Americas

Materials from the Americas

When Dimple Met Rishi

Eleanor and Park meets Bollywood in this hilarious and heartfelt novel about two Indian-American teens whose parents conspire to arrange their marriage. Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers… right? Rishi Patel is a hopeless romantic. So when his parents tell him that his future wife will be attending the same summer program as him—wherein he’ll have to woo her—he’s totally on board. Because as silly as it sounds to most people in his life, Rishi wants to be arranged, believes in the power of tradition, stability, and being a part of something much bigger than himself. The Shahs and Patels didn’t mean to start turning the wheels on this “suggested arrangement” so early in their children’s lives, but when they noticed them both gravitate toward the same summer program, they figured, Why not?

WOW Recommends: Book of the Month, September, 2017

Featured in WOW Currents (February, 2018) around the theme of women in STEM.

Two perspectives were offered in My Take/Your Take (March, 2018).

Last Leaf First Snowflake To Fall

Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall takes us on a dreamlike voyage into nature at that secret moment when fall turns into winter. We find ourselves in a kind of paradise, which humans may be part of but which they have not despoiled. A Native father and son lead us through forests, down rivers, over lakes and ponds. Along the way we experience the primordial beauty of the physical world. This is nature as we all feel in our hearts it must once have been.

Lessons From Mother Earth

Tess has visited her grandmother many times without really being aware of the garden. But today they step outside the door and Tess learns that all of nature can be a garden. And if you take care of the plants that are growing, if you learn about them — understanding when they flower, when they give fruit, and when to leave them alone — you will always find something to nourish you. At the end of their day Tess is thankful to Mother Earth for having such a lovely garden, and she is thankful to have such a wise grandma.

In Mad Love and War

This collection includes poems that explore human relationships, music, death … universal concerns written about in a way that recognizes and uses the universality while selecting the images from her Cree background. We are privileged to glimpse another way of relating to the world while being presented with the difficulties of growing up in a minority culture.

Idaa Trail: In the Steps of Our Ancestors

Etseh and Etsi traveled the Idaa Trail when they were children and as they paddle north with their grandchildren, they pass along their knowledge of special sites along the way — the history behind an abandoned village, the legend of the wolverine and its babies at the Sliding Hill, the story of a mysterious gravesite. They also explain how their people survived in the old days – building birch bark canoes, fishing with willow lines and muskrat-tooth hooks, and ambushing herds of caribou.

Huron Carol

In the early 1600s Father Jean de Brébeuf came to Canada from his native France as a Jesuit missionary. He settled among the Huron, or Ouendat, people in what is now Midland, Ontario. Despite his missionary zeal, Brébeuf was sensitive to the people with whom he lived. He learned their language and he wrote, in Huron, the original version of this famous Christmas carol. He and his fellow priests, called Black Robes, and many of their Huron parishioners were killed in an Iroquois raid in 1649. But Brébeuf’s carol continued to be sung by successive generations of Hurons. Then in 1926, Toronto writer Jesse Edgar Middleton, inspired by Brébeuf, wrote his own version of the carol in English. His are the familiar words we sing today, describing the Huron landscape, flora and fauna in telling the Christmas story.

Grandpa’s Girls

A young girl delights in a visit to her grandpa’s farm. She and her cousins run through the fields, explore the root cellar where the smoked salmon and jars of fruit are stored, swing on a rope out the barn loft window, visit the appaloosa in the corral and tease the neighbor’s pig. The visit is also an opportunity for this child to ask Grandpa what her grandmother, Yahyah, was like, and explore the “secret room,” with its old wooden box of ribbons, medals and photos of Grandpa in uniform.