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Immigrant city: stories
By David Bezmozgis. 2019
In the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A…
mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal where he discovers new designs on the past in "How it Used to Be." A grandfather's Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in "Little Rooster." In "Roman's Song," Roman's desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his father's request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, and has his loyalties tested by the man he might have been in "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave." And, in the noir-inspired "The Russian Riviera," Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs.Frying Plantain: stories /
By Zalika Reid-Benta. 2019
Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle -- of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a…
"true" Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother's rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too "faas" or too "quiet" or too "bold" or too "soft." Set in "Little Jamaica," Toronto's Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected stories. We see her on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig's head in her great aunt's freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother's house, trying to cope with the ongoing battles between her unyielding grandparents. A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker. In her brilliantly incisive debut, Zalika Reid-Benta artfully depicts the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation Canadians and first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity and predominately white society.Shut up you're pretty: stories
By Téa Mutonji. 2019
In this story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness…
inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed. 2019.Be my love: a novel
By Kit Pearson. 2019
For as long as she can remember, Maisie has spent her summers on Kingfisher Island. She and her beloved cousin…
Una run wild, and Maisie feels the warm embrace of her big, extended family. This summer Maisie needs that escape more than ever. But now everything on Kingfisher has changed: Una has returned from her mainland school a sophisticated young woman too mature for childish games, and even worse, she has an all-consuming infatuation with David Meyer, both an old friend and an older man. Soon Maisie finds herself playing second fiddle-jealous of Una and David's closeness, and unsure of what those feelings mean. When Maisie's greatest attempt to maintain the special magic of her friendship with Una goes up in smoke, it seems as though all is lost. But with an enormous revelation, and a heartrending intervention, Maisie may finally discover the strength she needs to find the same peace that the island has brought her within herself. Grades 5-8. 2019.Orange for the sunsets
By Tina Athaide. 2019
In alternating voices, friends Asha and Yesofu, one Indian and one African, find their world turned upside-down when Idi Amin…
decides to expel Asian Indians from Uganda in 1972. Winner of the 2020 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People. Grades 3-6. 2019.You owe me a murder
By Eileen Cook. 2019
Kim's boyfriend dumped her-- and now she's stuck on a class trip to London with him and his new soulmate.…
Kim can't help wishing Connor was a little bit dead, even if she'd never really do that. On the plane she meets Nicki, who is more than willing to listen to Kim’s woes. When Nicki jokes about swapping murders, Kim plays along-- that is, until Kim's ex-boyfriend mysteriously dies. Blackmailed by Nicki to fulfill her end of the deal, Kim will have to commit a murder, or take the fall for one. For junior and senior high readers.Proof I was here /
By Becky Blake. 2019
Hailing from Toronto, where she has an assault charge waiting, Niki is outside of Canada for the first time. The…
pickpockets, squatters and graffiti artists she meets challenge her to reassess her ideas about luck and art. With the help of a passionate Catalan separatist who dreams of building a new country from the ground up, Niki realizes that starting her life over from scratch could be an opportunity - if she can just find a way to clear her name." 2019.A story about cancer (with a happy ending) /
By India Desjardins. 2017
A teenage girl heads towards the hospital waiting room where the doctors are going to tell her how much time…
she's got to live. As she walks, she thinks about her journey up to this point ... the terrible decor in the hospital, wearing a headscarf, the horrible treatments, but also being with her friends, family, and her new boyfriend Victor. This is a story about cancer with a happy ending. It's about life, love, and especially, hope. Grades 6-9. ©2017.Born to the badge / (Wyatt Earp, an American odyssey #book 2)
By Mark Warren. 2019
Shunted from his entrepreneurial ambitions to profit from the boomtowns of the frontier, Wyatt Earp returns to law enforcement. In…
Wichita, Kansas the town leaders become disenchanted with his hardline methods, and so he moves to a place where an iron-rule is needed - Dodge City. With him comes Mattie Blaylock, a runaway prostitute, who, like Wyatt, is searching for a chance at a better life. As marshal in Dodge, Wyatt establishes a reputation as a peace officer, but he knows that police work will never deliver what he wants. After joining the Black Hills gold rush and then serving a stint as railroad detective in Texas, he returns to Kansas, only to pin on the badge again and inadvertently forge his path into history. 2019.Claws of the Panda: Beijing's Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada
