National Network for Equitable Library Service

Oh, snow day, snow day, what a very fun no-school day - Jo Jo Makoons is back in the third book in this favorite chapter book series, and she's planning the very best version of the winter Olympics that her Ojibwe community has ever seen. Jo Jo Makoons has noticed that the family members she loves most - Mama, Kokum, and even her cat, Mimi - all have their own ways of being healthy. So when Teacher says that their class will be learning about healthy habits, Jo Jo is ready to be neighborly by helping everyone around her be healthy too.

An intimate and darkly comic memoir of a woman who does a 180 with her body. In the opening pages of *Passing for Thin*, Frances Kuffel waits at the airport to be picked up by her brother, Jim. He strides past her without a glimmer of recognition because she barely resembles the woman he is expecting to see. Jim had last seen her when she was 188 pounds heavier. What follows is one of the most piercing explorations of the limits and promises of a body since Lucy Grealy’s *Autobiography of a Face*.

A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author. Emily Wells spent her childhood dancing through intense pain she assumed was normal for a ballerina pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was all in her head. In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life.

A raw, beautiful memoir of a girl born missing an ear, a medical system insistent on saving her from herself, and our culture's desire to "fix" bodies. When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her "whole" - could make her "right" - and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear.

In 1970, when he travelling in Spain as an 18-year-old, David Homel took a false step and ended up in pieces at the foot of a cliff. After a spell in a Spanish hospital, he was gathered up in the arms of a nearby US military hospital where he began a long march back toward life, through botched surgeries, opiate addiction, and the loneliness of being a crippled traveler. Many years later, living in Montreal with growing pain and incapacity, he made an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon who gave him advice to live by.

A moving and honest graphic memoir about the unexpected cancer journey of a young, queer, mixed-race woman. At the age of twenty-five, Kimiko Tobimatsu was a young, queer, mixed-race woman with no history of health problems whose world was turned upside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an instant, she became immersed in a new and complicated life of endless appointments, evaluations, and treatments, and difficult conversations with her partner and parents. Kimiko knew that this wasn't what being twenty-five was supposed to be like ...

In this intimate and moving graphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her struggle with postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet. Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, Dear Scarlet perfectly captures the quiet desperation of those suffering from PPD and the profound feelings of inadequacy and loss. As Teresa grapples with her fears and anxieties and grasps at potential remedies, coping mechanisms, and her mother's Chinese elixirs, we come to understand one woman's battle against the cruel dynamics of postpartum depression.

This is the story of Barry and Lupus. Barry, an exhausted newspaper owner physically and economically on the ropes, meets Lupus, a wolf-German Shepherd cross, at an animal shelter. Despite a nagging belief that he cannot take responsibility for anything or anyone else, Barry rescues Lupus and takes him home. Every Wolf's Howl recounts their incredible three-year journey together, back and forth across the country, enduring poverty, heartache, and illness.

Most people think Alzheimer's disease is the same as memory loss or hope that if they ignore it hard enough, it will go away. That was certainly Marion Agnew's hope when her mother -- a Queen's and Harvard/Radcliffe-educated mathematician, nuclear weapons researcher, award-winning professor and researcher, as well as a mother of five -- began drifting away from her. This moving memoir looks at grief and family, at love and music. It is a coming-to-terms reflection on the endurance of love and family.

Rain on a Distant Roof takes readers inside the frightening but fascinating world of Lyme disease in Canada. This is the story of one woman's struggle to understand the disease that’s destroying her body and mind. Armed with a confusing diagnosis, a baffling array of symptoms, and a body that’s filled with diabolical bacteria, she sets out to unravel the mysteries of her malady.