Americas

Materials from the Americas

Lightfinder

Lightfinder is a YA fantasy novel about Aisling, a young Cree woman who sets out into the wilderness with her Kokum (grandmother), Aunty and two young men she barely knows. They have to find and rescue her runaway younger brother, Eric. Along the way she learns that the legends of her people might be real and that she has a growing power of her own.The story follows the paths of Aisling and Eric, siblings unwittingly thrust into a millennia old struggle for the future of life on earth. It deals with growing up, love and loss, and the choices life puts in our path. Love and confusion are in store, as are loss and pain. Things are not always what they seem and danger surrounds them at every turn.

Zero Repeat Forever

Sixteen year-old Raven, injured and still grieving over her boyfriend’s death by the invading Nahx, crosses paths with Eighth, a Nyx warrior who has deserted his unit and abandonded his directives, and as the world falls apart around them, the two learn to trust each other in order to survive.

Light Years

When a mysterious virus turns into a worldwide pandemic, sixteen-year-old Luisa Ochoa-Jones travels across the country in search of a cure, discovering that the fate of humanity may rest in the confluence of her extraordinary computer programming skills and a synesthesia-like condition that causes her senses to misfire when she is under emotional stress.

Evangelina Takes Flight

Having fled the rampaging revolutionaries in Mexico in 1911, thirteen-year-old Evangelina and her family face unexpected prejudice and violence in Texas.

I Am Not A Number

When Irene is removed from her First Nations family to live in a residential school, she is confused, frightened and terribly homesick. She tries to remember who she is and where she came from despite being told to do otherwise. When she goes home for summer holidays, her parents decide never to send her away again.

Dragonfly Kites

Joe and Cody, two young Cree brothers, along with their parents and their little dog Ootsie, are spending the summer by one of the hundreds of lakes in northern Manitoba. Summer means a chance to explore the world and make friends with an array of creatures, But what Joe and Cody like doing best of all is flying dragonfly kites. They catch dragonflies and gently tie a length of thread around the middle of each dragonfly before letting it go. Off soar the dragonflies into the summer sky and off race the brothers and Ootsie too, chasing after their dragonfly kites through trees and meadows and down to the beach before watching them disappear into the night sky. But in their dreams, Joe and Cody soar through the skies with their kites until it’s time to wake up.

Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend

Margaritte is a sharp-tongued, drug-dealing, 16-year-old Native American floundering in a Colorado town crippled by poverty, unemployment and drug abuse. She hates the burnout, futureless kids surrounding her and dreams that she and her unreliable new boyfriend can move far beyond the bright lights of Denver that float on the horizon before the daily suffocation of teen pregnancy eats her alive.

A Properly Unhaunted Place

Rosa Ramona Díaz has just moved to the small, un-haunted town of Ingot the only ghost-free town in the world. She doesn’t want to be there. She doesn’t understand how her mother a librarian who specializes in ghost-appeasement could possibly want to live in a place with no ghosts. Frankly, she doesn’t understand why anyone would.

Step Up To The Plate, Maria Singh

Nine-year-old Maria Singh learns to play softball just like her heroes in the All-American Girls’ League, while her parents and neighbors are struggling through World War II, working for India’s independence, and trying to stay on their farmland.