Death

Monday

This playful and original picture book takes three friends through the days of the week as well as the seasons of the year. Monday is our main character and as we move through the days of the week he becomes smaller and smaller until Sunday when he virtually disappears in a snowstorm. His two freinds go off to look for him. They too move through the days of the week as well as the seasons of the year as they search for their friend. At the end they finally find him, and he is just a little bit different, for as we know, no one Monday is the same as the next.

Please note that there are five different weights of paper used in this book and as the reader moves from the lushness of spring into the browns of autumn and the icy whiteness of winter the paper becomes thinner and thinner. Additionally, the paper is textured with a Braille-like effect during the snowstorm at the end of the book.

Light Foot/Pies Ligeros

Once upon a time no creatures on Earth died. But they had baby after baby, and before long the world grew crowded. Death decided to solve the problem by challenging everyone to a skip-rope contest — as an immortal, Death won every time, and one by one everyone succumbed to her dare. Soon, every living being knew Death. This intriguing fable is based on Francisco Toledo’s series of engravings of Death, a dominant figure in Mexican culture. Toledo, the heir to the great generation of Mexican artists that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, has imaginatively explored this integral part of life, and his entrancing images are matched by poetic text from his wife Natalia.

Kaito’s Cloth

With the winter days approaching, young Kaito journeys to the Mountain of Dreams to watch her butterflies soar one last time. However, when she reaches her destination after an arduous three-day trek, she is too late. Her butterflies have died. “Weep no more,” says the Lord of Flight, creator of all butterflies. “Only the wings are stilled. Flight is eternal.” Kaito has an idea: She takes a silver needle and soft spider’s silk, and sews a pair of wings that take breath in the wind. With her kite, now everyone can enjoy the beauty of a butterfly’s flight all winter long.

In Kaito’s Cloth, Glenda Millard and Gaye Chapman offer an emotionally resonant and visually arresting story about the beauty of butterflies, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Mcfig and Mcfly: A Tale of Jealousy, Revenge, and Death (with a Happy Ending)

From the unparalleled Henrik Drescher comes a wickedly funny story about the perils of runaway rivalry (with a happy ending). McFig lives with his daughter, Rosie, in a lovely little cottage far away from anywhere big and important. One day, McFly and his son, Anton, buy the land next door. At first McFig and McFly hit it off big-time and build McFly a cottage modeled exactly after McFig’s house. But then the two start to add things onto their houses — a medieval tower, a second-story playroom and soon McFig and McFly are in a lifelong competition to be bigger and better than each other.

H.I.V.E.: The Overlord Protocol

Otto Malpense and his friends thought their first year at the Higher Institute of Villainous Education was the most adventurous and exciting that they would ever encounter. They were dead wrong. When Otto and Wing are allowed off campus to attend Wing’s father’s funeral in Japan, they have no idea it’s a trap, all part of a lethal plan organized by Cypher, the most ruthless supervillain any of them have ever known. He intends to use them to retrieve the Overlord Protocol, a device that has the capacity to help him take over the world. But when things go terribly wrong, Otto will stop at nothing to hunt him down and make him pay. With the help of Laura, Shelby, Raven, and his former nemesis, Dr. Nero, Otto must find a way to defeat an enemy that has overcome some of the planet’s most infamous villains without even breaking a sweat. Because if he doesn’t, the world as they know it will be changed forever.

Porcupine

War-torn Afghanistan could not seem farther from Newfoundland, but it is about to change twelve-year-old tomboy Jack Cooper (or Jacqueline, as her mother insists on calling her) forever. When her father is killed in the war, she watches helplessly as her mother crumbles under sorrow and depression. Jack and her younger sister and brother, Tessa and Simon, end up across the country, living on a run-down farm in a small town on the Prairies with a great-grandmother they didn’t know existed. Worried that they will be abandoned again if Gran moves into a retirement home, Jack puts on a brave face and encourages Tessa and Simon to take on the challenges of their new life. In the process, she learns that families come in many different forms and that love, trust, and faith can build a home anywhere.

The Day the World Exploded: The Earthshaking Catastrophe at Krakatoa

The almighty explosion that destroyed the volcano island of Krakatoa was followed by an immense tsunami that killed more than thirty thousand people. The effects of the waves were felt as far away as France, and bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. Today, one hundred and twenty-five years after the volcano erupted in one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known, the name Krakatoa is still synonymous with disaster.

Crazy Diamond

That’s Mira M. And this is the story of her unforgettable life — as a kid alone in a junkyard tire swing, to her escape from Croatia at age 9 in a Marshall amp road case in the rear of her uncle Lou’s van. A musician, he hands her the key to her future: a guitar. When she’s 14, Mira meets Melody, Rosa and Jackson, three teens who stow away from Ghana in a ship-ping container and end up — to their surprise — in Hamburg, Germany. What stories they have! And what a story the four of them, plus Kralle (a little older and wiser) and Zucka (the record producer’s son), share on the way to the fame that all of them covet — except Mira, even after the MTV Awards show in Barcelona. Her song lyrics tell her truth. But are they her lyrics? Her music? She swears so. But who listens, now that she’s 18 — and dead?

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life “before,” when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith’s holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school’s production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky’s tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith’s ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.

A Swift Pure Cry

Ireland, 1984. After Shell’s mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning, and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister. Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with childhood friend, Declan, who is charming, eloquent and persuasive. But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and the center of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country. The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.