Brothers at War

by Don Cummer

Scholastic Canada

978-1-4431-1382-3 

204 pp.

Ages 8-14

October, 2013

There are many divisions in twelve-year-old Jacob Gibson's Upper Canada in 1811.  There are the towners and the dockers; the supporters of the Americans and of the British; those who have and those who have not pledged allegiance to the King; entitled, rich boys like William Dunwoody II and his best friend Henry Ecker and the regular boys like Jake and his friend Eli; the Iroquois and the British subjects of Upper Canada; and those itching to get to war and those opposed to it.  Sometimes the lines blur between the groups but most people differentiate themselves from others based on some criteria or another.

When Jake Gibson meets new boy Eli McCabe, son of the new tanner from America, he accepts him readily, especially after Eli helps him from a fall into a ditch during a snowball fight and then later from the frigid Niagara River when challenged by William and Henry.  Of course, Eli confirms the gossip that his father will not swear allegiance to King George, only coming to Upper Canada to be left alone and not deal in politics.  Now the McCabe family may be evicted from the Canadas.  And though William and Henry are relentless in their harrassment of Eli, calling him Turd Boy and pulling vicious pranks to make him look suspicious of vandalism and mischief, Jake and Eli are brought closer together, becoming blood brothers and determined to stand up to the menacing duo.  Sadly, with the dissolution of the Assembly by General Brock and the subsequent elections, coupled with the talk of war between across the Niagara River, Jake and Eli's friendship is tested and loyalty questioned.

Predictably, Upper Canada in 1811-1812 was no less corrupt than some political regions in Canada today.  There are those with wealth who happily use their money to corrupt others and the electoral process, without any concern for the rights and freedoms of all.  And though there are many who are forthcoming and demonstrate much integrity, the unscrupulous ones first must be challenged and blocked. Don Cummer has written a credible story of two boys whose friendship both spans their different worlds and resists that separation. Though it is difficult to always know the appropriate action when balancing friendship and country, Mr. Willcocks who publishes the Upper Canada Guardian advises Jacob,

"Stay close to your friends.  Protect them and keep them out of trouble.  No matter how difficult that may be at times.  In the end, they will thank you." (pg. 134)

This is wise advice, particularly as the War of 1812 will still not have begun at the conclusion of Brothers at War.  But the boys will need to wrestle with their loyalties to their families and their friendship, as well as to their own evolving politics, and fight themselves and each other when dealing with extraordinary circumstances that put those for whom they care in jeopardy. They are indeed brothers at war.

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I came across this quirky video titled Don Cummer arrested for Brothers at War on YouTube and thought readers might enjoy a chuckle as Don Cummer, the author of Brothers at War, attempts to sell copies of his book and is challenged by Mr. Joe Willcocks.  Luckily, the ending indicates that books are good for everything!

 Don Cummer arrested for Brothers at War

Uploaded by Don Cummer on November 2, 2013 to YouTube.

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress

by Christine Baldacchino

Illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant
Groundwood Books
978-1-55498-347-6
32 pp.
Ages 4-7
For release May 2014

It's not surprising that Morris Micklewhite loves the colour tangerine.  It reminds him of his mother's beautiful long hair, the brilliance of the sun, and the richness of a tiger's coat.  And, with the soul of an artist, he is drawn to painting, puzzles, singing, and imaginative play.  When he finds a tangerine dress in the dress-up center at school, Morris puts together an experience for all his creative senses.  A dress of warm tangerine, of swishes and crinkles, that he pairs with different shoes, but especially the ones that click, click, click.  But not everyone appreciates Morris' selection and, though he tries to ignore his peers' words, he is troubled by what he hears and how both the girls and boys exclude him.

Predictably, Morris wants to stay home.  Pretending he has a stomachache, Morris is hopeful of missing school, the place he likes to do so many things.  But,

"When he thought of all the kids in his class
and all the means things they did and said,
his tummy ached for real." (pg. 14)

Delighted to have the time to hang out with the cat, Moo, and read about elephants, Morris starts to feel better, even finding a way ultimately be accepted by the other children and still be true to himself.

Christine Baldacchino strikes the right tone for recognizing how one's differences may be appreciated or not.  She could have played up the gender issue, what boys do and what girls do, but it's much more about just being different and still being true to yourself.  Being different can be such a hardship for many children.  Without recognizing that we are all different, and should be proudly so, many of us just want to fit in, and fitting in often takes the path of conformity.  Morris Micklewhite is no different than other children but he finds a way to embrace his individuality and creativity and share it with others successfully.  There's a lovely fluidity to Isabelle Malenfant's illustrations, undoubtedly due to her responsive use of charcoal, watercolour and pastels, which has already garnered her the 2013 Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize.  With a very simple message dressed in hues of tangerine and the clap, clap, clap of applause, Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress will serve to help those whose imaginations may be haltered or those who cannot accept anything beyond life's typical scenarios. 


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A book trailer uploaded recently by the House of Anansi is available on YouTube and at our book trailers' site here.

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.

Jeremy Stone

by Lesley Choyce

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-504-2

184 pp.

