Canada

Materials from Canada

Landing, The

Will Ben ever escape the Landing? The hardscrabble farm on the shores of Lake Muskoka can’t generate a living, so Ben’s Uncle Henry sells goods and gas to cottagers from the dock known as Cooks Landing. It had never been much of a living and since the Depression hit, it’s even less. Ben’s thinking a lot these days, and it’s making him miserable. He’s thinking about how unfair it is that his uncle only cares about work. He’s thinking about what he really wants to do: play the violin. These days, he’s lucky to snatch the odd bit of practice between chores, playing to the chickens in the henhouse. A new job fixing up the grand old cottage on nearby Pine Island seems at first to be just one more thing to keep Ben away from his violin. After he meets the island’s owner, Ben changes his mind. Ruth Chapman is a cultured and wealthy woman from New York who introduces Ben to an unfamiliar, liberating world. After Ben plays violin for Ruth and her admiring friends, it only makes him more desperate to flee. Then, during a stormy night on Lake Muskoka, everything changes.

The Onlyhouse (Northern Lights Young Novels)

Red Cedar Award nominee, 1997 Life in her new neighborhood isn’t going to be easy for Croatian immigrant Lucy Vakovik. Her mother has saved enough to buy them an onlyhouse: a single detached home. But to Lucy’s friends, her mother says, “My sometime English is broking.” What’s a kid to do? Lucy’s got a fight ahead of her and important choices to make. But she knows she’s not a stereotype like some people think – she’s Lucy and that’s a good place to start.

Bradley Mcgogg, the Very Fine Frog

Bradley McGogg makes his home in the bog where there are plenty of yummy bugs for a frog to feed on. Upon finding his pantry bare one day, Bradley decides to meet his neighbors, in the hopes that they will share some of their favorite meals with him. But this “bog frog” soon finds that not all animals eat alike.

More Than You Can Chew

Marty Black has retreated from a difficult family situation into the area she can best control, her own appetites. She may not be able to control her parents’ behavior, but she can decide what she will and will not eat. Eventually, she stops eating altogether. Marty is close to death when she finally asks for help and finds herself in a psychiatric institution. But recognizing her need for help is only the first tenuous step on a long road to recovery. Marty’s ability to find a way to live, despite the powerful lure of anorexia, is the core of this novel.

The Blue Girl (Firebird)

Seventeen-year-old Imogene’s rebellious nature has caused her more harm than good—so when her family moves to Newford, she decides to reinvent herself. She won’t lose her punk/thrift-shop look, but she’ll try to avoid the gangs, work a little harder at school, and maybe even stay out of trouble for a change. But trouble shows up anyway. Imogene quickly catches the eye of Redding High’s bullies, as well as the school’s resident teenage ghost. Then she gets on the wrong side of a gang of malicious fairies. When her old imaginary childhood friend, Pelly, actually manifests, Imogene realizes that the impossible is all too real. And it’s dangerous. If she wants to survive high school—not to mention stay alive—she has to fall back on the skills she picked up in her hometown, running with a gang.

The Corps Of The Bare-Boned Plane

When an accident leaves teenage cousins Meline and Jocelyn parentless, they come to live with their unknown and eccentric Uncle Marten on his private island. They soon discover that the island has a history as tragic as their own: it was once an air force training camp, led by a mad commander whose crazed plan to train pilots to fly airplanes without instruments sent eleven pilots to their deaths. Jocelyn, Meline, and Uncle Marten are soon joined on this island of wrecked planes and wrecked men by an elderly Austrian housekeeper, a very mysterious butler, a cat, and a dog. But to Jocelyn and Meline, being in a strange new place around strange new people only underscores the fact that the world they once knew has ended. Told in the alternating voices of four characters dealing with grief in different ways, Polly Horvath’s new novel is a rich and complicated story about loss and the possibility— and impossibility—of beginning again.

Being With Henry

“You never know where this life will take you,” Henry Olsen tells Laker Wyatt when he finds the boy could, penniless, and sleeping on the street. Raised by his hapless, childlike mother, Laker has often had to act more like a caretaker than a son. It’s become easy for him to soothe her with a cup of tea or fake a phone call to her boss on a bad day. But when stepfather number two, Rick the Prick, comes on the scene, everything changes. After Laker fights with Rick, his mother, Audrey, does the unimaginable: She kicks her son out. Drifting aimlessly, Laker meets Henry, eighty-three, a widower with family troubles of his own. Being with Henry brings its own challenges, as well as surprises. How these two disparate souls — an angry, homeless teenager and a lonely, crotchety old man — come to know and care for each other makes a sometimes funny, often poignant, and ultimately moving novel about truth and family and the courage it takes to search for these in unexpected places.