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My One Hundred Adventures, by Polly Horvath • Schwartz & Wade Books, 2008. 272 Pages.

I’ve already waxed poetic on summer homes, and the way that the time breaks free of chronometrical devices and becomes attuned to the more natural rhythms of sunrise, sunset, childhood and adolescence. I think summer houses are liminal places, too, existing on the threshold between school years, between childhood and adolescence (how many coming-of-age stories take place in summer homes?), between water and land.

In My One Hundred Adventures, Jane and her family live at a summer house year round, occupying that magical suspended space perpetually. Family, in this case, is Jane’s three siblings, Maya, Hershel, and Max, and their mother, a prizewinning poet who shuns the spotlight and gathers berries, greens, and oysters to feed her family.

Every summer is the same, but Jane, at twelve, is ready for change. She makes a wish for one hundred adventures, and soon, strangers and changes come to her small world, bringing adventure with them. Like any hero, Jane soon finds that, at their essence, adventures involve a journey to one’s interior, and the change and growth that comes from beginning to know oneself.

This is a gorgeously written book, one that can slip from poetry to sly humor within an instant. Readers who love Madeline L’Engle’s remarkable families, and coming of age stories like Jacob I Have Loved will enjoy this book, as will daydreamy girls who love the sea & can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Older readers who like Fannie Flagg will also enjoy Horvath’s offbeat portrayal of small-town life.

What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses? by Richard Van Camp. Illustrated by George Littlechild • Children’s Book Press, 1998

It’s forty below in the Northwest Territories of Canada. So cold the ravens won’t fly and dogs refuse to bark. So cold that there’s only one thing to do: Ask questions & figure things out.

The book’s narrator, half Indian and half white, is a “stranger to horses.” His people are Dogrib Indians, not horse people. So he asks everyone he can think of: What’s the most beautiful thing you know about horses?

The answers are varied and poetic. Horses always know their way home. They can run sideways and when they run they “seem to flow over the land.” They stare at you as they breathe. Illustrated in gorgeous, vibrant color by George Littlechild, the story flows naturally from interior to exterior conversations, creating a fully realized mental landscape.

This is the sort of book that could work both as a read-aloud for younger children and as inspiration for older children and teens interested in creating their own poetry and images. Lovers of horses, words, Native culture,  and illustration will enjoy this gorgeous book.

The Sky is Falling, by Kit Pearson • Viking Kestrel, 1989

Norah Stoakes doesn’t mind the war. In fact, she can’t understand how anyone can bear to be sent away from it, and thrives on the “bright edge” it gives her world.

But then Norah’s parents decide that it’s time to send her and her younger brother Gavin away from the action to Toronto. And so Norah and her brother travel across the sea, eventually landing in a strange house, with Mrs Olgilvie, an older woman who seems to prefer Gavin to his sister, and her daughter, a sad, shy woman who’s rumored to have a tragic past. Norah doesn’t fit in anywhere; the kids at school think she’s a snob and the Ogilvies seem taken aback by her fractious ways.

Norah is a strong and sympathetic character, and Pearson (as usual) deftly captures both Norah’s limited worldview and the larger picture that Norah must grow to see. I particularly enjoyed Norah’s relationship with Gavin, which defied stereotype and overly-sweet convention and instead conveyed the full complexity of sibling rivalries and affections.

I would recommend this book for 3rd – 6th graders who are interested in historical fiction, particularly about World War II (such as Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars) as well as books about children who are wrestling with finding their identity and achieving a balance between finding independence and relying  on adults for boundaries and comfort (see Kit Pearson’s Handful of Time).

Troll Blood, by Katherine Langrish • Harper Collins, 2008

I really went back and forth on whether this book counts as Canadian literature. The author grew up in Yorkshire and has lived in France and America. The book itself is third in a series focused on a Scandinavian village. But it came up in my search on the San Francisco Public Library’s catalog for Canadian children’s books, and the bulk of the action does take place on Baffin Island, a Canadian locale I spend a fair amount of my professional life writing about. So ultimately, I decided the book was Canadian enough for me.

The story follows Peer, a shipbuilder’s son with no aim of leaving his small village until Hilde, his long-time friend, companion, and secret crush, decides to join an expedition set for Vinland, a mysterious and far away land that few have ever seen. He joins the expedition, and finds that his Viking shipmates aren’t all they seem to be, and neither are the mysterious Skrælings of the Viking tales.