Ages 14-18

November 2013

Lesley Choyce has a new voice.  In general terms, it's novel in verse.  Specifically, it's the voice of Jeremy Stone.

Jeremy Stone is a sixteen-year-old whose story begins with his return to school after a three-year silence.  Voice silence, that is.  (He was always being told that he was too loud, too rude, too curious.  So he shut up.)  Though he learned from his grandfather–a survivor of the residential school system–never to live in the past, the baggage that Jeremy carries is critical to his present.  Jeremy had been close to his grandfather, Old Man, when they lived on the reserve.  Old Man has since passed, though his spirit regularly visits Jeremy and advises him on all matters of the heart and mind.  Jeremy's father suffers with the black dogs of depression and is now living Out West, cleaning on oil rigs and making money, though he always seems to be running out of minutes on his cell phone.  Jeremy lives in town with his mother, who has kicked most of her drug addictions except for cigarettes and alcohol, but still has a few demons to wrestle.

Though pegged fairly quickly as a boy of First Nations heritage, Jeremy tries to stay under the radar, often quiet still, rarely engaging with others.  But the flicking of a paper clip at Jeremy's cheek by Thomas Heaney brings Jeremy some attention, especially after he capably wins against Thomas a.k.a. Paper Clip in a phys ed wrestling match.  Caitlan, a girl with "Indian eyes", tells Jeremy about a boy she'd loved, Jenson Hayes, who committed suicide after jerks such as Thomas Heaney broke him down with their emotional assaults. When Jeremy learns Caitlan is cutting herself and thinking of joining Jenson, he realizes that he must make things right, and that does not include revenge.  Through his spiritual interactions with Old Man and others, Jeremy finds a way to help others and ultimately help himself as well.

Lesley Choyce often takes on mature issues, even discomforting ones, in his young adult books, from life on the street in Last Chance (Lorimer, 2009), to grief in Shoulder the Sky (Dundurn, 2002), imprisonment in The Book of Michael (Red Deer Press, 2008) and physical bullying in Gone Bad (Lorimer, 2011).  But in Jeremy Stone, Lesley Choyce has taken on the voice of a First Nations teen and channelled the issues of dysfunctional families, bullying, grief, spirituality and suicide from his perspective.  Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, but Lesley Choyce achieves this with resounding success, never making the reader believe that anyone but Jeremy Stone, with his own strengths and weaknesses, has shared these thoughts and feelings.

Novels in free verse have to say a lot without a lot of words at their disposal.  For that reason, Jeremy Stone is a fast read.  But it is also one that must be contemplated in depth.  In all novels in verse, the reader must read between the spaces and the lines and the letters to see beyond that which the author chooses to share up front.  Jeremy Stone, the book, is very much like Jeremy Stone, the teen: there is so much more than the words.  The richness is realized by those who take the trouble to see beyond the cover and the obvious.

Sabotage

by Karen Autio
Sono Nis Press
978-1-55039-208-1
293 pp.
Ages 10+
2013

In 1915 Port Arthur Ontario, Saara Mäki and her younger brother John, from Karen Autio's Second Watch (Sono Nis Press, 2005) and Saara's Passage (Sono Nis Press, 2009), may seem to be typical Finnish children in their community but, with the Great War on in Europe, nothing is typical anymore. John's Ukrainian friend Fred has had his father herded away to an internment camp. Then a man at the grocery store calls the Mäki family "enemy aliens". Even Saara has worries that she may not progress from Junior Fourth to Senior Fourth because she's been away for months helping her aunt who has TB. And the news is rife with the case of Carl Schmidt, a German who participated in dynamiting an armory, a plant and the Nipigon River railway bridge, almost. Suspicions abound.

Alternating chapters in the voices of Saara and John, Sabotage begins at the onset of summer holidays. While Saara, now 14, must work away at delivering her mother’s sewing work and completing assignments that would allow her to pass into the next form, John (9) delivers newspapers with Fred, and keeps his ears open to all the gossip and any news the reporters might share. Though Saara is pestered by John’s pranks and outrageous ideas, she is forced to watch him and even work with him whenever directed by their mother. When a new boy, Peter Schmidt, joins them in playing war, Saara meets his sister, Birgitta, and they become fast friends.

While John’s suspicious but observant nature helps him to find evidence of sabotage and get him rewarded with the moniker of “Scoop”, he and many others see sabotage and saboteurs everywhere, whether it be a fire in a grain elevator (a fairly common occurrence) or a person speaking German. But when their own actions are misinterpreted as suspicious, and their father is accused of attempting to blow up the grain elevator, John and Saara must work together and ask for help of those who disapprove of them if they are to help their father and prove that all landed immigrants are not dangerous enemy aliens.

