Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World of Industrial Farming

Stuart Laidlaw, a member of The Toronto Star’s editorial board who has led the paper’s coverage of Canadian farm and agricultural issues, has written a compassionate and harrowing account of the burgeoning industrialization of Canadian ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Science, Technology & Environment

A Foreign Field

By Gillian Chan

During the Second World War, the Royal Air Force ran a flight training school in the town of Hagersville, Ontario. The school is one of the two main backdrops for Gillian Chan’s new novel; the ... Read More »

November 24, 2003

The Water of Possibility

By Hiromi Goto

When the Kato family moves to rural Alberta, it is 12-year-old Sayuri who faces the toughest adjustment. Her father has a new job, and her mother, a horror-fiction writer, needs only her imagination to feel ... Read More »

November 23, 2003

A Mighty Big Imagining

By Lynne Kositsky

Penguin has created an engrossing new series of historical fiction called Our Canadian Girl. Each of the series’ books imagines a 10-year-old girl’s reactions to a particular historical situation: the 1885 Montreal smallpox epidemic in ... Read More »

November 23, 2003 | Filed under: Book news, Libraries

A Group of One

By Rachna Gilmore

Fifteen-year-old Tara Mehta considers herself 100% Canadian and doesn’t want to be labelled by her skin colour or her Indian heritage. But when her paternal grandmother, Naniji, comes to Canada for a visit, Tara is ... Read More »

November 23, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Apples and Angel Ladders: A Collection of Pioneer Christmas Stories

By Irene Morck, Muriel Wood, illus.

Irene Morck’s Christmas stories are drawn from her father’s experiences as the child of a Danish immigrant family struggling to survive in the 1920s on their farm in Alberta’s central woodlands. Each of the six ... Read More »

November 23, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Box Girl

By Sarah Withrow

Sarah Withrow’s characters are would-be escape artists: caught in painfully binding realities, they box themselves in even more tightly in preparation for flight. In her first novel, Bat Summer (which won the Groundwood First Novel ... Read More »

November 23, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

On Wings of a Dragon

By Cora Taylor

Stories about surviving extraordinary hardship are always in demand, perhaps because of the hope inspired by those who manage to rise from the ashes of their former lives. In Cora Taylor’s latest fantasy for young ... Read More »

November 23, 2003 | Filed under: Book news

Four Pictures by Emily Carr

By Nicolas Debon

These two new books on Emily Carr couldn’t have taken more different approaches. Jo Ellen Bogart’s Emily Carr: At the Edge of the World is the more traditional – a crisply written biography, filled with ... Read More »

November 21, 2003 | Filed under: Book news