Izzy Wong's Nose for News

Written by Marty Chan

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-4598-3937-3

208 pp.

Ages 8-12

September 2024

 

Twelve-year-old Izzy Wong may have a nose for news, but she has to make sure she's not putting her nose where it doesn't belong or sniffing out a story that isn't there. She may aspire to be the next Sarah Koenig and make her journalist/news-anchor mom proud of her, but Izzy Wong still has a lot of learning to do. After all, she is only in Grade 6.

 

Izzy may not be popular, but she loves reporting news from the school and interviewing her classmates about tests and other school happenings for her podcast. They might not like being questioned but Izzy doesn't let that deter her. But when she learns that the third-floor girls' bathroom flooded over the weekend and has caused much damage to classrooms and the library, Izzy thinks she's got a fabulous podcast story in solving the mystery of how it happened. 

But Izzy is still a novice at interviewing and pursuing a story. She gets useful advice from her mom how to keep herself from starting rumours and making herself part of the story, but she doesn't always follow the advice or heed the warnings of her teachers or principal. Instead, she begins speculating that Doyle McTaggert, a sixth-grade prankster, may have been behind stuffing paper towels in the toilets. With that leading her, Izzy begins seeing things that make Doyle look guilty and, without intending to do so, she starts gossip about her classmates. How is she going to get to the bottom of this mystery without making everyone hate her or clouding her investigation with rumours?

While a flooding in a school bathroom may not be the mystery of the century, it is a big deal in an elementary school where bathrooms are places of chatter and refuge. And when classrooms and staff are impacted–from the massive clean-up and ruined school equipment and furniture–it is a very big deal and mystery that the authorities want solved, although perhaps not how Izzy goes about it. But author Marty Chan makes Izzy a believable character who is determined to do something, although her passion is not always embedded in common sense or the sound judgement of her elders. She's eager but impetuous and she takes missteps that she sometimes should walk back but doesn't. In other words, she's a kid who is learning from her mistakes and by doing her best, even if it isn't always right. Fortunately, Marty Chan lets Izzy grow into her journalistic skills and herself, learning some sensitivity from her missteps and some wisdom from her peers and elders about the consequences of her actions. At least she learns. And she solves a mystery that wouldn't have been uncovered without her diligence in pursuing a story. Izzy may have been distracted by the whiff of stories of romance and revenge but, in the end, she got to the heart of the matter and matured as an investigative reporter.

Larkin on the Shore

Written by Jean Mills

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-577-6

310 pp.

Ages 13+

October 2019

"...her words have stayed with me, just like Jonah's. Words do that. Words spoken and words in books. Words you write. They start to breathe and live and just take over. And right now, I've been taken over by the words of other people–people talking–and I can't find myself or my own words." (pg. 221)

After she is traumatized by something that happened with a boy, Jonah, and ejected from a moving car, sixteen-year-old Larkin Day is sent from her home in Toronto to stay with her grandmother Granne in Tuttle Harbour, Nova Scotia for the summer.  Larkin had managed to finish her Grade 10 exams but the gossip and social media about what happened have left her feeling isolated and unsafe and contemplating the relief of suicide. Her dad decides his mother, a retired principal, would be the best bet for his daughter while he heads to Vancouver to deal with Larkin's mom, a woman addicted to painkillers and bouncing between the unsafe streets and rehab. 

But for Larkin, Granne and Tuttle Harbour are unfamiliar and she must learn to assess every person she meets for sincerity and safety. That includes neighbour Will Greenfield who is helping his dad Billy renovate an old house for Granne into the Tuttle Harbour Café and Reading Room. As Larkin helps Granne with the book donations for the reading room, she deals with her anxiety which tempers her interactions with others, even with nice-guy Will. But when Will takes her to a local campfire with his peers, Larkin meets the gregarious Casey Henwood, his girlfriend Beth and others, and overdoes the drink when "...it tastes so good and goes down easily." (pg. 70). Could she be putting herself in harm's way?

When a fire destroys the back of the café, Casey and Beth and others are quick to point fingers at Will's dad, a recovering alcoholic, who'd apparently once burned down a shed he was building at the Henwood's farm. Hearing the gossip about Billy as well as about Will from Beth, and reflecting on the talk that went on about her after she was injured, Larkin is perplexed about whom to believe or to trust. What's worse is the news coming from her dad about her mother's health situation.  Walking out into the water until the darkness envelopes her or trying to swim out to Prince Edward Island, knowing she'd never make it, continue to overshadow her regular visits to the shore until she starts to live beyond others' words.

Jean Mills, who wrote the Red Maple-nominated Skating Over Thin Ice (Red Deer Press, 2018), knows how to tell a story about dealing with expectations from family, school and self. She gets what it's like to trust and not trust your own feelings and to be confused about how those you care about conduct themselves around you. From an addicted mother to an unfamiliar grandmother and peers that are both charming and deceptive, Larkin must look at every interaction as a potential disaster and possibly harmful. Sadly this is probably not unusual for teens who are trying to understand a world in which they are expected and allowed to take on greater responsibilities but may be unsure whether they have the strength or understanding to meet them. For Larkin, it may not always be evident which is the safe world or the dangerous one, not unlike a shore that borders land and water, but she is developing the courage to choose her heading and a solid intuition about good people that will guide her.

