From the time she was a little child, Amani Raheem knew she wanted to accompany her grandfather, Seedo, each day as he herded his flock of sheep up into the mountain meadows to graze. When she reaches the age of six, Seedo starts to teach her how a good shepherd tends to his, or her, [...]
It’s hard to be the overweight and socially awkward daughter of a media superstar. Living in the shadow of her mother, Mimi, whose talk show, You, You and Mimi, is watched by hundreds of millions of people all over the world, seventeen-year old Robin Schwartz struggles with apathy and depression. Burned by classmates who became [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Grade 10 student Meghan Ball is perfecting the art of invisibility. Her extreme obesity makes her both the target of vicious verbal attacks by J-Bar, Valley Regional High’s star athlete, and renders her a non-person in the eyes of staff and fellow students. Abandoned in Grade 7 by her only friend, Meghan strives to pass [...]
Sixteen-year old Kim Cameron’s world seems to be defined these days by the painful consequences of love: her parents’ marriage cancelled due to lack of interest; her classmate Katie Matthews dumped by her boyfriend, John Reddear, who then commits suicide, it’s rumoured, because of his feelings for another boy on the volleyball team; Kim’s own [...]
Dragged on a day-long field trip to the Black Vine swamp in Florida’s everglades by Mrs. Starch, their terror of a science teacher, Nick Waters, his friend Marta Gonzalaz, and the rest of their class from Truman School scramble to record the names of plants and animals knowing full well that they will be tested [...]
Peering into the bathroom mirror, one morning after his shower, fifteen year-old Bobby Phillips is shocked by what he sees. Or, rather, by what he doesn’t see, for Bobby has disappeared, become invisible. His parents, both exceptionally intelligent and well-educated university professors, are initially taken aback by their son’s invisibility, but quickly draw up plans [...]
Escalating hostilities between Tories, loyal to the British Crown, and Whigs, who demand independence for Britain’s Thirteen American Colonies, have exacted a heavy price on fifteen-year old Charlotte Hooper. Her three older brothers have all ‘accepted the King’s shilling,’ and two have been killed in fighting. The third is missing and feared dead. She has [...]
Fifteen year-old Tamura Tierney is determined to become a model. Obsessed with fashion, make up, hair and clothes, she’s not going to let the fact that she’s living in her third foster home, with the kind but style-challenged Shirl and Herb stop her from fulfilling her dreams.
Eighty-nine year old Miss Jean Barclay, may be [...]
