Issues category: 21839 books

The rules for a young English woman in 1799 are simple: Do what you’re told; stay out of the way; and don’t, under any circumstances, ask questions. But Constance Blackchurch is insatiable, headstrong, and complex; and the quest to find her missing mother is too much to resist. . . . ....

From Nazi Germany to a modern-day orphanage in the American South, three girls separated by decades and thousands of miles are about to give up when a single pair of shoes binds them all together.   Dalya is the daughter of a cobbler in 1930s Berlin, and though she is only fifteen, she knows she...

A heartbreaking novel based on the true story of a World War II voyage. In May of 1939, the SS St. Francis sets sail from Germany, carrying German Jews and other refugees away from Hitler’s regime. The passengers believe they are bound for freedom in Cuba and eventually the United States,...

Cass feels the long winter shadows on her heart. Her mother died of cancer and her father has remarried a woman who has moved into their old Manitoba house with her nasty, babyish daughter and an attitude that's very hard to take. Christmas promises to be a miserable time. More than a century...

Maria is the younger daughter of an esteemed family on the island of Murano, the traditional home for Venetian glassmakers. Though she longs to be a glassblower herself, glassblowing is not for daughters—that is her brother's work. Maria has only one duty to perform for her family: before her father...

Based on real-life events, a gripping historical novel from award-winning young adult author Jessie Haas To Sue Gorham, life in Westminster West isn’t fair, not at all. It isn’t fair that she has to do most of the backbreaking chores on their Vermont farm while her sister, Clare, gets to...

“This story makes you believe in the love and laughter and friendship that give you hope in the worst of times” (Booklist).   Thirteen-year-old Shanta Cola Morgan is an orphan who lives with her grandmother and her bedridden Uncle Louie. It isn’t exactly a typical family like other kids have.   But...

A young girl fleeing Hitler takes refuge in Shanghai, where she learns that she must fight to survive Throughout tomboy Ilse’s childhood, her mother has tried to force her to behave like a proper Austrian lady. But when Hitler annexes their country, the family flees, boarding a packed freighter...

Based on the 1957 Little Rock school integration, two teenage girls—one white, one black—are swept up in the fear and prejudice of their divided southern town It’s Sophia Stuart’s last year at Chatham High—only now the pretty, popular high school senior will be sharing classes with...

In 1909, 13-year-old Luc Godin arrive in British Columbia from Quebec only to discover that the house they thought they'd move into hasn't been built. So the Godins have to make due with living in a railway boxcar with three other families. Luc's father and the many other newcomers to the Fraser...

Commended for the 2011 Best Books for Kids and Teens Living in grim Depression-era Toronto with her actress mother, Frannie, Ivy Chalmers has never met her father. In 1931, Frannie sends twelve-year-old Ivy to stay with her paternal grandmother in Larkin, Ontario, while she seeks stardom in...

Short-listed for the 1997 Canadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice On the run from the authorities and the angry townspeople of Weasel City, British Columbia, in the early 1940s, teenage Loretta and her younger brother, Teddy, travel with their gambling stepfather, "Bean-Trap" Braden,...

In 1910, while twelve-year-old Addy McLeod waits in a cabin in the Kootenay wilderness of southeastern British Columbia for her brother, Cask, to send for her, she fends off the unwanted advances of her alcoholic stepfather. When tragedy strikes, she is forced to flee and disguise herself as a boy. Addy’s...

Short-listed for the 1999 Silver Birch Award Eleven-year-old Ellen finds herself wrongly accused of stealing while selling flowers on the Liverpool docks. In her escape she becomes a stowaway aboard a steamship bound for Canada, an unwilling member of a band of orphans headed for new families...