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Commended for the 2007 Canadian Children’s Book Centre Choice Selection It is Christmas 1912, and Charlotte McEwan is 15 years old. The coal-mining town of Extension, British Columbia, on Vancouver island has hit hard times. When the opportunity to work in a local dynamite factory presents itself, Charlotte braves the disapproval of her mother for the chance to bring in some extra cash and keep the vow she made to herself to get her family as far away from the mine as possible. But the job is more dangerous than she bargained for, and soon Charlotte is at risk in more ways than one.

Jason Stevens is an angry 15-year-old when his parents decide to move from Toronto to Lucan, Ontario, site of the notorious 1880 massacre of the Irish-Canadian Donnelly family.

After his "wonderful airship" crashes near St. Francis of Assisi's Home for Foundlings in Quebec City, Ben Franklin is thrown slightly off course in his carefully laid plan to coax Canada into joining the Americans in their fight against England's rule.A motley crew of orphans hides the famous inventor from the British Redcoats during the American War of Independence.

What do you do with elephants escaped from the zoo, or whales swimming loops around in your soup? Gwen Molnar answers these and other puzzling questions in a rollicking collection of readable, singable poems.

When Hawk’s baseball coach tells him how Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run nearby, the question arises: what happened to the baseball? Bullies, baseball, and kids who defy the odds. Hawk, a poor, half-Native boy who lives on the street, is eager to go back to school, to play baseball, and to please both his divorced parents. When Mr. Rizzuto, his baseball coach, tells him how the great Babe Ruth, playing on nearby Toronto Island in 1914, hit his first professional home run, the question arises: what happened to the baseball?

Commended for the 2011 Best Books for Kids and Teens Living in grim Depression-era Toronto with her actress mother, Frannie, Ivy Chalmers has never met her father. In 1931, Frannie sends twelve-year-old Ivy to stay with her paternal grandmother in Larkin, Ontario, while she seeks stardom in New York City. When Ivy’s father, Alva, arrives unexpectedly in Larkin, he turns out not to be the Prince Charming she imagined, but an illiterate peddler.

Eleven-year-old Danny Ryan and 19-year-old Wendy Marshall think their friendship is only about looking after two baby raccoons that Danny has rescued. But when a bank holdup upsets Wendy so much that she can hardly stand to be around people, she leaves her job as a teller, retreats to a farm, and surrounds herself with injured and orphaned wildlife.

During a camping trip, 11-year-old Lee finds herself on a rough trail in a Vancouver Island forest. Halfway to an abandoned homestead, Lee trips and is knocked unconscious. She awakens in a world unfamiliar -- all the usual landmarks have disappeared and the terrain is unpopulated except for a strange trailer and a herd of dogs. Lee investigates only to find an ornery woman at an easel who says she's Emily Carr, and a family from the Depression-torn Prairies illegally logging the island's mighty cedars.

In a tumble-down house carved out of the dunes lives an old man with second sight. He is the sifter of sands, the man who separates the sparkling mica, black lava, golden-reds, and misty grays. And as he sifts he mesmerizes Jessica and Andrew with his tales of the trickster-creator Raven and how a lonely young man lived to be 300 years old.

Due to circumstances beyond her control, 12-year-old Peggy Henderson has to move to the quiet town of Crescent Beach, British Columbia, to live with her aunt and uncle. Without a father and separated from her mother, who's looking for work, Peggy feels her unhappiness increasing until the day she and her uncle start digging a pond in the backyard and she realizes the rock she's been trying to pry from the ground is really a human skull. Peggy eventually learns that her home and the entire seaside town were built on top of a 5000-year-old Coast Salish fishing village.