By Jonathan Manthorpe. 2019
Claws of the Panda tells the story of Canada’s failure to construct a workable policy towards the People’s Republic of…
China. In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage. Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents. The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.Ridgerunner
By Gil Adamson. 2020
Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Ridgerunner is the follow-up to Gil Adamson’s award-winning and critically acclaimed novel The…
Outlander. November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world. Bestseller. Winner of the 2020 Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.Here the Dark
By David Bergen. 2020
NOMINATED FOR THE 2020 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK “David Bergen’s command is breathtaking…
… His work belongs to the world, and to all time. He is one of our living greats.”—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves From the streets of Danang, Vietnam, where a boy falls in with a young American missionary, to fishermen lost off the islands of Honduras, to the Canadian prairies, where a teenage boy’s infatuation reveals his naiveté and an aging rancher finds himself smitten, the short stories in Here the Dark explore the spaces between doubt and belief, evil and good, obscurity and light. Following men and boys bewildered by their circumstances and swayed by desire, surprised by love and by their capacity for both tenderness and violence, and featuring a novella about a young woman who rejects the laws of her cloistered Mennonite community, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner David Bergen’s latest deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost—and how we might be found.Butter Honey Pig Bread: A Novel
By Francesca Ekwuyasi. 2020
Longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. An intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women: a novel about food, family, and…
forgiveness.Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family. Francesca Ekwuyasi's debut novel tells the interwoven stories of twin sisters, Kehinde and Taiye, and their mother, Kambirinachi. Kambirinachi feels she was born an Ogbanje, a spirit that plagues families with misfortune by dying in childhood to cause its mother misery. She believes that she has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family and now lives in fear of the consequences of that decision. Some of Kambirinachi's worst fears come true when her daughter, Kehinde, experiences a devasting childhood trauma that causes the family to fracture in seemingly irreversible ways. As soon as she's of age, Kehinde moves away and cuts contact with her twin sister and mother. Alone in Montreal, she struggles to find ways to heal while building a life of her own. Meanwhile, Taiye, plagued by guilt for what happened to her sister, flees to London and attempts to numb the loss of the relationship with her twin through reckless hedonism. Now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos to visit their mother. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward. Canada Reads 2021.The Starlight Claim
By Tim Wynne-Jones. 2019
Fast-paced, evocative, and intensely suspenseful, Tim Wynne-Jones’s latest psychological thriller finds a teenager setting his wits against the frigid wilderness…
and a menacing crew of escapees.Four months after his best friend, Dodge, disappeared near their families’ camp in a boat accident, Nate is still haunted by nightmares. He’d been planning to make the treacherous trek to the remote campsite with a friend — his first time in winter without his survival-savvy father. But when his friend gets grounded, Nate secretly decides to brave the trip solo in a journey that’s half pilgrimage, half desperate hope he will find his missing friend when no one else could. What he doesn’t expect to find is the door to the cabin flung open and the camp occupied by strangers: three men he’s horrified to realize have escaped from a maximum-security prison. Snowed in by a blizzard and with no cell signal, Nate is confronted with troubling memories of Dodge and a stunning family secret, and realizes that his survival now depends on his wits as much as his wilderness skills. As things spiral out of control, Nate finds himself dealing with questions even bigger than who gets to leave the camp alive.Mad for Ads: How Advertising Gets (and Stays) in Our Heads
By Ian Turner, Erica Fyvie. 2021
This amusing and engaging behind-the-scenes look at advertising and its influence will help kids decode the ads that surround them…
