National Network for Equitable Library Service

After spending five years in a cerebral palsy center, Sally is challenged to adjust to normal family and school life.

This bittersweet coming-of-age novel, told through the eyes of a rebellious young girl, vividly captures the struggles of families caught between two cultures in the Korean community in Toronto in the 1980s. Family secrets, a lost sister, forbidden loves, domestic assaults Mary discovers as she grows up that life is much more complicated than she had ever imagined. Her secret passion for her English teacher is filled with problems and with the arrival of a promising Korean suitor events escalate in ways that she could never have imagined.

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. And my joy. Such incredible joy.

Before beginning his training as a Seeing Eye dog, Shakespeare, a labrador retriever who understands human speech, is placed for his first year of life with a foster child who has never learned to love.

When Patricia's mother sends her to her cousins' cottage for the summer, Patricia doesn't want to go. She doesn't know her cousins at all, and she's never been good at camping or canoeing, let alone making new friends. When she arrives at the cottage, her worst fears come true: her cousin Kelly teases her; Aunt Ginnie and Uncle Doug feel sorry for her. She doesn't fit in. Then Patricia discovers an old watch hidden under a floorboard. When she winds it, she finds herself taken back in time to the summer when her own mother was twelve ...

Foster child Min Randall's life is not easy as she has to deal with a number of foster parents and Children's Aid, but things take a turn for the better when she finds an injured dog.

"Nine-year-old Anna has always been the clumsy one in the family - somehow she can never do anything right. She bumps into tables, and she can't read the chalkboard at school. Her perfect brothers and sisters call her 'Awkward Anna.' When Papa announces that the family is moving from Germany to Canada - he's worried about what the Nazis' rise to power will bring - Anna's heart sinks. How can she learn English when she can't even read German properly? But when the Soldens arrive in Canada, Anna learns that there is a reason for her clumsiness.

In this sharply observed and erotically charged debut collection, Journey Prize-winner Yasuko Thanh immerses us in the lives of people on the knife edge of desire and regret, hungry for change yet still yearning for a place to call home, if only for a little while.

An updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the world, artfully fusing pure delusion and abstract perception with heartbreaking reality. Lau's stories feature the children and grandchildren of immigrants, transnational adoptees and multiracial adults who came of age in the 1990s--all struggling to find a place in the Western world and using the only language they know to express their hopes, fears and expectations.

Henry and Jenny are married after years apart and the only thing that could make them happier would be to have a child, but Jenny age and the fact her body was ravage by cancer is working against her wish.