FernFolio » Toronto

Clancy with the Puck by Chris Mizzoni

fernfolio — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:56:31 +0000

Traded to the Hogtown Maple Buds near the end of the regular season, Clancy Cooke helps his new team make the playoffs. With his skating and stick handling, Maple Buds fans believe, the team has a real shot at the Stanley Cup.
The visitors take an early lead in that seventh game of the finals, but Clancy scores two quick goals to tie it up. It looks like the game will go into overtime when the visitors get another goal past the Buds’ goalie, putting the score at four goals to three for the visitors. With seconds to spare, Mackenzie gets a break away and goes flying down the ice toward the visitors’ net, only to be tripped. Mackenzie cannot take the penalty shot with his twisted knee, so the Buds’ coach calls on Clancy Cooke.
As Clancy responds to fans’ cheers, eying the visitors’ goalie who stands quaking before his net, he dreams of winning the Stanley Cup for Hogtown Maple Buds and securing his place in hockey legend. Can the great Clancy Cooke put the puck in the goal and take the final game into overtime?
Written in rhyme and wonderfully illustrated by the author, Clancy with the Puck, by Chris Mizzoni, is sure to capture the imagination of anyone who has wanted to succeed at something so badly that they could taste it!
FernFolio Editor

Fire on the Water -The Red-Hot Career of Superstar Rower Ned Hanlan by Wendy A. Lewis

fernfolio — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:24:15 +0000

Growing up on the Toronto Islands in the 1860s, Ned Hanlan dreamed of rowing. The son of a poor Irish immigrant, he had neither the well-to-do background nor the big, bulky physique of most rowers of his day, but Ned possessed natural athletic ability and the will to win.
Ned Hanlan won his first big race, the Championship of Toronto Bay, at the age of eighteen, and rapidly came to the notice of the city’s rowers and their fans. Soon afterward, he won the Lord Dufferin Medal, Ontario’s top prize for single-scull racing, and attracted the attention, and support, of a group of local businessmen who worked together to foster his rowing career. With the proper training and money to buy the right equipment, Ned Hanlan was soon racing for the right to call himself Champion of Canada. Races in the United States, England and even Australia followed; the man from the Toronto Islands became Canada’s first sports super hero.
With his athleticism, his focus on training, and his humorous antics during races, Ned Hanlan thrilled and charmed rowing fans throughout his career, and for many Canadians came to represent a nascent national pride. Fire on the Water celebrates a great Canadian’s accomplishments and allows a new generation to learn about this intriguing man.
FernFolio Editor

Peril at Pier Nine by Penny Draper

fernfolio — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

For the boys who move at the end of the June from houses in the city to their cottages on the Toronto Islands’ Ward Island, that summer of 1949 promises to be magical. Freed from the demands of school, the everyday world of city life, and the cautious fretting of their parents, Jack, Donnie, Dougie and Beans roam the islands on their bicycles, have overnight camping trips accompanied by the requisite ghost stories, play baseball, serenade one another, and the occasional admiring girl, on their ukes, and sail the harbour in their small sailboats.
Fourteen-year old Jack is the undisputed leader of the group. A tall, striking boy with a fiercely competitive streak, he is an expert sailor, more at home on the water, even, than on land. He has a fondness for playing pranks, and is always up for a game, always eager to try some new foolishness. Though Jack is frequently admonished to think before he acts, his impulsiveness often leads him into trouble with the adults of Ward’s Island.
However, Jack has a dream; he wants to become captain of a laker, one of the great boats that ply the Great Lakes. He hopes that he can impress Captain Clapp, a retired laker captain living on Ward’s Island, with his knowledge of sailing and the lakes, as well as with his good judgement and sense of responsibility, so that Captain Clapp will help him get a position on a training ship. But, while the captain readily acknowledges that Jack has an almost instinctive understanding of the wind and the waves, he finds the boy to be rather less than responsible. When Jack leads the rest of the boys in an afternoon of fun that damages an Island landmark, his father confiscates his sailboat, and the boy figures he has kissed good-bye to his chance to impress Captain Clapp.
When disaster strikes right in Toronto Harbour, Jack rushes to help in the rescue effort. Through that harrowing experience, the boy proves that, underneath the bluster and bravado, he does have what it takes to command a laker.
Told against the backdrop on one of Toronto’s greatest marine disasters, Peril at Pier Nine does a splendid job of bringing the experiences of Jack and his friends, that summer of 1949, vividly to life.
FernFolio Editor

