Category Archives: Canadian
No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
Canadian author Deborah Ellis has harnessed the power of words to create miraculous results: her multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) has raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. With her latest title, Ellis tackles leprosy, this time sending all her royalties to The Leprosy Mission Canada. In case you had any doubt, beyond her many good deeds, Ellis also writes really good books.
For independent Valli, the “best day” of her young life happens to be the day she leaves her home village of Jharia, India. What kept her there for her first nine or 10 years – she’s not quite sure how old she is – was what she thought was her family: “You stayed with your family because they were your family and families were supposed to stick together and care for each other.” But when Valli learns that her ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ were merely paid to take her in as a baby, she grabs her chance to escape an inevitable future – back-breaking work in the coal mines, too-large families, abusive and alcoholic husbands – that most of the village women are doomed to live. Hidden in the back of a coal truck, she drives off toward the unknown.
Valli arrives in Kolkata and narrowly escapes a life in a brothel. For awhile, she’s content to wander the streets, finding ways to “borrow” what she needs, enjoying an adventure here and there – diving for coins in the river, sleeping in cemeteries, escaping frustrated guards. Her bare feet that magically feel no pain in spite what should be debilitating injuries, keep her moving swiftly. But when she sees her future once more – city-style, this time – in the face of a begging woman with a thinly wailing baby, she realizes that she needs to find the kind doctor who tried to help her once before, even if it means facing the “monsters” in the hospital.
Once again, Ellis writes a poignant, penetrating story about the difficult challenges of being a girl in the developing world. If the Breadwinner Trilogy is any indication of No Ordinary Day‘s potential success, then sharing Valli’s story to benefit the Leprosy Mission will surely provide the real-life Vallis the much-needed chance to choose healthier, safer, more fulfilling lives.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, Canadian, Indian
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
With utter certainty, I can claim that I’ve never ever been remotely disappointed by a Michael Ondaatje title. Until now, alas. Here’s my very best advice to you about this, his long-awaited new title, The Cat’s Table: read it page by page for yourself only; do not choose the audible option, even as the venerable Ondaatje himself narrates. Really. At least with this work, Ondaatje’s voice unfortunately expresses a sense of detachment so visceral that bonding with the book’s protagonist proves difficult at best …
Perhaps his distance might be explained in the “Author’s Note” at title’s end, in which Ondaatje insists, “Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.” That narrator, ironically, is also named Michael, also born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), also moved to England at the age of 11, and also grew up to be a writer with a Canadian address. As if to downplay those similarities (but why?), Ondaatje’s voice unintentionally results in a disengaged, aloof narration.
In Colombo late at night, Michael, the 11-year-old narrator here, boards the big ship Oronsay alone: “… it was explained to me that after I’d crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, I would arrive one morning on a small pier in England and my mother would meet me there.”
As the ship begins its journey, Michael is placed at Table 76 for his meals, also known as ‘the cat’s table’ – “the least privileged place,” he quickly learns. His tablemates include “two other boys roughly my age,” who become his adventurous companions throughout the voyage and beyond. One friendship will last a lifetime; the other will remain a spectral presence. Michael’s three-week passage will include other memorable characters – his beguiling distant cousin Emily, a mysterious criminal about whose offenses no one seems to be quite sure, late-night gambling bunkmates, and a young deaf girl who is magic on a trampoline. In between “Departure” and “Arrival,” Michael intersperses fragments from his adult life, fluidly passing from past, present, future, and back again, offering elliptical details of what followed that pivotal multi-sea crossing.
All my favorite literary elements are here: non-linear time, sparse but profound writing, characters with mysteries to be solved (or not), fateful reunions, etc. etc. If only had known to read, not listen; the iPod failed me for sure this time! So perhaps as I impatiently anticipate Ondaatje’s next book, I’ll have the time to re-read, re-discover. re-imagine Cat’s Table all for myself …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Hocus Pocus by Sylvie Desrosiers, illustrated by Rémy Simard
A magician, his dog, their groceries come home and settle in to relax, eventually drifting off for a nap. Meanwhile, a rabbit peeks out from the magician’s hat, sees the snoozing man and dog, notices the carrot on the counter, and decides he must have it.
Of course, the dog wakes up – rather grumpily, having been disturbed out his comfortable slumber – and all sorts of bunny vs. canine mischievous adventures ensue … Let the chase begin!
Here’s the most enchanting part of the story: the book is completely textless. Instead, the creators rely on vibrant, adorably comical pictures that convey a constant motion from one entertaining pane to the next. Even for kiddies not yet ready to recognize letters and words, Hocus Pocus will surely work a little magic in giving the youngest book experts an inviting opportunity to ‘read.’