The story is a delightful fantasy, full of trolls, spirits and ice giants that live in unquestioned community with the human protagonists. Langrish has obviously done her research, but history and legend mix effortlessly with the narrative, creating a fully realized and engrossing world without the myth or history ever seeming didactic or forced. The story was complex without being overwrought, and satisfying without being predictable.

Readers ten and up, particularly those with an interest in North American prehistory, will love this book.  As will YA-loving adults — once the semesters over, I plan on devouring the first two (not even slightly Canadian) books.

I collaborated with a classmate on a book trailer for my Canadian Youth Literature Class. Here it is.

Essex County Book Trailer from Nora Sawyer on Vimeo.

In Search of April Raintree: Critical Edition, by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier (Critical Edition edited by Cheryl Suzack). Portage & Main Press, 1999.

April and Cheryl Raintree are Métis sisters growing up in Manitoba. Taken from their alcoholic parents after their youngest sister dies, the two are separated and raised in a variety of foster homes. April, the eldest, suffers abuse and neglect at the hands of one family and comes to despise her native heritage, longing for the safety and security she sees in the white world. Cheryl, the younger and more dark-skinned of the two, embraces her mixed heritage, reveling in Métis history and longing for a stronger connection with her Native roots. As the two girls reach adulthood, however, the complexity of racial relations in modern Canada and the weight of expectations come to weigh on both of them, shaping and influencing their lives in profound and unexpected ways.

This was a heartbreaking and engrossing novel. More than anything I’ve read lately, it pulled me in, bringing me into April’s world in a way that wasn’t easy to shake off when I put the book down. Told from April’s perspective throughout, the story was simply and straightforwardly written, which made it all the more heartbreaking at times. There was no turning away from it.

It’s often tempting to shield children from accounts of suffering and unhappiness. But reading this book, I remembered the stories I’d read even as a preteen that my adult self might consider too harsh for children (Jennings Michael Burch’s They Cage the Animals at Night is the one that comes immediately to mind). In Search of April Raintree tells a story that should be told, and one that, sadly, some children will not be unfamiliar with. Mature junior high schoolers, high school students, and college students interested in literature, the history of Canada, First Nations and Native American history, or just a well-written and hearbreaking story will enjoy this book.

According to one of the critical essays included in this edition, a ‘toned down’ version of the story was published in order to make the book more accessible to younger readers. Frankly, I think that any such watering down does children a disservice. We live in a world where bad things happen and people sometimes use bad words. Foisting a diluted story on young readers that pretends otherwise does them a disservice.

Dancing Through the Snow, by Jean Little • Kane Miller, 2009

Originally published by Scholastic Canada in 2007, Dancing Through the Snow tells the story of Min (don’t call her Minerva), a “foundling” buffeted from foster home to foster home after being abandoned in the washroom of the Canadian Nation Exhibition when she was three.

When her latest foster mother gives her up (complaining that Min “gives me the creeps”) just before Christmas, Min expects to be shuffled into yet another mismatched home. But then Jessica Hart, a doctor who has been kind to Min in the past, swoops in, taking Min home.

Honestly, this book had me in tears from the very start. Something about Min, and the bond she forms with Jess, just got to me. There are shades (and even shout outs to) the bond between Marilla and Anne in Anne of Green Gables, with a relationship that goes beyond a saccharine story of belonging, and captures the importance of understanding, of love, and of the unconditional acceptance in family life.

This isn’t a perfect book. Some of the story seems too good to be true, with Min’s life becoming almost impossibly rosy once she finds a home with Jess. But the story is so warm and well told, I honestly didn’t care.

Children as young as nine and on up to early high school will enjoy Min’s story, and just as Min finds comfort in books that reflect her own situation, foster children may recognize something of Min’s struggle in their own lives.

Awake and Dreaming, by Kit Pearson, Puffin Books, 1996.

Even the happiest child longs, sometimes, for another life. And Theo is far from happy: she’s the perpetual new kid, moving from school to school while her mother, Rae, struggles to pay the bills and seems more concerned with her own loneliness than she is with Rae’s shabby clothes and tendency to withdraw into books and her own imagination.

Things hit a crisis when Rae decides to move in with her boyfriend, and takes Theo by ferry to live in Victoria with her aunt Sharon. On the ferry, something strange happens: Theo meets a family like she’s always dreamed of being a part of, four children, with a brother and sister older than she is and a brother and sister younger than she. In desperation, she wishes on the new moon that this could be her family, and suddenly, her wish comes true. She wakes up in their house, a new and completely accepted member of the family.

