Counting on Snow

Maxwell Newhouse, folk artist extraordinaire, has created a unique counting book. The premise is simple. He invites children to count with him from ten crunching caribou down to one lonely moose, by finding other northern animals – from seals to wolves to snowy owls – as they turn the pages. But as the animals appear, so does the snow, until it’s a character too, obliterating light and dark, sky and earth. A gorgeous exploration of the isolation and the beauty of northern winter, Maxwell Newhouse has created a deceptively simple picture book that can be enjoyed by all ages.

She’s Got Game

Fresh from the spotlight of their first television experience, the Amigas Inc. team is back, but the heat is always on in Miami and when they get hired to do an unusual quince for a bratty debutante, the temperature goes sky high.

Queen of Hearts

Marie-Claire Coté is fifteen-head-strong and full of life. It’s 1941, Canada is two years into World War II, and workers are scarce. So Marie-Claire pitches in on the family farm, tries to keep up with her school-work, and listening to stories told by her fun-loving hard-living uncle, Gérard. But the whole family is taken aback Gérard is diagnosed with tuberculosis and even more shocked when Marie-Claire and her younger brother and sister are all stricken with the disease and are sent to “chase the cure” at a nearby sanatorium located in the rolling hills of southern Manitoba. Marie-Claise fights her illness and longs for privacy in a place where there is none. She desperately wants to ignore the other “TB exiles” around her, especially her frail but irritatingly cheerful roommate Signy, who seems determined to become best friends. And then there’s fellow patient Jack Hawkings, the nineteen-year-old musician with the heart-stopping smile. Soon she discovers that the sanatorium is a world unto itself–a world in which loss can be survived, and friendship, and love can be found in unexpected places.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 3

I Will Save You

Seventeen-year-old Kidd Ellison runs away to work for the summer at a beach campsite in California where his hard work and good looks lead to friendship and love but painful past memories surface in menacing ways.

What My Father Gave Me

Passionate, compelling essays reveal how daughters see their fathers. Editor Melanie Little brings together seven outstanding women — including Susan Olding, Jessica Raya and Saleema Nawaz — to write brilliant, powerful accounts of father-daughter relationships during their teen years. These deeply personal narratives draw readers into raw, real-life experiences. One girl recalls the parade of men in her mother’s life until a man named Al unexpectedly becomes the father she never had. Another father’s abandonment leads his teen daughter to enter a string of doomed relationships with older men, fueled by her “pilot light of pure hatred.” Another reveals the harrowing secret she guarded as a teen: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. One girl watches as the father she loves and respects struggles on the picket lines during a lockout at work and through an ensuing depression. Another daughter charts her own reckless behavior against that of her father’s, in search of a way to break the cycle. Gutsy and honest, these true stories invite readers behind secret doors as they celebrate the power of words to connect to the teen experience.

Grandma’s Gift

The author describes Christmas at his grandmother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem the year she introduced him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja, which has had a profound and lasting effect on him.

Too Late/Train Wreck

Some mistakes can never be repaired. The narrator of Train Wreck is looking back at the year she was 15 and in love with a bad boy named Johnny. Johnny’s friends play a cruel trick on a misfit named Suzy by convincing her that Johnny is attracted to her. When the prank goes too far, the narrator wants something big to happen to prove Johnny still loves her. The prank goes tragically wrong when Suzy is gang-raped. The narrator, now married to Johnny, reflects on the day she watched the horrific attack and did nothing.

In Too Late, 15-year-old Greg is in a teen sex offenders’ facility because of an assault on his stepsister. He hates the professionals who try to help him and can’t wait to go home. When he enters a room for a meeting, his mother is there crying. Her partner, whom Greg calls Step Dude, sits at her side. They have come to tell Greg they don’t want him back. It’s too late to be good, they say. Greg comes to the crippling realization of what he has become: the father he has both hated and feared.

Each book in the Single Voice series consists of two separate but thematically connected stories with distinct inverted covers in an alluring “flip-book” format. Exploding with the urgency, drama and confusion of adolescence, these books will appeal to both avid and less experienced readers.

Ole Flamenco!

“Photo-essay about Flamenco, a southern Spanish art form that incorporates song, dance, and music, tracing its cultural history and focusing on a contemporary young girl and her brother as they learn the traditional style of movement and instrument playing. Includes a glossary/pronunciation guide and author’s sources”–Provided by publisher.

The Trouble With Marlene/Film Studies

Parents have a lingering impact on their teen children. If you act like Marlene, you end up like Marlene — messed up, lonely and broke. No wonder Samantha rejects her mother’s lifestyle. In The Trouble with Marlene, mother and daughter share one thing — thoughts of suicide. Marlene never stops talking about it, but for Samantha, it’s a private affair. There’s one other private thought for Samantha: putting a pillow over her mother’s face and bringing the madness to an end. How far is she prepared to take her fantasy?