The kind of summer camp I wish I had attended….

The VPL is hosting their 9th annual ‘Canadian Book Camp’ August 10th-14th where teens ages 11-13 and 14+ attend workshops on creative writing, and listen to keynote speeches by Canadian authors and illustrators – including Meomi (creators of the world’s cutest Olympic mascots! check out Miga, Sumi and Quatchi here). I stumbled across the posting [...]

Spirited Away to ‘Half World’: A Book Review

Half World Hiromi Goto Toronto: Puffin Canada, 2009 230 pgs, hardcover, $20.00 (CAD) ISBN: 978-0670069651 Once the three realms were united. The Flesh World, the Spirit World, and Half World. Through the realms, human beings cycled in an endless process of death, renewal and rebirth. But then, the realms splintered. Disconnected, apathy grew in the [...]

More Susan Juby: Beyond Alice…

After writing my earlier post about Canadian author Susan Juby, I wanted to add a second, ‘more Juby,’ post because even though her Alice books are fabulous, they are not all that Susan Juby can – or wants to – write. In describing her recent book, Another Kind of Cowboy (2007), which is about dressage [...]

Adrian Mole meets a girl from Smithers, BC: Canadian author Susan Juby and the birth of Alice MacLeod

In describing the birth of her famous fictional character, thrift-store junkie and small-town survivor Alice MacLeod, Susan Juby said to Quill & Quire that, “it was one of those ideas that just comes to you: Adrian Mole meets a girl from Smithers. That’s it” (February 2005, ¶12). Like Sue Townsend’s iconic anti-hero of early 1980s [...]

YA (and local) author Kelley Armstrong coming soon….

…to London, ON. She is doing a series of readings and book signings in early May for her YA ‘urban fantasy’ trilogy Darkest Powers – about a teenage necromancer and ghost whisperer who is coming to terms with her powers (when she first tells people that, like the movie, ‘I can see dead people’ she [...]

Funny, I know: A reading response to ‘Alice, I think’

Alice: 15 years old, home schooled for 10 of those, and heading back to school for the first time since her disastrous first day of grade 1, which she attended dressed as a hobbit – complete with a pointy felt cap. Funny, endearing, full of thrift store fashions and hippie parents and all set in [...]

On my bookshelf….

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Vol. 1, The Pox Party: written by YA author M.T. Anderson (who previously wrote the YA vampire novel, Thirsty), Octavian Nothing is a story of historical fiction set around the time of the American Revolution and it is about science, intelligence, experimentation and racial prejudice — a book that [...]