Seven high-school juniors think it will be fun to participate in the Argus program, a new computer program that lets them simulate their tenth high-school reunion, but they find that glimpses into the future can be devastatingly disturbing.
Sixteen-year-old Jessica, who longs to be free of the restrictions of her father and life in the Jewish ghetto of sixteen-century Venice, falls in love with a Christian aristocrat and must make choices which will affect her whole family. Inspired by Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.
A collection of stories highlights the similar problems faced by women of all ages, including the pensive, eighteen-year-old Ginny; seventeen-year-old Loretta, who is alone; and fifty-five-year-old Allison, who cannot help crying all the time.
Shortlisted for Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year Award 2007 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award nominee 2007 Saskatchewan Young Readers’ Choice Willow Awards nominee Canadian Children’s Book Centre Our Choice Starred Selection White Pine nominee, 2007 McNally Robinson announced that Wild Orchid was one of the top five best selling books in Saskatechewan in 2006. Taylor Jane Simon is 18 years old and spending the summer with her mother in Prince Albert National Park. The holiday has been planned so Taylor’s mother can spend time with her latest boyfriend, Danny, and work in the pizza restaurant near the park that Danny runs. Taylor would just as soon stay at home in Saskatoon, but because she suffers from an autistic condition called Asperger’s Syndrome, she can’t stay on her own. Taylor’s mother encourages her daughter to explore the park’s possibilities on her own. For Taylor, whose life experience has been seriously limited, this means facing the test of meeting new people who work in the park’s nature center – and facing it alone. Summer also holds out the possibility of finding her own boyfriend, though Taylor isn’t quite sure what that may involve. What she discovers will change her life forever. Written as an epistolary novel, Wild Orchid is frank but optimistic, literal yet innocent. A courageous wit attends Taylor’s gradual emergence as her own person, and the reader will find the exploration of Taylor’s mind a revealing and heartwarming encounter.
After Odella’s mother leaves her, her sisters, and their father in Manitoba and moves to Iceland with another man, she then dies there, and the family finally learns some of the many secrets that have haunted them for two generations.
Two years after his father’s mysterious disappearance, Jim Hawkins is coping — barely. Underneath, he’s frozen in uncertainty and grief. What did happen to his father? Is he dead or just gone? Then Jim meets Ruth Rose. Moody, provocative, she’s the bad-girl stepdaughter of Father Fisher, Jim’s father’s childhood friend and the town pastor, and she shocks Jim out of his stupor when she tells him her stepfather is a murderer. “Don’t you want to know who he murdered?” she asks. Jim doesn’t. Ruth Rose is clearly crazy — a sixteen-year-old misfit. Yet something about her fierce conviction pierces Jim’s shell. He begins to burn with a desire for the truth, until it becomes clear that it may be more unsettling than he can bear. What is the real meaning of the strange prayers Father Fisher intones behind the door of his private sanctuary? Why does Ruth Rose suddenly disappear? And what really happened thirty years ago when a boy died in a burning house?
Thirteen-year-old Plato Jones comes to terms with his mixed heritage when he visits Greece and finds out about his Welsh grandfather, a World War II hero, and his Greek grandfather, who is rumored to have been a traitor.
A collection of short stories which focus on the difficult journeys teens take on their way to adulthood.
Your mother’s suicide attempt has left her in a coma from which she’s never waking up. You know that she wouldn’t want to live like this, but could you really help her die? Here you are, making the hardest decision of your life and there’s no one to help you: Your father has disappeared into depression. Your best friend is becoming someone you no longer want to know. There is a girl who could help, maybe, if you’d let her. But in the end, it’s all up to you.
A free-verse novel from debut author Alma Fullerton plunges deep inside the psyche of a young man faced with a life-and-death decision.