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Canadian, Nonethnic-specific
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Regardless of what is actually happening on the page (even brutality, sometimes tragedy), Michael Ondaatje’s writing is something akin to a velvety, soothing dream. In a perfect world, reading (or better yet, listening to … in this case, to the lulling voice of actor Hope Davis) the Sri Lankan-born, Canadian-domiciled Ondaatje would be done in an uninterrupted flow …
Anna, Claire, and Cooper are three siblings unrelated by blood. Their widowed farmer father creates his family, taking in young Cooper at age 4 after his parents are murdered then bringing newly orphaned Claire home from the hospital with his birthdaughter Anna when he loses Anna’s mother in childbirth. Sixteen years later, the father will shatter that same family.
Almost two decades since the fateful storm that tore her family apart, Anna reappears in a remote French village, researching the life and work of late-19th century French poet and novelist Lucien Segura. Anna is living a “quiet and anonymous time” in Segura’s home, content to spend most of her waking hours at Segura’s own kitchen table … until she goes out one day to explore her surroundings and brings home a lover who has an intimate connection to Segura and this manoir home.
Back across the Pond and across the continent, Claire is working in San Francisco for a lawyer, her job having to do with a different kind of research. Most weekends, she travels back to the family farm to see their father in Petaluma; she is the only child who returns home. By chance, out on assignment, Claire meets Cooper who in his adulthood has become a professional gambler; she will once again need to save him.
Time, narrative, histories are all seemingly borderless in Ondaatje’s novel. From the 1970s to 1990s to the decades leading up to World War I, Ondaatje intricately weaves together fragments from two families – separated at the very least by thousands of miles and almost a century, and yet overlapping in so many intimate details of their very existence.
For readers to know so much more than the characters is almost aching knowledge … and still we can never know enough. With prose so beckoning, so addictive, finishing an Ondaatje novel always comes with both satisfaction and want.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
Chanda’s Wars by Allan Stratton
In the six months since Mama passed away, Chanda’s life has changed completely. As the sole provider for her sister Lily and brother Soly, Chanda is unable to continue her own education and instead substitutes at the primary school. With Mama gone, Chanda’s best friend Esther and two of her younger siblings have moved in. Having made an uneasy peace with Esther, who she claimed was a bad influence on Chanda, Mrs. Tafa is a sometimes overbearing guardian who commands (and supports) from next door.
When Chanda’s nightmares become ever more violent, her screaming frights more debilitating, Mrs. Tafa and Esther both convince Chanda she must return to her family’s village with Lily and Soly. There she must secure the blessings of her grandparents and finally put an end to the alleged curse that haunted her long-suffering mother. Unconvinced, Chanda still makes the long journey with her siblings, and for a short time, experiences a joyful extended family reunion.
Her happiness is short-lived when she realizes that she’s to be given to a neighboring family’s son in marriage to assuage the generations-old curse. But before she and her siblings can safely return home to Tiro, vicious rebels from the warring country next door raid the village. Murder, rape, and devastation ensue, and the youngest children are kidnapped to serve as child soldiers.
Against impossible odds, Chanda promises she will rescue her siblings, even if she has to rely on the help of her rejected intended, Nelson, who has a younger brother of his own he’s determined to save. Chanda and Nelson endure brutal conditions, witness unthinkable horrors, and somehow remain hopeful that their families will be reunited … what the children must survive is the most atrocious tragedy of all.
Canadian playwright and author Allan Stratton continues the story he began in his bestselling, mega award-winning Chanda’s Secrets with another haunting illumination of young Chanda’s difficult life. Stratton is fully aware that instant answers and happy endings are impossible in an area ravaged by disease, destruction, and war, and yet he’s careful never to sensationalize.
While the African country here remains unnamed, Chanda’s story could be set anywhere in the world – far too many places – where horrific events continue, especially as they affect children. Stratton convincingly crafts another necessary reminder that children have no true future without peace … and that peace is the one non-negotiable legacy we must somehow ensure.
Readers: Young Adult
Published: 2008 Continue reading
Filed under ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, Canadian
Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton
If it hasn’t happened already, soon enough Chanda’s Secrets will be coming to a theater near you … it arrives Friday, August 5, if you happen to live in the DC metro area. As internationally lauded as the film version – titled Life, Above All – has been, no celluloid version could possibly capture the breadth and depth between the pages of Canadian writer Allan Stratton‘s 2005 Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Do yourself a favor: Read, then see …
In the small town of Tiro in a fictional southern African country, 16-year-old Chanda is the oldest child living at home with her mother and three younger siblings. Her beloved father died in a horrible mine accident years before, and since then, her mother has been unlucky in her subsequent relationships, each producing another child. Yet regardless of her personal struggles, Mama has always managed to be a resilient, devoted, caring parent … until now.
