Human Wildlife

The average adult is made up of 100 trillion cells. But only one-tenth of those are human. The rest are bacteria, fungi, parasites, and “miscellaneous riff-raff.” That is one of the astonishing facts in Dr. ... Read More »

November 26, 2003 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Island of the Blessed: The Secrets of Egypt’s Everlasting Oasis

By Harry Thurston

Author, scientist, and environmental journalist Harry Thurston’s latest book combines the most winning elements of the travelogue and archeological mystery while working in a timely environmental warning. Island of the Blessed tracks the unfolding archeology ... Read More »

November 26, 2003 | Filed under: History

Loop

By Anne Simpson

Loop is East Coast poet and novelist Anne Simpson’s second book of poetry. Her first, Light Falls Through You, was the winner of both the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the 2001 League of Canadian Poets’ ... Read More »

November 26, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

The Canning Season

By Polly Horvath

“Ratchet Clark lived with her mother, Henriette, in a small, gloomy sub-basement apartment in Pensacola, Florida. They had no windows, but if they had she imagined they would be able to see worms, grubs, and ... Read More »

November 26, 2003

Stitches

By Glen Huser

Like Glen Huser’s first young adult novel, Touch of the Clown, this one deals with marginalized Alberta kids struggling with social problems. Travis knows he is different from the other boys in his junior high ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Book news

Jake, Reinvented

By Gordon Korman

An ambitious teen analogue of The Great Gatsby, Gordon Korman’s new novel, Jake, Reinvented, makes explicit its literary antecedents: Jay and Daisy have been replaced by Jake and Didi; Tom and Nick by Todd and ... Read More »

November 25, 2003

Theories of Relativity

By Barbara Haworth-Attard

Since he was kicked out by his mother when she found a new man, 16-year-old Dylan Wallace has been panhandling on the streets. Preparing for winter, he’s methodically coming up with his own manual for ... Read More »

November 25, 2003

The Healing Time of Hickeys

By Karen Rivers

Sixteen-year-old Haley Harmony is self-deprecatingly honest about her flaws, almost to a fault, in B.C. author Karen Rivers’ latest YA novel. The entries in her laptop diary demonstrate, with terrific comic and touching effect, the ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Book news

I Gave My Mom a Castle

By Jean Little, Kady MacDonald Denton, illus.

Giving presents and getting presents: both are often fun, but not always easy. Jean Little’s many well-loved novels and poems explore the difficulties as well as the joys of family life, and this new poem ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

The Several Lives of Orphan Jack

By Sarah Ellis, Bruno St-Aubin, illus.

Sarah Ellis, the celebrated Vancouver author with X-ray insight into her child protagonists’ inner lives, turns her talents to something completely different: an ebullient bildungsroman that skips along with the sparkling wordplay of a junior ... Read More »