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Short-listed for the 2003 Red Maple Award and Arthur Ellis Award for best Juvenile Book, commended for the 2003 Canadian Children’s Book Centre Our Choice Selection Shelby Belgarden isn’t exactly thrilled when people start thinking Greg is her boyfriend. After all, she’s more interested in the athletic Nick Jarvis. But one day Greg suddenly becomes more interesting to Shelby – though for all the wrong reasons: Shelby begins to suspect that Greg is responsible for the series of arsons that have occurred in her small New Brunswick town in recent weeks.

In 1909, 13-year-old Luc Godin arrive in British Columbia from Quebec only to discover that the house they thought they'd move into hasn't been built. So the Godins have to make due with living in a railway boxcar with three other families. Luc's father and the many other newcomers to the Fraser Valley have come to work in the lumber industry. Their new home still has vestiges of the wilderness, and Luc and his family find find pioneering life difficult, especially as French speakers in a world of English.

Ben and Charity Muldoon are 15-year-old twins who find themselves in the midst of politically charged events in the Saskatchewan River Valley in 1885. One day, as Ben is walking through a ravine, he encounters a Cree boy named Red Eagle, who quickly becomes his friend after a hair-raising rescue. Ben eventually discovers that a confrontation between the North-West Mounted Police and the Natives, led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, is imminent.

Short-listed for the 1999 Silver Birch Award and for the 2001 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award Fifteen-year-old Rowan, the daughter of foreign correspondents in Africa, finds herself beached for a summer with her cousins near Tofino, British Columbia. Desperate for a summer project, she camps on a neighbouring island to monitor the progress of an endangered group of sea otters, further threatened by the development plans of a real estate agent trying to sell the property for tourism.

Fifteen-year-old Danny is a troubled kid, and trouble always seems to follow him. Things are changing just too fast his family has moved to a new town, his father is battling alcoholism, and Danny has a hair-trigger temper that causes him problems with the teachers and the other kids at his new school. But as they say, everybody can do at least one thing well, and for Danny its judo. The dojo is the one place where Dannys aggression can find an outlet, even as he tries to make sense of a life that seems way out of control.

Eric Zweig is a managing editor with Dan Diamond & Associates, consulting publishers to the National Hockey League. He has written about sports and sports history for many major publications, including the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail His non-fiction sports books for young people include Star Power: The Legend and Lore of Cyclone Taylor and Crazy Canucks. He lives in Owen Sound, Ontario.

Born with Down syndrome, Ruby Jean Sharp comes from a time when being a developmentally disabled person could mean growing up behind locked doors and barred windows and being called names like "retard" and "moron." When Ruby Jean's caregiver and loving grandmother dies, her mother takes her to Woodlands School in New Westminster, British Columbia, and rarely visits. As Ruby Jean herself says: "Can't say why they called it a school -- a school's a place you go for learnin an then after you get to go home.

In 1755, on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, fifteen-year-old Nola and her Acadian parents face expulsion from Grand Pry the British. Nola, her friends Hector and Jocelyne, Nola’s grandfather, and a band of bold teenagers manage to flee by boat only to encounter challenges tougher than their wildest imaginings. Their destination is French-occupied Fort Louisbourg, but along the way hostile soldiers, a harsh environment, enigmatic Mi’kmaq, and superpowers at war turn their journey into a series of hair-raising adventures.

Commended for the 2011 Best Books for Kids and Teens Robin Starveling, aka Noah Vaile, is scooped off the streets of seventeenth-century Bristol, England, and dragged onboard a ship bound for Virginia by the murderous William Thatcher, who needs a servant with no past and no future to aid him in a nefarious plot to steal gold. Starveling fits the bill perfectly since he lives nowhere and has no parents. Aboard the ship, Starveling makes friends with a young cabin boy, Peter Fence.

Angela Wroboski has recently moved with her mother from their small hometown into the city to rid them of a dark past. Now, Angela must deal with the fact that her home will be anything but "normal." Her dad, the infamous Nick "The Weasel" Wroboski, has served three jail terms for various crimes, including robbery, during her lifetime, and on June 5, Angela’s fifteenth birthday, he’s released from a two-year sentence in Fort Gavin Prison.