Boney: Guest review

This review was written by Grade 8 student Hasini K.

Written by Cary Fagan

Illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-548-9

32 pp.

Ages 3-6

October 2022

 

While Annabelle and her dad are taking a walk in the woods with their dog, Scoot, Annabelle discovers an animal bone. Annabelle asks her dad if they can take the bone home, and her dad agrees. 

 

Annabelle decides to make the bone her new playmate, and names him Boney. Annabelle feels that Boney is a great playmate – and she is completely in love with her new friend! They hang out at the park and Annabelle even makes Boney a bed complete with a blanket and pillow in his own room. 

From Boney by Cary Fagan, illus. by Dasha Tolstikova

However, when creatures run wild in Annabelle's dreams, she wonders for the first time where Boney truly belongs. What becomes of Annabelle’s and Boney’s friendship? You'll need to read the book to find out.

Boney is written by Cary Fagan and illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova. It is a short but sweet story with very vivid and beautiful illustrations which are very thought-provoking. Kids may wonder where Boney, the bone, was actually from. The story does mention how the bone could've been any animal, but we can't help but wonder. I would recommend this book to readers from Grade 1-4 since it is pretty relatable in many ways. At some point in our lives, we all have to deal with the fact that something we might be doing is not right, even if we want to do it. Making tough choices is also very hard to do, no matter your age. Personally, I liked how the story had a really meaningful message. It teaches us that, sometimes, we have to do things that aren't easy to make the situation right. It captures the innocence and uncertainty of kids when they’re dealing with conflict within themselves. Little kids would especially take losing a friend or a toy or item they have gotten attached to, as Annabelle must do with Boney, very hard. I would certainly grab a copy of this creatively written book to enjoy!

~ Written by Hasini K., Age 13

All the Things We Leave Behind

Written by Riel Nason

Goose Lane Editions

978-0-864-920416

240 pp.

Ages 14+

September 2016

There are so many incidents that can stand out small and don’t seem like anything at the time but end up meaning so much.  There are so many tiny twists in a life that you can never know the ultimate significance of. (pg. 80)

As teen Violet Davis looks back through her copious memories of incidents with her older brother Bliss and their parents, she now seems to see the significance of them with respect to his disappearance from their lives after graduation from high school.  There were all the signs of a wanderlust for moving beyond their small town of Riverbend and Hawkshaw, New Brunswick, for travel, for adventure.  There was also the darkness in Bliss that may have been triggered when the two first discovered the Department of Transportation’s gruesome boneyard of deer and moose road kills, perhaps Bliss’s “first proof of unhappy endings” (pg. 116) but this melancholy could not be repressed.

It seemed that every bad memory, in fact only bad memories, bubbled up in his brain.  His entire perspective changed and every thought he had was permeated and tainted, shifted and reinterpreted in a negative way. (pg. 116)

Now it’s the summer of 1977 and Violet’s parents are ostensibly on vacation, but really in search of  any evidence of Bliss’s travels.  And Violet has been left in charge of the family business, officially known as Charles J. Davis & Son Antiques but known locally and by all travellers as The Purple Barn, a roadside attraction and store brimming with crafty twig furniture and quilts and antiques and collectibles.

For Violet, the summer is more than just working at The Purple Barn, and keeping the busybody employee Mrs. Quinn in check; it’s also a time of hanging with her boyfriend Dean and best friend Jill and her boyfriend Johnny.  While her brother’s disappearance is always foremost in her mind, as she rethinks what she should have and could have done to keep him from leaving them behind, Violet is forced to struggle with two unrelated issues.  First, she must negotiate the purchase of the contents of the renowned Vaughn cottage, a grand home deserted after the drowning of the owners' grandson. Secondly, Violet is haunted by a white buck that no one else seems to see.  Is it Speckles, a piebald deer Bliss befriended years earlier,  or an apparition that is part of the rumoured ghost herd of the boneyard?

