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Commended for the 2009 Best Books for Kids & Teens For Skye Haverill and her family, it begins as an ordinary day. But in the annals of Canadian history, October 7, 1825, is the date of one of our greatest national disasters. The Haverill family has been turned upside down in the last year. Following the death of their mother, Skye and her brother, Tavish, have adjusted to live with a single parent. And when they're asked to make another adjustment – when his father remarries and his new wife becomes pregnant – Skye finds that some changes are too much to handle.

Rosemary Watson and Peter McAllister think their future is clear: they’re finally heading off for university. They’re thinking about finding apartments, picking courses, living like adults.But what happens when the future becomes the past? While helping Rosemary’s brother move into an apartment in Toronto, Peter and Rosemary fall into an underground river and are swept back in time, to Toronto in 1884. It’s a struggle to survive and adapt to the alien culture of the late nineteenth century.

Sarah Martin is bored. Thanks to her father’s transfer from an inner-city police division to a small-town detachment, she is forced to to live in Muskoka - no friends, no mall, no life. But when Sarah does make a new friend - Mindi - life gets considerably more interesting, as the two become aware of suspicious activity surrounding Mindi’s mother’s boyfriend and an old barn on his property. When Sarah discovers that the barn actually holds a dozen wild black bears, she will stop at nothing to save them from their fate at the hands of an organized poaching ring.

Rosemary Watson lives in the small town of Clarksbury, where news travels fast and gossip sticks around. Years before, her brother Theo suffered a nervous breakdown, and Rosemary, now entering junior high, is constantly teased about it. She wonders if she might go crazy like her brother, and she feels guilty for not being able to save him. She tries to hide in books, but even there she’s uneasy: she can’t stand to see characters suffer.

2009 Silver Birch Award — Winner 2009 Red Maple Award — Shortlisted 2009 Best Books for Kids & Teens — Commended 2008 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award — Longlisted For Tara and her brother, Suraj, the year their mother and grandfather fled the village of Morni in the middle of the night has been a nightmare. Their new stepmother is cruel and deceptive, and the village itself is lacking a healer. What’s more, men of the village have been disappearing, often returning in a strange, altered form.

Mountains, travel, adventure Amelia Hammer wants it all. Instead, her globe-trotting parents have dumped her in tiny, boring Dunstone, Ontario, in the middle of winter with her grandmother and her geeky cousin Simon. Simon isn’t having much fun either, saddled with a sulky stranger in black leather and with neon hair.And he has to be nice to her. But life in safe little Dunstone turns dangerously exciting when Mara comes to town. Amelia is enchanted by this tall, proud, fearless girl, but Simon worries that Mara might be mixed up in something weird. Hes right.

In The Ruby Kingdom, readers were captivated as Amelia Hammer and her cousin, Simon, and friend, Ike, discovered a secret gate leading from the small, southern-Ontario town of Dunstone to the extraordinary land of Mythrin - a world populated by dragons.Now, dragon leader, Mara, seeks the help of Amelia and her friends again. This time, a peculiar race of humans from a world called Cassar is searching for the Prism Blade - a legendary weapon forged at the beginning of time.

Sarah Martin isn’t the only outsider in her small Muskoka town. But when she’s teamed up with Byron Hopper for a geometry project, she discovers that she’s had an easier time being accepted in her new town than some long-time residents. Byron’s family has long been the subject of rumours. Some say that they are a mob family, some say they are part of a witness relocation program, some say they are just plain weird. But the most sinister rumour surrounds Byron’s sister, Garnet, who many believed committed murder.

Fifteen-year-old Paula’s perfectionism drives every facet of her life, from her marks in Grade 10 to the pursuit of a "perfect body." A history project brings her face to face with her grandmother’s early life and, as she delves deeper, she is disturbed to find eerie parallels between her own struggles and what she learns of the past.As Paula slowly destroys the very body she’s trying to perfect, her spirit is torn between settling for her imperfect life or entering the shadowy mystery of her grandmother’s Armenian past.

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, as he strikes out in search of a good poker game in the Canadian and American West. Loretta and Teddy try to adjust to life on the run as they shuttle from ghost town to ghost town, jumping borders and stowing away on trucks, sleds, and trains.