When I Love You at Christmas

Simply tie the front and back covers of this 14-page board book together, and get ready to celebrate! The two envelopes inside contain everything you need to decorate: sheets of stickers, shiny paper, and ornaments to cut out and color, plus tips for creating even more decorations for your very own tree.

Rubia and the Three Osos

Retells the story of Goldilocks and the three bears in rhyming text interspersed with Spanish words, which are defined in a glossary.

Fiesta!

Describes a festival or holiday celebrated in Latin America for each month of the year, from the feast of Saint Anthony in January through Mexico’s Cinco de Mayo, an Inca festival in Peru in June, and a ritual of African origin in Brazil in September.

When Apples Grew Noses and White Horses Flew

In these three imaginative stories, Jan Andrews introduces us to Quebec’s traditional folktale hero, Ti-Jean. He’s an endearing character who is both wise and foolish, and though he does find himself in hard situations (often of his own making), in the end, he somehow manages to do what needs to be done. In “Ti-Jean and the Princess of Tomboso” he eventually outwits a greedy princess; in “Ti-Jean the Marble Player” he gets the best of a pint-sized scoundrel; and in “How Ti-Jean Became a Fiddler” he turns the tables on a too-clever-for-her-own-good seigneur’s daughter, and finds true love in the process.

City Numbers

Joanne Schwartz and Matt Beam have discovered numbers in many different forms all over the city. They are on houses and apartment buildings, on store windows and doors, on trucks and garbage bins, on sidewalks and parking spots. They are printed, spray-painted, molded in plastic, chiseled in stone, stamped on vinyl, even torched into metal. We see these numbers, often unconsciously, every day, but the wonderful photographs in this book prompt us to look at them more closely, becoming aware and alive to the art, serendipity and variety that surround us.

Migrant

Migrant farmers and their families represent an ever-growing body of laborers around the world. They are used as cheap labor but most of them are not allowed to settle down, integrate into their host countries and become citizens with full rights. This is, of course, devastating to their children.

Among these groups are the Mennonites from Mexico, who originally went to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s. They speak “Low German” and though many are poor, they are an important part of the Mexican farm community. Because of free trade and the fact that Mexican farmers cannot compete with highly subsidized US farmers, they have been forced to come back to Canada — as migrant workers — in order to survive. Anna is the child of Mennonites from Mexico, who have come north to harvest fruit and vegetables. Sometimes she feels like a bird, flying north in the spring and south in the fall, sometimes like a jackrabbit in an abandoned burrow, since her family occupies an empty farmhouse near the fields, sometimes like a kitten, as she shares a bed with her sisters. But above all Anna wonders what it would be like to be a tree rooted deeply in the earth, watching the seasons come and go, instead of being like a “feather in the wind.”