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Growing up, Nancy believed in magic despite a hand-me-down life in a small town. So it’s no wonder the buzzing excitement of Toronto and its allure of freedom was a likely choice for her new home, the place she finds herself years later selling her body for drugs. Nancy is further from freedom than ever under the wings of Sikes, a drug dealer and pimp. When she meets Oliver, a seventeen-year-old who lands at Sikes’s feet after a life of foster care and shelters, the two find unlikely solace in each other.

Hilary has one goal for her first year in junior high: to become popular. But her plans are turned upside down when her best friend leaves for the summer and a quirky girl named Kallie moves in next door. Kallie paints constellations on her ceiling, sleeps in a hammock, and enacts fantastical plays in front of cute boys on the beach. Yet despite Kallie’s lack of interest in being “cool,” Hilary and Kallie find themselves becoming friends. That summer friendship, however, is put to the test when school begins, reigniting Hilary's obsession with climbing the social ladder.

Sixteen-year-old Darrah is in trouble. She lost her temper and, as a result, Mrs. Johnson, was hurt. Now her parents want her to go to something called a "Restorative Justice" circle that the RCMP suggested. Darrah has to face her parents, Mrs. Johnson, a policewoman, and a "facilitator" who all sit in a circle and decide on Darrah's "sanctions." Sanctions aren't punishments, the facilitator tells her. At first Darrah doesn't believe this—helping Mrs. Johnson two afternoons a week feels like punishment.

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.