to await trail. She meets Ned, a travelling puppeteer, and Simon, apprentice to a charlatan apothecary, both of whom are working at the Halifax fair.
Desperate to find a way to help her father, Meg confides her problems to Ned and Simon, and discovers in them two kindred souls, eager to help her save her father and escape the clutches of Mr. Sutcliffe, father to Patience, and of Reverend Eastwood. But matters become increasingly complicated when if becomes clear that Meg’s father is the victim of a conspiracy, and that Meg’s talent for carving wood border dangerously upon magical.
Set during the Interregnum, when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans ruled England, Woodenface is a wonderful adventure that draws upon the English tradition on the Greenman and celebrates the magic that exists in all living things.
FernFolio Editor

Pirate’s Passage by William Gilkerson

fernfolio — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:52:41 +0000

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 tourist resort. Between overdue bills and the constant harassment of municipal and provincial inspectors, Jim and his mother wonder whether they can hold onto the inn over the lean months of winter, or whether Roy Moehner will foreclose on the mortgage and steal the inn out from under them. Jim is further harassed by the Moehner boys in his grade eight class, and terrorized by Grendel, a vicious dog owned by Klaus Moehner.
Then Captain Charles Johnson blows around Grey Rocks Point and into the harbour just ahead of a sou’wester aboard his old gaff rig sailboat, the Merry Adventure. Unable to complete repairs to his boat and set sail again before the winter gales begin, Captain Johnson rents a room in the inn and settles into the Hawkins family and the town of Grey Rocks. He calls himself a sailor and an historian, and travels on a British passport, but the Captain is otherwise vague about himself and his past. It is only on the subject of pirates that Captain Johnson becomes talkative, and when Jim approaches him for information, he agrees to help the boy with his essay on pirates.
So begin Captain Johnson’s lectures about the history of pirates, beginning with the cavemen, and working through the Viking invasions, the Irish pirate queen, Granuaile, privateers, and buccaneers. He seems to have read every book ever published on the subject of pirates, and possesses many pirate artefacts, which he shares with Jim, but he clearly believes that the best book about pirates in one entitled A General History Of the Robberies and Murders Of the Most Notorious Pirates, published in 1724 and written, oddly enough, by one Charles Johnson. Captain Johnson is a wonderful storyteller. As he instructs Jim about pirates, he often falls into a story, suddenly shifting from the past tense into the present, and drawing Jim into the tale until the boy can see and hear and smell and taste and touch the objects and events described to him.
As his friendship with Jim Hawkins grows, the Captain learns about the many sly attacks against the Hawkins family engineered by the Moehners, and secretly helps Jim undertake some of his own counter measures. His willingness to bend the rules and take the law into his own hands, suggest that Captain Johnson is more than a little pirate like himself. But it isn’t until he helps the Hawkins family overcome their greatest threat that Jim begins to realize that the truth about Captain Charles Johnson may be more fantastical than the most riveting of his pirate stories.
William Gilkerson’s Pirate’s Passage is an adventure story that will hold you long after you read the final page, and set you to thinking – and dreaming – about pirates. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature in 2006, this book will appeal to experienced readers in Grades 6 and up.
FernFolio Editor