When Chanda’s baby sister dies, the family quickly begins to unravel. The baby’s father, an alcoholic lothario, rarely bothers to come home and soon enough disappears. What seems to begin as utter grief saps Mama’s strength, until she can no longer rise from her sleeping mat. Mama insists that the only way she can recover is to make peace with her estranged family, so she travels to her home village leaving Chanda in charge with promises of a swift return. With all the crushing illness around her, Chanda must face the secret that no one dares to name.
With the support of her best friend Esther, who lost both parents to the unnamable disease, the sometimes begrudging love of Mrs. Tafa next door, and the guidance of her highly respected high school teacher, Chanda confronts the town’s ignorance and crushing judgments, and breaks the taboo silence demanded of HIV/AIDS victims. Unlike the silently complicit victims’ families, Chanda openly decides what is best for her family, especially for her frail mother.
In spite of the multiplying illness and deaths throughout, Stratton’s unforgettable story is driven by courage and abundant hope. Chanda’s education plays a pivotal role in her capable decisions and justice-fueled demands. Amidst excruciating choices and impossible challenges, she manages to hold on to her dreams of scholarship and degrees … and while no easy fairy tale ending awaits, Chanda’s inspiring determination will make you believe she’ll someday, somehow accomplish all.
Read …then see … then read some more: Chanda’s story continues in Chanda’s Wars.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Filed under ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, Canadian
Mud City by Deborah Ellis
The final installment of the Breadwinner Trilogy follows Shauzia, Parvana’s best friend from The Breadwinner, in which both girls survived by cross-dressing as young boys, working to provide for their shuttered-in families in Taliban-controlled Kabul. While Parvana’s desperate odyssey to reunite with her family continues in Parvana’s Journey, Shauzia’s story takes her to a refugee camp in Pakistan, just beyond the Afghanistan border.
Shauzia shares a tent with Mrs. Weera, a domineering woman who was once the girls’ athletics teacher, who is now involved with running secret schools, clinics, and publishing a feminist magazine. Shauzia is tired of doing “little jobs” for Mrs. Weera, being ordered around, feeling suffocated in the refugee camp. Inspired by a magazine cut-out of a lavendar field somewhere in France, Shauzia dreams of faraway escape. Filled with defiant independence, Shauzia heads to the busy city of Peshawar with her loyal dog, Jasper, expecting to find enough work to pay her passage to freedom, away from hunger, suffering, war, and especially Mrs. Weera’s endless demands.
Supporting herself, of course, proves to be far more difficult than she ever expected. She finds a few odd jobs, but must resort to theft, begging, and running with hardened street kids in hopes of staying as safe as possible. She lands in jail, is saved by an ex-pat American family, but her respite is brief and she finds herself back where she started. How she will ever achieve her dreams seems to be a daunting, neverending challenge.
Of the trilogy, Mud City, is admittedly the weakest (less developed characters, the American deus ex machina gone awry), although only in comparison to the previous two titles. Certainly Mud could stand alone, but reading all three is more rewarding , enriched by the many small details that bind the three stories together.
Although the trilogy is seemingly finished, adding a final fourth which captures Shauzia and Parvana’s reunion would surely be welcome … indeed, those promised 20 years have nearly passed. Book 1 is set sometime in or close to 1996 (when the Taliban claimed Kabul), and books 2 and 3 about three years later (Parvana is 14 in Journey). Already, we’re in 2011, so somehow, the two cross-dressing girls – now fully grown women – are due for reunion at the Eiffel Tower’s peak in just five short years … oh, to imagine that …!
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2003 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, Canadian
Parvana’s Journey by Deborah Ellis
The second part of Canadian anti-war activist Deborah Ellis’ lauded Breadwinner Trilogy continues with Parvana’s odyssey to reunite with her surviving family. Parvana and her recently released father leave Kabul at the end of The Breadwinner, determined to find Parvana’s mother, older sister, younger sister, and toddler brother who traveled north for her older sister’s wedding.
Journey begins with harsh tragedy … at the graveside of Parvana’s father. Parvana is still traveling as Kaseem, but at 14, she will not be able to hide her true gender much longer. The villagers are initially welcoming of Parvana, but soon she must escape in the middle of the night after being warned that she is about to be sold to the Taliban.
All alone and not even certain of where she is going, Parvana recites multiplication tables, just as her father taught her, to keep her going during the most trying times. Barely able to take care of her own self, Parvana’s wanderings lead her to a struggling baby in a bombed-out village whose dead mother lies beside him, then an angry, abused young boy who has already lost a leg, and finally an imaginative little girl who believes she is forever safe from land mines that litter the damaged, broken, war-torn country. Together, the foursome form a new kind of family …
Parvana shares not only her strength and protection with the younger children, she also tries to impart her hard-won education, teaching her new siblings to read and write. She writes undeliverable letters as often as she can to her friend Shauzia, who also survived life in Kabul as a cross-dressing breadwinner for her family, with whom Parvana shares the secret promise of meeting at the top of the Eiffel Tower in (now less than) 20 years.
