June 19, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
Navigating adolescence, testing your boundaries, and figuring out who you are is hard. For LGBTQ+ teens, it’s even more difficult, and potentially much more dangerous. Love Is Love and Rough Patch are two books that ... Read More »
Cam Redden is something of a chameleon. It’s his job as a part-time employee of the Almost Family Surrogate Agency to blend into other people’s lives, whether he’s hired to play a bereaved-but-stoic grandson or ... Read More »
June 12, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction
At first glance, Stay appears to be modest in length, form, and story. But within the spare pages of this middle-grade novel in verse is a powerful narrative about a family in transition, and the ... Read More »
June 7, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction
Sisters Hanna, Megan, and Claire have just waved off their parents at the airport in Halifax when Hanna announces her plan: while Mum and Dad are in Europe, the three of them are going on ... Read More »
June 5, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction
Zoe Bird’s world is cracking apart. The teenaged narrator of Allan Stratton’s latest YA novel lives in a small Ontario town where she struggles against the oppressive influence of her narrow-minded parents at home and ... Read More »
May 29, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction
Told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, The Fashion Committee is the story of a style-obsessed girl named Charlie Dean and John Thomas-Smith, a boy who’s extremely talented in metalwork but couldn’t ... Read More »
May 16, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction
In Cat’s life, there is the time Before, and there is the time After. Before her mother died from breast cancer, Cat was a brainy high school student with early admission to Stanford University. After, ... Read More »
May 16, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
What could be worse than knowing it’s the last summer you’ll spend with your closest friends, as well as the last one before you get hit with the innocence-destroying horrors of high school? A lot, ... Read More »
May 8, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
There’s a reason popular kids aren’t usually called upon to take up quests in middle-grade fantasy: all metaphor goes out the window. Where’s the satisfaction in seeing a well-liked, effortlessly capable 12-year-old take down evil ... Read More »
May 8, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books
Life is changing for 11-year-old Henry, and not necessarily in ways he likes. He’s been okay with a baby brother arriving on the scene after 10 years of being an only child, okay with his ... Read More »
May 4, 2017 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books