Weird Rules to Follow

This award-winning book is a series of vignettes from the first person narrator, Amelia Douglas (Mia), during elementary school in the 1980s. Each short chapter gives readers an intimate insight into what it was like to belong to the Indigenous community of Tsimshian while growing up in the small coastal town of Prince Rupert, British […]

Those Kids From Fawn Creek

I went on the record during my CBC Radio interview about the challenge of including multiple characters in a book without creating character soup. In Elliot Jelly-Legs, I wanted to include an entire hockey team (or most of it). The solution was hockey cards inserted in the text as each character is introduced. In Those […]

Linked

Will prolific kid-lit author, Gordon Korman, ever run out of ideas? I reviewed his book, The Hypnotists, in this post on my old website and included Ungifted in my SciWhy article Science in Middle Grade Fiction. But those are just a few of many great titles by Gordon Korman, who keeps finding new ways to […]

Better Connected

You can tell from my past reviews (Under Pressure, Mya’s Strategy to Save the World and When the Worst Happens) that I’m a big fan of Tanya Lloyd Kyi. Now, in addition to middle grade nonfiction and fiction, she’s done something I’ve contemplated doing too–a collaborative book with her daughter (only in my case it […]

Maizy Chen’s Last Chance

I love a story within a story! At the start of Maizy Chen’s Last Chance, 11-year-old Maizy and her mom travel from their home in Los Angeles to Last Chance, Minnesota where her Oma and Opa run The Golden Palace–a restaurant that’s been in the family for generations.. Although her mom has a strained relationship […]