Riel Nason’s first book, multi-award winning The Town That Drowned (Goose Lane Editions, 2011), was a deeply moving examination of a small town dealing with its impending demise by deliberate flooding.  That community, Haventon, is now a memory in All the Things We Leave Behind, both as place and experience, but only one of many things left behind when people move, or die, or disappear.  Those things can be like the goods that The Purple Barn sells from estates or deserted houses, or the mementoes set to be bequeathed to family upon a grandmother’s death.  Or they can be people, like Violet, left behind when a brother goes exploring, or when someone dies.  It can even be the bones of the dead or their ghosts remaining to haunt people’s thoughts and dreams and nightmares.  The concept of things, including people, being left behind is a monumental one but one that Riel Nason addresses with sensitivity and completeness, understanding the nature of memories and mementoes as powerful beyond reason.

Having a reminder, a souvenir, to help you remember is great, but I think the best memories are through a special door in your mind that you can open without a key. (pg. 105)

Riel Nason’s writing, both intricate and profound in addressing the nature of loss and memory, does not dwell on grief, though the boneyard and the tragic deaths of the animals and people in the book are disturbing.  But, All the Things We Leave Behind is bigger and better than just that, instead becoming a souvenir in itself, one of  weighty contemplation and yearning for a past remembered and a future unlocked.  Even with the tragedies that unfold in All the Things We Leave Behind, there is a lightness and brightness in the darkness, and acknowledgement by Riel Nason that all the things we leave behind, tangible and intangible, become powerful tributes in their own ways.

Small Bones

Written by Vicki Grant
Orca Book Publishers
978-1-45980-653-5
256 pp.
Ages 12+
September 29, 2015
Reviewed from audiobook
978-1-4598-1098-3

We’ve probably all wanted to reinvent ourselves but Dorothy (Dot) Blythe probably has more reasons than most.  With the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girl burned down and the eldest seven girls being sent away, with only a few scraps to help them determine their heritage, Dot doesn’t have that much to hold onto.  So it’s not surprising that when, dressed in a fine suit donated by the wealthy Mrs. Welsh, Dot does not reveal her orphan background to the young man, Eddie Nicholson, whom she meets on the train.  Eddie helps get her to the Dunbrae Arms, a lodge where she needs to get a job, after having been robbed of her money and finding her destination, a men’s clothing store named Howell’s of Buckminster, closed.  Seems the town of Buckminster is her go-to place for answers, being the name on the cashmere overcoat in which she had been swaddled when deposited at the Home.  Other than a few barely legible initials and a tiny silver spoon with a crest, Dot doesn’t have much to go on.  So with no money and Howell’s closed, she gets a job a a seamstress at the Dunbrae Arms.  And there she pursues her history, asking questions of the snarly Mrs. Smees, who runs the housekeeping for the lodge, and Bas Simmonds, the laundry man, as well as Eddie who seems to know everyone and begins to spend time with Dot.

But, it is evident that Dot’s small frame and face remind others of someone but the confusion  or even anger her presence evokes is never clear to her.   And then she is invited to a summer party to commemorate ByeBye Baby, the unexplained discovery of a tiny baby in the woods seventeen years earlier.  A baby that was seen but disappeared before help arrived.  Knowing she must have been that baby, Dot encourages Eddie to pursue the story–he is a summer reporter for the Buckminster Gleaner–so that she too might learn everything she can about that baby and the mystery surrounding it.  And I haven’t even mentioned the small bones that begin to appear around the seamstress’ cabin where Dot rooms.  Fragile, incomplete, and mysterious bones, probably those of birds.

Vicki Grant weaves a loaded story about a pregnancy that was kept hidden and a birth that was obscured from small-town gossip and yet so important as Dot’s seemingly insignificant origins.  The cover up about her birth may have been haphazard but it was effective in keeping the truth concealed.  And yet many individuals knew a little something about the event.  Some knew better than to talk about it, afraid of ruffling feathers, but others just didn’t realize that they knew anything important.  With astute questioning and biding her time, Dot is able to piece her story together from a patchwork of details, and though her story may have been a tad frayed around the edges–she does jump to a few incorrect assumptions–it is heart-warmingly trimmed with a happy ending or two.  In fact, Vicki Grant, with her light-touch and say-it-straight writing manner, makes sure that it’s “Better than any fantasy” (pg. 239) that Dot could ever have imagined.