Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen Doubleday 1998 It’s February and Abraham Okimasis is on a sled pulled by eight huskies, racing to the finish line in northern Manitoba. That’s the opening scene of Tomson Highway’s first novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen. The reader, however, receives mixed messages
Mildred D. Taylor's The Gold Cadillac (1980) Illus. Michael Hays Dial Books for Young Readers, 1987 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) won the Newbery in 1977 and it remains Mildred D. Taylor's best known novel. But the Logan family was actually introduced in her first novella, Song of the Trees
Camille Yarbrough's The Shimmershine Queens Putnam-Penguin 1989 When I've had one of those soulfully-exhausting days (or weeks), one of the things that I like to do is browse in the children's library. I have my favourite branches, but often this is a hasty act of desperation which involves stopping at
Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer Grand Central-Hachette Book Group, 1996 Isn't it funny (funny-dumb) how the simple act of putting a book on a list can transform the idea of reading it from a pleasure into a chore. Even when you're the one listing it? That's what happened with me and
Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (2007) Art by Ellen Forney Little Brown, 2009 A few years ago I saw Sherman Alexie at a ridiculously underattended reading in a small Toronto bookstore on a fine Friday night in summer. I remember wondering if there wasn't something