But just as mysteriously as her new life began, it fades. And Theo is left to try and make sense of her life, both as it is and as she knows it was, however briefly.

This is a beautiful book, with shout-outs to some of my favorite books from childhood (The All-of-a-Kind Family! Half Magic!). Theo is a sympathetic and believable character, as are her families, be they her aunt and mother or the dream-or-reality Kaldors. And though the conclusion isn’t necessarily the one the reader might wish for midway through the book, it’s well developed and satisfying.

Children as young as eight (a year younger than Theo) or as old as thirteen should enjoy this book, particularly those lucky enough to have read some of the books that Theo enjoys. And for those who haven’t yet discovered the joys hiding behind the “ugly covers” in their school or public library, Theo might be just the guide.

Love You Forever, by Robert Munsch, Illustrated by Sheila McGraw • Firefly Books 2009 (75th printing, first published 1986).

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I hate this book. I hate everything about it, from the smirking, toilet-trashing toddler on the cover (who, a larger illustration two pages in to the story seems to indicate, has just drowned the family cat), to the stalker mother who climbs into her adult son’s bedroom window to sing him a freaking lullaby. Maybe I just don’t understand what it’s like to be a mother, maybe I’m a heartless old spinster, but, DANG. That’sjust weird. And I’ve read Oedipus. I know from weird.

But, obviously, I’m in the minority here. A cursory Googling reveals that people love this book. So I guess it’s time I made my peace with it.

The story is quite simple. A young mother with a new baby sings a simple lullaby: “I’ll love you forever/I’ll like you for always,/As long as I’m living,/my baby you’ll be.” The baby grows up, as babies do, and does the things that kids do, from making messes and flushing watches, to becoming a surly teenager and refusing to bathe. But his mother still loves him. And she still sings him that song, on every other page, in a sort of hypnotic refrain.

Eventually, the baby moves out, and his mother still loves him. The aforementioned creepy stalky lullaby scene happens. Then the mother gets really old, and tells her son (who only lives across town, mind you), that “You’d better come and see me because I’m very old and sick.” So he drags himself across town, picks her up, rocks her back and forth and sings, “I’ll love you forever,/I’ll like you for always,/ As long as I’m living/my Mommy you’ll be.” And then he goes home, and he stands, “for a long time at the top of the stairs,” goes in to his infant daughter’s room, and the we-have-no-boundaries-lullaby cycle begins anew.

And I’ll admit it. That sunrise/sunset bit at the end does bring the merest hint of a tear to my eyes. But it’s not a good tear. It’s a “You got me, you bastards” kind of tear.

So: Who is this book for? People who feel the mother in Runaway Bunny shows a disturbing lack of engagement in her son’s life. Parents looking for something to read aloud to the babies they can’t believe they love so much. Folks who have no inner cynic and are looking for a good cry.

It seems like Love You Forever, already in its 75th printing, is the kind of book that self-selects. If you like it, you LOVE it. And the rest of us just try to pretend it isn’t there.

I’d like to dedicate this post to my mother.

The Dragon’s Pearl, by Julie Lawson, Illustrated by Paul Morin • Clarion Books, 1993.

Xiao Sheng is a happy child, one who sings as he works and enjoys his life, even though he and his mother barely earn enough to get by.

One day, in the midst of a horrible drought, Xiao Sheng finds a verdant patch of rich, green grass. He cuts the patch and sells it in the village, only to return the next day and discover that all the grass has grown back.

What follows is a wonderful tale of myth-logic, where treasures are gained, and deserved, only to be threatened by the jealousy of a rotten few. Eventually, Xiao Sheng must take unexpected and drastic action to save his mother and his village.

I don’t want to give too much of the story away, as it is well and richly told, with illustrations by Paul Morin (who also illustrated Tololwa Mollel’s The Orphan Boy, which I just read for class). I loved the story’s kindness; except for a few clear villains, the characters are good people. Xiao Sheng and his mother are kind and uncorrupted by their good fortune, and the villagers are “not angry or jealous” of their wealth. Maybe I’m just a delicate flower, but I liked reading a story that, though it contained conflicts and trails, generally showed the world to be a nice place.

This is a picture story, and as such could be enjoyed by children as young a six (though there are some difficult words, and this may be one of those read-with-or-aloud-type books). Older children with an interest in China, mythology or (spoiler alert) dragons should also enjoy the story. There’s even a short “word about dragons” in the back of the book, which explains the role dragons play in Chinese mythology, and how it differs from dragons’ role in European myths. I could see this serving as a well-loved story, or as part of a larger lesson plan.