In spite of the endless difficulties she faces, Parvana holds on to her father’s beloved books as long as she can, as well as the single copy of a feminist magazine her mother helped to write and produce before the family was scattered. Parvana is determined she will not only find her missing family … but she will one day put her mother’s brave, banned work into her waiting hands.
Ellis creates another challenging, fast-moving story about the will to survive, even in the youngest, most vulnerable souls. The children’s ability to nurture one another even as adults prove unreliable provide moments of uplifting wonder. Truly, the future lies in children … their resilience, their determination, their forgiveness, and their awe-inspiring hope.
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2002 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, Canadian
The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis
When Parvana’s gentle father is suddenly beaten without cause and locked away for being an educated citizen, her family is left without a means to support themselves. Under Taliban rule, women are forbidden in Kabul to leave the house unless fully covered and accompanied by a male family member. The only male at home now is Parvana’s toddler brother, hardly a likely escort. Meanwhile, their bereft mother – a former radio journalist – cannot get out of bed. Her teenage older sister is a perfect target for kidnapping.
At 11, Parvana is still young enough to dress in her late older brother’s leftover clothing, even if her resemblance to Hossain makes her mother weep. Masquerading as a boy, Parvana can leave the family’s stifling one-room apartment to go to the market, take over her father’s job as a letter-reader-and-writer-for hire, to buy food, and feed her family. As “Kaseem,” she becomes the family’s breadwinner.
In spite of her new relative freedom, Parvana – nor her family – is hardly safe, and they must struggle daily to survive, holding on to the hope of a family reunion someday. The Breadwinner is the first of a trilogy that continues in Parvana’s Journey and Mud City – all three chronicle the extreme choices Parvana and her family are forced to make amidst the cruel Taliban control of their war-torn country.
Award-winning Deborah Ellis – one of Canada’s most popular, bestselling children’s authors – is a longtime anti-war activist who traveled to Afghan refugee camps in the late 1990s and “heard many stories like Parvana’s.” Honoring those experiences of struggle, Ellis is donating all royalties from The Breadwinner to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan – even more reason to invest in her books!
Ellis strongly reminds readers in her ending “Author’s Note” that in spite of the Taliban’s initial ousting in 2001 from Afghanistan, “the future of Afghanistan’s women and girls remains uncertain.” A full decade later, that future remains under threat. In the words of the looming Talib soldier, toting a rifle to complete his menacing shadow, “‘Read this.’”
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2001 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, Canadian
Cry of the Giraffe by Judie Oron
In her small native village, young Wuditu – and the rest of her family – are called falasha, a derogatory term reserved for Jewish people. Their own name for themselves is Beta Israel, meaning ‘the house of Israel.’ In spite of a centuries-long history grounded in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Jews, who are often the potters and iron workers in their villages, are treated as outcasts in their own homeland.
Every new generation of Beta Israel is told of their great history in a place called Yerusalem, a promised homeland to which someday the Beta Israel will return: “‘When the time comes for you to go to Yerusalem, you must be ready to leave this land in the blink of an eye. And when you get there, your lives will be changed forever!’” the village leader reminds Wuditu once again.
That time is suddenly now. With growing violence compounded by unrelenting religious persecution during junta dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam’s brutal reign, Wuditu and her family secretly abandon their village and begin an arduous trek to a refugee camp in the Sudan, following promises that they will eventually be rescued and evacuated to Yerusalem.
One dark night in 1989 in the refugee camp, Wuditu, now 13, and her younger sister Lewteh, 10, are violently expelled from the camp and forced to walk back to Ethiopia, where they thankfully find temporary shelter with an elderly couple. Wuditu makes the difficult decision to seek help alone in order to save her sister and herself, and somehow reunite them both with their family. Her three-year solo odyssey of deprivation, violence, prostitution, and slavery is wrenching, and yet somehow, she never gives up her dream of safety, family, and salvation in a homeland she has only imagined.
For Canadian journalist and author Judie Oron, who just won a 2011 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Giraffe (adding to growing list of international kudos), this story is also her own personal journey as well: for the last two decades, Lewteh and Wuditu have been part of Oron’s family. ”Cry of the Giraffe was written out of love and admiration for a daughter who bravely endured a lengthy and brutal captivity yet emerged a generous and caring human being,” Oron begins her acknowledgments on the book’s final page. That such harrowing events happened to an innocent young girl, that such suffering continues for far too many others, is undoubtedly wrenching truth. And yet that out of that horror emerged love, laughter, and family is a truly a miracle to believe.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2010
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, African, Canadian, Jewish
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