National Network for Equitable Library Service

Tragic Links is award-winning author Cathy Beveridge's fourth young adult novel focusing on Canadian disasters. This time Jolene and her family find themselves in Quebec where Jolene's father is conducting research for his Museum of Disasters. When Jolene finds a time crease, she discovers Montreal in the 1920s. Back there at the church, Jolene said, "I was hiding." But Stephan, the handsome boy who lives next door to her Grandma Rose in Montreal, knows otherwise. And so Jolene divulges their family secret: the ability to time travel through time creases.

In I’ll Be Home Soon, Luanne Armstrong takes the reader on a tension-filled ride as Regan, a young girl living in the inner city, searches for her mother who has mysteriously disappeared. Homeless but by no means hapless, Regan is on her own much of the time but also receives help from a wide diversity of people: a young homeless boy like herself, her kung fu teacher, a university researcher, her grandmother, and a group of people who survive as bottle pickers. On the street, she must learn who it is she can truly trust, and it is not always those whom she (and the reader) might expect.

Stealth of the Ninja, book eight in the “Submarine Outlaw” series, brings Alfred, our courageous and idealistic protagonist, to a whole new level of experience when he pilots his homemade submarine to Japan. Here he visits a strange old man who lives on an abandoned freighter drifting on the sea. The man — a ninja, in fact — challenges Al to acquire greater physical strength and stealth. But it is also the time of the 2011 tsunami, and the giant wave capsizes and sinks the ship, taking his new teacher with it. Al barely escapes in his sub.

In the third volume of the Submarine Outlaw series, Alfred sets off in his submarine up the dark and wilful St. Lawrence River. With Hollie and Seaweed, his dog and seagull crew, Alfred follows the route of Jacques Cartier, nearly five hundred years before them, as they sail down the Strait of Belle Isle into the largest river mouth in the world. But the St.

When sixteen-year-old Sarah from Toronto learns that she is to spend the summer with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, she is convinced that it will be the most tedious summer ever. She gets off to a rough start when she meets Luke, the nephew of her grandmother’s friend, and one unfortunate event leads to another. Just when she thinks her summer cannot get much worse, she finds herself transported to Acadia in 1755. Here she meets Anne and learns much about the Acadian culture and history and the Acadians’ relations with the Mi’kmac people.

This young reader novel about the Underground Railroad begins when Rebecca, a twelve-year-old slave in South Carolina, hears that Grower Brown plans to sell her father to another grower. Unwilling to accept the idea of slavery any longer, she shocks her parents by declaring that she will run away, with or without them. Despite their fear, they agree to go with her on the Underground Railroad to Canada. They are led by the famous Harriet Tubman, aka Moses, the tiny but fiercely courageous black woman whom Rebecca comes to love.

Thirteen-year-old Kalu and his young cousin, Aisha, are the only survivors when their African village is overrun by rebels and burnt to the ground. After making their way to the coast, Kalu gets a job aboard a smuggler’s boat heading for Ireland. When the smuggler learns that the coast guard is searching for illegal migrants, he abandons the kids on Last Chance Island off the west coast of Ireland. At the same time, fifteen-year-old Spike learns that her father has died and she is shipped off to live with a distant relative, a woman who tends the lighthouse on Last Chance Island.

Ghosts of the Pacific, the fourth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, begins with Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog undertaking a harrowing journey through the icy gauntlet of the Northwest Passage on the way to the South Pacific. Alfred wants to see those dark places of the earth where horrendous events have taken place.

Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Inverted Pyramid, a best-seller when it was first published in 1924, appears now for the first time in a new edition. Writing in the period from 1908 onwards, Sinclair published over fifteen novels, some of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. In The Inverted Pyramid, which critics often cite as his most ambitious novel, he explores Canada's drift during WWI from a world of production to one based on finance, with all the attendant problems we are still enduring today.

The result of a cross-Canada contest for the best short stories about young people’s experience of loss and grief, Dark Times is a superb anthology about a topic that often remains hidden but is crucial in the development of a child’s sense of identity.