Although the premise behind Sabotage is, well, sabotage, Karen Autio paints a picture of a Canadian community on the edge: men away at war, never coming back; women need to find work to help support their families and help with household duties previously shared with their spouses; families of internees are left without support, financial and emotional; flagrant prejudice is leveled against those who speak other languages regardless of their loyalties, community connections, and valuable contributions; censorship of letters shows up between children; attempts to unionize workers and institute labour reforms are seen as suspicious; and paranoia about everyone and everything abounds. The little pleasures of an ice cream with a beau are few and far between (though sweet), as is play for children. Youth like Saara and John, as well as Fred, Birgitta, Peter and others are slammed hard with the realization that the world and the adults running it are not always hospitable and generous, or even rational. It was a hard lesson to learn, I’m sure. Credit to those adults who could demonstrate sound judgement during a time of war, and impressed that model upon children, because in a world where there really were saboteurs aiming to do harm, there was enough to worry about.

Pay It Forward Kids: Book Launch (Toronto)

Celebrate International Pay It Forward Day

April 24 

by joining

author Nancy Runstedler

for the official book launch of

Pay It Forward Kids:

 Small Acts, Big Change

 Fitzhenry & Whiteside

978-1-55455-301-3

64 pp.

Ages 10-14

2013

Saturday, April 26, 2014

at 

6:30pm - 8:30pm

Mabel's Fables Bookstore

662 Mount Pleasant Road

Toronto, Ontario

The book itself is enough reason to attend this book launch, 

but, for an added incentive, 

a percentage of all royalties from the book will be going to the Pay It Forward Foundation 

and 

all attendees (max. 300) will receive an official purple and white Pay It Forward bracelet. 

  Help Pay It Forward!  

The Worlds We Make

Written by Megan Crewe

Disney Hyperion

978-1423146186

288 pp.

Ages 12+

February, 2014

At the conclusion of Megan Crewe's The Lives We Lost (reviewed here on May 28, 2013), a hapless group of young people were leaving inhospitable Toronto to attempt to deliver a vaccine to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia in the hopes that the CDC would be able to mass produce the vaccine needed to save those uninfected with the widespread and deadly virus. The group, led by Kaelyn whose father had produced the vaccine, consists of Gav, her boyfriend, who she'd met while fighting the virus in their island community; Leo, her former best friend who had just returned to the island after making his way from New York City; Tobias, a young soldier who rescued them from the island; Justin, a reckless fourteen-year-old who'd forced them to take him; and a new recruit, Anika, a former ally of the scary Wardens and their leader Michael.  But getting the vaccine to the CDC is far more difficult than just finding a vehicle and gasoline to get it there.  The group must outwit and escape the omnipotent Michael and his legions of Wardens who are determined to get the vaccine for themselves.  So begins The Worlds We Make, the conclusion to Megan Crewe's Fallen World Trilogy.

Heading south in an SUV stolen from Michael's well-organized and well-supplied gang, Kaelyn and her entourage continue to deal with incredible snow storms and the fear that Gav and possibly Tobias have become infected with the virus.  A flat tire lays them up in a small town, searching for a new tire and supplies, attempting to contact the CDC by radio and, worst of all, isolating the now delusional Gav from all but the immune Kaelyn.  Gav's death leaves Kaelyn reeling, though his message to her on a scrap of paper in his jeans compels her to keep focused on getting to Atlanta. 

The group's journey is essentially a series of driving episodes interjected with stops to search for supplies and encounters with individuals or evidence of those who are no longer around (having died or left). Mostly they are observers of phenomena from fire balls in the sky, to a suicide victim, a well-stocked hunter's cabin, a commercial pig farm where the animals were left caged to die, and isolated communities of people, sometimes welcoming, sometimes not.  Though they connect with a Dr. Guzman at the CDC who prepares for their arrival and analysis of the vaccine for production, their capture by Michael's Wardens suspends their travels and threatens their only goal and their lives.

While the plot is very directed i.e., the group endures different horrors as they attempt to reach the CDC, the story is bigger than the plot in The Worlds We Make.  It has more to do with the premise of creating a world we choose, not as we deem it to be as thrust upon us.  Sure the epidemic changed everything and everyone is reacting to that change.  Some don't change their ways at all and may remain safe or may become victims.  Some completely alter their behaviour, such as Michael who was formerly a policeman and now uses the knowledge he learned to successfully establish a criminal organization, based on fear and hostility.

Kaelyn begins to see their world as a new dynamic, based on survival and power, essentially without room for empathy.  Every choice they make now must be weighed against the potential for infection, attack and successful delivery of the vaccine.  Trust is a commodity in short supply.  Anika, the last to join their group, constantly looks ready to run.  Justin's bravado covers his insecurities related to his youth, his interest in Anika, and even his desire to make amends for his perceived lack of effort. Kaelyn is less able to edit her comments, never realizing the effect they have on others around her.  That is, until she comprehends that they see her as a leader, their leader, and she must not refrain from showing how much she values them just to avoid the hurt of losing them.

The world that Megan Crewe has created is one of desperation and paranoia.  The bad is often highlighted because it is overwhelming and tragic, but there are slivers of goodness like freshly-baked bread and home-made sandwiches, hugs of reassurance, and a simple smile.  The strength of character with which Megan Crewe has imbued Kaelyn carries the reader, as well as the group, to a surprising resolution to create a new actuality where bad and good must come together to make something better.