When I was a girl, I heard Gordon Lightfoot's albums often enough that I knew the words to his songs as well as I knew the lyrics on my Sesame Street records. Once, my mom brought home a recording from the library: one of his ballads with an illustrated book
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
"Being 16 is officially the worst thing I've ever been." That's Kimberly Keiko Cameron (aka Skim) speaking. "Why do the students call you Skim?" her English teacher, Ms Archer asks. "Because I'm not," Skim answers. Adolescence is such a horrid time: you're called what you're not, you want
The cover of The Secret of the Village Fool displays Renné Benoit's gentle style of illustration and invites the reader into an inspiring and powerful tale. But it also shows the anxiety and uneasiness of Milek and Munio, two young boys in their village in Poland during WWII. Their neighbour, Anton,
"If we’re lucky, art can help us through our wolfishness."* And it does, indeed, help Virginia get through her wolfishness. As does her sister, Vanessa. And the painting of Bloomsberry. What's this? A children's book about Virginia Woolf? But we all know how THAT story ends. And, yet,
