February 17, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction
Until her senior year of high school, Parker Fadley was teen royalty: cheerleading team captain, academic all-star, pretty, perfect. Now, she’s heading for social bottomfeeder status – and through the liberal use of icy insults, ... Read More »
This third Penelope book by author-illustrator duo Sheri Radford and Christine Tripp catches up with the exuberant and capricious girl on the day of her birthday party. All three Penelope titles involve a familiar childhood ... Read More »
February 17, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Picture Books
Stripmalling is both a semi-autobiographical first novel from Winnipeg-born author Jon Paul Fiorentino and something more complex and metafictional. The hero, Jonny, is a 31-year-old aspiring writer and instructor at a “mildly respectable university” in ... Read More »
February 17, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
The elegiac tone of Jonathan Goldstein’s first novel, Lenny Bruce Is Dead, doesn’t have much to do with the death of the iconoclastic, detatched comic of the title. Rather, Josh, who lives in Montreal, is ... Read More »
January 22, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
Human nature is a mass of contradiction and ambiguity. We hurt what we profess to love, we kill with kindness, and we deny any culpability. Almost nothing exemplifies our contradictory nature like our relationship with ... Read More »
January 19, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Science, Technology & Environment
Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, that oft-quoted paragon of unreliable narrators, said you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. It’s an absurd statement, of course, as any parole officer or criminal psychologist ... Read More »
January 19, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
The small town of Trafalgar, B.C., seems far more suited to quiet vacations than murder, but the detective duo of Constable Molly Smith and Sergeant John Winters know better. Their debut, In the Shadow of ... Read More »
January 19, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
There’s a scattered, unsettling feeling to journalist and magazine editor Elizabeth Kelly’s first novel. Maybe it’s the seemingly endless jumble of canines constantly getting underfoot. Maybe it’s the way the narrator, Collie Flanagan, darts like ... Read More »
January 19, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
When fighting wildfires, one moment can lead to tragedy. When arson enters the equation, tragedy can turn into murder. One Careless Moment is the second of Dave Hugelschaffer’s Porter Cassel mysteries. As the novel opens, ... Read More »
January 19, 2009 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
This year the machinery mythologizing the high rollers of capitalism is grinding mightily, with the focus turning to media magnates. Donald Trump still holds court on television’s The Apprentice; there’s a new biography of William ... Read More »
December 15, 2008 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography