National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Breadwinner The first book in Deborah Ellis’s riveting Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.Parvana’s JourneyA war is raging in Afghanistan as a coalition of Western forces tries to oust the Taliban by bombing the country. Parvana’s father has died, and her mother, sister and brother have gone to a faraway wedding, not knowing what has happened to the father. Parvana doesn’t know where they are.

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award and selected as an OLA Best Bet for 2012 Madeline's parents have gone missing. Her only clues? A note tacked on the fridge from someone called The Enemy, a file card covered in a squiggly secret code, and dozens of red eyes staring out the blackened windows of a car she saw speeding down her driveway. And Madeline could swear the driver was a fox . . . Luckily, Madeline encounters two bunnies who have decided to take up detective work (detectives get to wear fedoras) and are willing to come to her aid -- pro bono.

This lavishly illustrated book brings Gordon Lightfoot’s heart-stirring song, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” to readers young and old. The song was commissioned by the CBC in 1967 to mark Canada’s centennial year and it has been a classic ever since. It eloquently describes the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway — “an iron road runnin’ from the sea to the sea” — a great feat of nation building that changed Canada forever for good and for ill, as in the process many people died and were dispossessed of their land.

Winner of the Ruth Schwartz Award Jeanne Chatel has always dreamed of adventure. So when the eighteen-year-old orphan is summoned to sail from France to the wilds of North America to become a king's daughter and marry a French settler, she doesn't hesitate. Her new husband is not the dashing military man she has dreamed of, but a trapper with two small children who lives in a small cabin in the woods.

Leon and his friend Susan live in New Auckland, a small isolated fishing village on the coast of British Columbia. One day, the village receives an unexpected gift from the Government of Canada -- a fire truck. But New Auckland is surrounded by mountains and hugs a tiny beach. There are no roads, no cars, no fire hydrants. What will the village do with its new truck? The man who comes to build the fire station brings with him a practical joke that scares the wits out of Leon and Susan -- a real live wiggling thumb, completely detached from its owner.

It's the summer of 1962, and to twelve-year-old Rex the world is starting to look like a pretty scary place. On TV there are reports about the Russians and a nuclear war. Some people in his new neighborhood are even building bomb shelters in their backyards. Rex learns that there's trouble closer to home as well. A black panther has escaped from a zoo and he and his friends are sure they have spotted the creature in their local park -- and it is Rex who comes up with a plan to trap it.

Winner of the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize, the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and the IODE National Chapter Award Drawing on the real background of the Chinese role in the gold rush, the building of the railway and the settling of the west coast in the nineteenth century, noted historian and children’s author Paul Yee has created eight original stories that combine the rough-and-tumble adventure of frontier life with the rich folk traditions that these immigrants brought from China.

Winner of the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction The year is 1959, and fifteen-year-old Nipishish returns to his reserve in northern Quebec after being kicked out of residential school, where the principal tells him he's a good-for-nothing who, like all Indians, can look forward to a life of drunkenness, prison and despair. The reserve, however, offers nothing to Nipishish. He remembers little of his late mother and father. In fact, he seems to know less about himself than the people at the band office.

Literature’s most endearing rabbits are back in this sequel to Mr. and Mrs. Bunny — Detectives Extraordinaire! While the Bunnys' human friend, Madeline, worries about saving money for college, Mrs. Bunny is more concerned about how to become a queen.Unexpectedly, Madeline’s family inherits a sweet shop (candy store!) in England, and it looks for a while as if everyone’s problems are solved.

Winner of the IODE National Chapter Award, and a Horn Book Fanfare Top Ten List selection In this brillant and poetic novel, Brian Doyle returns to the Gatineau River near Ottawa, the world of his novels Up to Low and Uncle Ronald. Mary Ann Alice McCrank was named for the pretty church bell in the steeple of St. Martin's Church in the Martindale. She has the soul of a poet and Mickey McGuire Jr. is in love with her. Mary Ann Alice is passionately interested in many things, especially the geology of her part of the world.