In the library, in books, I discovered a wild freedom – not just to learn for myself what gave me pleasure, but to live other lives, see through other eyes, go adventuring, sail, fly, suffer, defy, overcome and exult,” writes Michele Landsberg in her deeply moving introduction to this imaginative anthology. The first of its kind in Canadian children’s literature, this book celebrates the importance of libraries in our lives.

Editor Debora Pearson, herself a former children’s librarian, and best known for her Norma Fleck award-winner By Truck to the North, has brought together nine original short stories by children’s writers as diverse as Sarah Ellis, Celia Lottridge, Ken Setterington, and Budge Wilson. Like all anthologies, this is a mixed bag and four stories clearly stand above the rest. Ken Roberts’ wry “Dear Mr. Winton” thrusts readers into an utterly disastrous visit to the library that Cara makes with her pet snake – all in the name of research. Jean Little’s “Mrs. Grinny Pig, Tiggle Wiggle and Henry” tackles the potholes of the information highway from another equally hilarious perspective, as she chronicles the troubles Henry has with his school librarian. Equally satisfying is Paul Yee’s “Fly Away,” told in the folk tale style of his Tales from Gold Mountain, the poignant story of a young Chinese girl who, in the cold isolation of the New World, literally dies without new books to fire her imagination. In Tim Wynne-Jones’s “The Mystery of the Cuddly Wuddly Bunny,” the young narrator describes a series of ghostly encounters at the library with a stranger who, ultimately, inspires him to write a story that may or may not already exist. This book is a natural for library-friendly parents and grandparents to give to children.