Red River RagingBy Penny Draper Thirteen-year-old Finn Armstrong is a world traveler. With a home base in Vancouver, Finn accompanies his parents on their international research trips. This year he was supposed to go to Egypt, but instead he’s been sent to St. Agathe, Manitoba to stay with his grandmother and great-grandfather, known simply as […]
The Poet’s DogBy Patricia MacLachlan Siblings Flora and Nickel are lost in a snowstorm. As the blizzard envelops them, someone comes to the rescue. But Teddy is not your usual someone – he is a dog. Teddy takes the two children to his cabin. The poet who used to take care of Teddy is gone, […]
Constable & ToopBy Gareth P. Jones Sam Toop is just a kid, but he’s the son of an undertaker and has been around death all his life. Sam can also see ghosts, and London in the mid-1800s is filled with them. Sam’s a Talker, and ghosts come to him for help with their unfinished business. […]
The Night CircusBy Erin Morgenstern Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is a spellbinding fairy tale of a novel. Jumping back and forth through time, and moving from London to Cairo to Boston to Montreal, The Night Circus makes you feel as though magic is everywhere, if you just know where to look. Hector Bowen makes […]
The World’s Greatest DetectiveBy Caroline Carlson Eleven-year-old Toby Montrose is an orphan who is continuously being shuffled around to the homes of his aunts and uncles. Eventually, all of them send Toby away. He has finally landed at the home of his Uncle Gabriel. Toby knows that if Uncle Gabriel rejects him, he’s off to […]
The Lotterys Plus One By Emma Donoghue I loved reading this book! The Lotterys are a very unusual family that leads a utopian family life. They have two moms and two dads and seven children, some of whom are biological children, some of whom are adopted. This very lucky family won the lottery and as […]
Station Eleven By Emily St. John Mandel A famous actor has a heart attack on stage as he performs King Lear; a paramedic-in-training jumps out of the audience to perform CPR; and a 7-year-old actress watches her mentor pass away. Outside the theatre, snow is falling, and a deadly flu is quickly spreading across the […]
York: The Shadow Cipher By Laura Ruby The first thing that will strike you about this book is its cover. It’s the city of New York but in an astounding alternate universe where machines transform themselves and seem almost alive; where the subway (called the Underway) goes both above and below ground and zings riders […]
Miss EmilyBy Nuala O’Connor “Oh, chimerical, perplexing, beautiful words! I love to use the pretty ones like blades and the ugly ones to console. I use dark ones to illuminate and bright ones to mourn. And when I feel as if a tomahawk has scalped me, I know it is poetry then and I leave […]
GenesisBy Helen Dennis When a boy washes up on the shore of the Thames – alive, but barely – Londoners want to know who he is and what he was doing in the river. But the boy has no memory of anything and doesn’t even know his own name. No one comes forward to claim […]