Sketches by Eric Walters

fernfolio — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:00:30 +0000

Fourteen year-old Dana is a runaway, living on the streets of Toronto. Begging for spare change to buy coffee and a doughnut, and protecting her rapidly dwindling possessions from thieves is a far cry from her comfortable life in the suburbs, but she cannot go home.
Fortunately, Dana is adopted into a street family. Sixteen year-old Ashley has been on the streets since she was twelve and, though she puts on a tough act and grumbles about the added pressures of looking out for an underage runaway, proves herself when things get difficult. At seventeen, Brent shows a sometimes alarming tendency toward drug use, and possesses a level of cynicism and pessimism that hints at the struggles he has known, but is steadfast in his care and protection of the two girls. It is Brent who knows all the squats and finds them somewhere safe to sleep each night. It is Brent who figures out each day how they are going to make some money, either by choosing a subway entrance at which to beg for change or by cleaning windshields at stoplights. Both Brent and Ashley are there to calm her down and get her safely away when Dana is propositioned by a man in a business suit who then accuses her of solicitation when Dana starts making a scene.
Dana learns about the realities of life on the street, the constant discomfort of dirty clothes and hair, of hunger and of fatigue. She discovers that street people such as she are invisible, and that most passers-by either become hostile when asked for money or give out of the selfish desire to make the unpleasantness go away.
Dana’s only escape from the tediousness and fear of street life is making art. When she is caught spray painting underneath an overpass by a worker from a local centre for street youth, she is invited to drop in. At Sketches, Dana finds art, industrial arts and computer design studios, and friendship in the form of the centre’s director, Nicki, and a former street youth and now up-and-coming artist, Becca, who volunteers at the centre.
Though Brent and Ashley are initially sceptical about Dana’s increasing involvement in Sketches and its programs, they quickly recognize the potential of making sidewalk chalk pictures, after Nicki and Becca teach Dana and others how to create them. Soon the three young people are earning some decent money through the donations of admiring passers-by, and are thinking that, just possibly, they can make it off the street.
This is a good story about street youth and the hardships of life on the street. It explores some of the compelling reasons that push young men and women to leave home, and as well as the difficulties they face in making it off the street and into homes and jobs. Perhaps our politicians ought to be reading this. Sketches is the Intermediate Book Club’s choice for its second book of the year. I know there will be plenty of discussion about social justice.
FernFolio Editor

Safe as Houses by Eric Walters

fernfolio — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:04:47 +0000

On the afternoon of Friday, October 15, 1954, thirteen year-old Lizzie Hardy walks the two McBride children home to their house on Raymore Drive and then prepares to baby-sit them until their parents return home from work. While Lizzie enjoys looking after six year-old Susie, she finds her older brother David a difficult kid to deal with. At eleven, David insists he is too old for a baby-sitter and he constantly challenges Lizzie’s right to tell him what to do.
Walking home that Friday afternoon is made more difficult by the rain that pours down, soaking the three children to the skin. As they descend into the Humber River valley and cross the footbridge to Raymore Drive, David and Lizzie notice that the river has overflowed its banks and that the force of the current has swept all kinds of debris into its waters.
Safely inside the McBride house, they watch news bulletins on CBC about the storm. Hurricane Hazel has caused rain to fall continuously for three days, and flooding has closed underpasses and snarled traffic across Toronto. When Mrs. McBride calls to say that she and her husband will be delayed by the rain, Lizzie realizes that she may have to spend the night.
By ten o’clock both the power and the phones are out, and the two older children begin to feel cut off from the world around them. Dozing on the sofa, Lizzie awakes to find that there is water up to her calves in the living room. Looking out from the house, she and David discover that the river is so wide that they cannot see its edges in the dark, and that the house in now a small island in the current. It rapidly becomes apparent to the three children that they need to keep above the level of the water, and they move first to the second floor and then into the rafters. As the long night wears on, Lizzie and David learn that they will need all of their courage and resolve, if they are going to survive until morning.
This is a gripping account of three children’s experiences during the flooding caused by Hurricane Hazel. Eric Walters has done a nice job of creating two appealing characters in Lizzie and David, and of conveying both the destructive power of mother nature and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
FernFolio Editor

Into The Ravine by Richard Scrimger

fernfolio — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 11:57:40 +0000

When thirteen year-old Jules makes a list of the talents of his best friend, Chris, and compares it to a list of his own abilities, the only thing he knows he excels at, by comparison with his intelligent, athletic, good-looking, quiet friend, is talking. So when he and Chris and their impulsive, wild-child sidekick, Cory, decide to make a raft and travel on it from their Scarborough homes down the creek that runs through the ravine nearby to Lake Ontario, Jules knows that Chris will be the leader of their day-long expedition. Certainly, the instructions for building the raft come from Chris’ favourite book, The Outdoor Survival Guide, and, when it comes to navigating their vessel downstream, Chris effortlessly steers them clear of fallen trees and around bends, while Jules’ turns at the pole have them careening from one side of the creek to the other.
The boys travel through the wilderness of the Highland Creek ravine, encountering along the way some of its inhabitants, including a very memorable ex-circus performer named Ernesto, and three rope-swinging girls intent upon luring Jules, Chris and Cory into their mantrap.
But when the three boys are confronted with a gang of teenaged thugs determined to steal their raft, it is Jules’ gift of the gab that gets them out of the gang’s clutches. Unfortunately, the gang’s leader, a particularly nasty piece of work called Philip, decides to get even with Jules and his friends, and he and the gang start tracking the raft’s progress downstream. The situation rapidly escalates from taunts and pushing and shoving to threats and real physical violence, until Jules begins to realize that he will need all of his persuasive powers if the friends are going to avoid disaster.
Richard Scrimger has written another terrific adventure and populated it with characters who will stay with you long after the last page is read.
FernFolio Editor

Tibet: Our Lives, Our Stories by the Tibetan Book Club of Parkdale Public School

fernfolio — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:44:43 +0000

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 write a book about their experiences as young immigrants from Tibet, a homeland none of them have ever visited but to which they all feel a deep and abiding attachment.
Beautifully illustrated by drawings, watercolours and photographs rendered by book club members, Tibet: Our Lives, Our Stories, chronicles their memories of refugee life in Nepal and Northern India, their cultural traditions and celebrations, and their long journeys to a new home in Toronto. Many of these students spent years living with relatives, while their parents travelled to Canada, found jobs, and then began the long process of sponsoring their children. They speak movingly of arriving in Canada overjoyed and nervous at the prospect of being reunited with their parents, and tearful after saying good-bye to the only families many have ever known.
New lives in Toronto have meant adapting to a new language, new customs and traditions, and new challenges and opportunities. Some write that their parents struggle in physically-demanding and low-paying jobs in order to offer their children a better future. All of them have set high goals for themselves, and want to make those parents proud. Each writer states that they feel very lucky to be living in Canada, and all express the profound wish for a free and independent Tibet.
This lovely book is a must read for those who want to understand more about Tibet and its people, and the experiences of young immigrants to Toronto, or to learn just how successfully young writers can share the stories of their lives.
FernFolio Editor

The Maples on the Move! by Martha Davis and Molly Whittington

fernfolio — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:22:09 +0000

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 as their family grows.
Lack of space causes all kinds of small disputes among Kelly and Brian, their seven children, grandparents Henry and Rose, and Great Grandpa Albert. Eventually, they realize that it’s time to find a new and bigger house to accommodate all of their needs and interests. With the help of Henry’s realtor brother, they find the perfect house for their needs, but must overcome a number of difficulties, not the least of which is finding the money to afford the new house, before they can call the old Palmerston estate home.
Martha and Molly have done a wonderful job of explaining the process of home buying to children, including the job of the real estate agent, the importance of getting a home inspection, and the numerous small and larger surprises that await a new home owner.
The characters of Brian and Kelly, their children, aged 13 months to 16 years, and the grandparents are skilfully presented and engaging. The reader is rapidly drawn into the lives of the Maple family, and celebrates with them, when at last they are able to settle into their wonderful new Victorian home.
The Maples on the Move! is beautifully illustrated with photos taken in and around Martha’s and Molly’s two doll’s houses, as well as that of Molly’s friend, Esperanza.
Reading The Maples on the Move! just might inspire you to stop dreaming and start writing… and photographing! You can contact Martha and Molly at maples.move@hotmail.com.
FernFolio Editor