every day and make smart decisions. For children growing up in an advertising-saturated world, here's an eye-opening explanation of what advertising is, how it works and why that matters. The book covers the components of an advertising campaign, from slogans to logos, and the many ways marketers seek to influence behavior, from tapping into fears to using psychological pricing. It then brings these techniques and tools to life by taking readers through the creation of two fictional advertising plans. Along the way, there's information about the strategies that advertisers use to influence their audience, as well as valuable background on how digital technology allows companies to track people and what that means for privacy. It's a savvy look at the business of advertising that teaches children to pay better attention to ads and be more discerning about the messages they find. Award-winning author Erica Fyvie has geared this vital, comprehensive and entertaining look at advertising to children who are just beginning to notice and to be swayed by brands. By building media literacy and promoting critical thinking about all kinds of marketing tools --- from in-game ads to social media “kid influencers” --- the book empowers readers to analyze and respond to what they see every day. Relevant, child-friendly language and examples, along with bold and humorous illustrations by Ian Turner, keep the pages lively and interesting. There are direct curriculum links to language arts, visual arts, technology and social studies lessons. Also included are a glossary, index and selected bibliography.Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism
By Daphne B., Alex Manley. 2021
A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets…
As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be. The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter. “The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir “[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe.” —Laurence Fournier, Lettres Québécoises, five stars "Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphné B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that’s typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do." —Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points "A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen." —Rachel Kauder Nalebuff "Made-Up is anything but—committed to the grit of our current realities, Daphné B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool." —Sruti Islam "The book will leave you both laughing in recognition and wincing at the reality of the beauty world’s impact on our collective psyche." —Chatelaine d"[Made-Up] examines the intersection of beauty culture and consumer culture... Aided by the work of writers like Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Amanda Hess, and Arabelle Sicardi... B. makes sharp observations about the ideologies behind both beauty [...] and consumerism." —Bitch Media "Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading." —Literary Review of Canada "[Made-Up], newly translated by writer/poet Alex Manley from its original French, puts an iPeople Like Frank: And other stories from the edge of normal
By Jenn Ashton. 2021
Finalist, Indigenous Voices Awards 2021 On the edge of normal, the everyday can be an adventure and the ordinary a…
triumph. In the tradition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Room and If I Fall, If I Die, this uplifting collection explores the world through the eyes of protagonists whose perspectives are informed by their unique circumstances. Some are struggling with physical challenges while others seek to overcome psychological barriers. Far from being defined by their limitations, these characters revel in achievements others take for granted and find wonder in unexpected places. By celebrating the private triumphs of people who are all too often dismissed, Ashton reminds us all of our own humanity.Growing Up Trans: In Our Own Words
By Kate Fry, Lindsay Herriot. 2021
How to Lose Everything: A Memoir
By Christa Couture. 2020
Her Epic Adventure: 25 Daring Women Who Inspire a Life Less Ordinary
By Julia De Laurentiis Johnston, Salini Perera. 2021
Thrilling true stories of female adventurers who never stopped believing in themselves --- and achieved the unimaginable! Throughout history, women…
eager for adventure have long faced obstacles and opposition. But here are the stories of 25 remarkable women --- from pilots to mountain climbers, deep-sea divers to Antarctic explorers --- who defied expectations and made their mark on history. Included are Bessie Coleman, famously known as the first Black woman to earn a pilot's license (two years before Amelia Earhart!). But readers also learn about lesser-known women, such as Diana Nyad, who, at age 64, became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, and Arunima Sinha, the first woman amputee to climb Mount Everest. The women's experiences are all different, but they have one thing in common: they didn't let anything get in the way of their dreams! This highly readable and inspiring book --- organized by sky, peaks, ice, land and water adventures --- describes the achievements of a diverse group of female adventurers from around the world, including women of color, Indigenous women, LGBTQ+ women and women with disabilities. Author Julia De Laurentiis Johnston's text pays particular attention to the barriers and biases these adventurers faced because of their gender and the character and uncompromising ambition they displayed to overcome them. Sidebars provide how-to tips for adventurers, engaging STEM content, fun facts and inspirational quotes. Illustrations throughout the pages by Salini Perera enhance the compelling stories and bring a contemporary feel to the book that makes it accessible and appealing to kids today. Also included are an interview with the modern-day adventurer Lois Pryce, a world map that locates the stories throughout the book, author's sources, resources for kids and an index. This book links to both biography and history curriculums.