A Girl Like That

Written by Tanaz Bhathena

Farrar Straus Giroux

978-0-374-30544-4

369 pp.

Ages 13-18

February 2018

Zarin Wadia, sixteen, is A Girl Like That. She's seen as provocative, rebellious, and clever but her story is one of tragedy from birth to her death.

Zarin's death, along with that of a young man, Porus Dumasia, in a car accident is not a surprise ending. It begins the book with Zarin's guardians, Masi (mother's sister) and Masa (maternal uncle), and Porus's mother wailing over the dead teens. How they got there which is essentially Zarin's back story is the story of A Girl Like That. Told in multiple voices of Zarin, Porus, a gossipy classmate Mishal, and a boy Farhan with whom Zarin becomes involved, Tanaz Bhathena's first young adult novel is a study in nature vs. nurture for a teen whose origins were considered shameful and whose upbringing was rife with physical and emotional abuse. 

Memories...can be like splinters, digging into you when you least expect them to, holding tight and sharp the way wood did when it slid under a fingernail. (pg. 27)

Zarin is never made to feel like she belongs. Not with her Masi and Masa who take her in after her unmarried mother's death or at Qala Academy, the school she attends after they move from India to Saudi Arabia. She is shamed at home by her abusive and mentally ill Masi–and infrequently defended by Masa–for her illegitimacy, her gangster father and issues related to her being a girl. At school, a place where rumours are currency, especially for Mishal the anonymous BlueNiqab blogger and gossip monger, Zarin's classmates look down their noses at her for her heritage and standoffish ways. Still, Zarin endures. She hides the abuses and thumbs her nose at those who shame her. She smokes and she goes riding in cars with boys, an offense according to Sharia law.

And then her childhood Parsi friend, Porus, moves to Jeddah with his mother after the death of his beloved father. Zarin and Porus resume their friendship though it is an unconventional one, with Porus completely smitten and Zarin dating other boys and not sure she is capable of loving anyone. When Zarin is the victim of an assault by Farhan, her world at home and school dissolves into a muddy mess of anger, gossip, shaming, and revenge, with Zarin's desperately searching for courage and safety, within and without.

A Girl Like That is garnering much attention because of Tanaz Bhathena's story about gender inequality and religion-based social restrictions in Saudi Arabia. By focusing on a world that is intimate to many but foreign to so many others, Tanaz Bhathena is both honouring those who live Zarin's life and educating those unfamiliar with the restrictions and distinctions of living with abuse, segregation, cultural discrimination, gender inequality and religious policing.  But beyond the cultural milieu, A Girl Like That is still a statement about the need for self-expression, to fight self and others, to become who you are. Zarin's story is still a tragedy for the abuses inflicted upon her by family, both young men and women, and her cultures but she finds a way to fly, even without wings.

Because a bird only learns to fly when its wings are broken. (pg. 318)

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.

The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden

by Philippa Dowding
Dundurn
978-1-459707351
200 pp.
Ages 8+

January, 2014

"This morning I wake up on the ceiling." (pg. 9)

Between this first line and the book cover of The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden, readers will tweak in pretty quickly what Gwen's "gift" is.  But, with all the weird things already happening in her life, mostly the supremely outlandish changes that puberty brings, Gwen's attitude is quite refreshing:

"So what's a little early-morning floating around your room compared to that?" (pg. 11)

Gwen doesn't tell her mother who has enough to worry about since Gwen's dad died seven years ago during a freak storm, just before the twins, Christine and Christopher, were born.  But a couple of peculiar questions from the elderly bottle-collector, Mr. McGillies ("How's flyin'?" pg. 25) and Mrs. Forest at The Float Boat candy store who knows that floats make Gwen sick ("Are you ready for a float?" pg. 50) has Gwen freaking out just a little.  When her foot starts floating upward during class and Gwen has to make a mad dash to a supply room to hide her new aerial buoyancy, she comes clean to her best friend, Jez, who is able to offer her some support and cover.

Courtesy of her Mentor, Mrs. Forest, and her Watcher, Mr. McGillies, Gwen learns that she is a Night Flyer, receiving a copy of  "Your First Flight: A Night Flyer's Handbook", the "Micro-Edition for the Less-than-Willing Reader".  She could certainly have used the extended version because Gwen starts going out on her own, taking chances and making some embarrassing choices, even getting in trouble with the law. But she's got some tough learning ahead of her if she doesn't want her flying to turn from a gift to a handicap.

Middle-grade readers will know Philippa Dowding's earlier books, including this year's Silver Birch Express nominee The Gargoyle at the Gates (Dundurn, 2013), and appreciate the humour and relaxed pacing of her stories.  The twists, the turns, the flips, the floats are all there to take the reader for a wonderful flight of fancy, and gently alight in Gwen's new reality and unfolding future.  With The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden hinting at an important choice that Gwen must make, readers may be able to share in that future.