National Network for Equitable Library Service

Ms. Baxter, a schoolteacher, is hoping to invite Siha Tooskin's (Paul's) grandparents to visit the classroom to offer information for her science class, and she asks Paul the respectful protocol for doing so, which in Nakota culture can involve the offering of tobacco.

Paul (Siha Tooskin) spends some time with his mother and they discuss the nature of life with respect to animals, the environment, and the Creator in the Nakota Indigenous tradition. There are also themes of endurance and resilience when faced with difficult times.

Siha Tooskin (Paul) is ill in the hospital and there he learns about the combination of Western medicine and Nakota remedies that will help him get better.

Siha Tooskin (Paul) experiences a bit of teasing (bullying) about his braid and his grandfather teaches him about how he can find strength in his hair through the Nakota tradition and rise above such petty taunts.

Siha Tooskin (Paul) has a school assignment to talk about healthy foods from his (Nakota) culture. His father teaches him about the Indigenous origins of many foods that we enjoy today.

Siha Tooskin (Paul) learns from his grandmother about how a dream catcher is made, and how it will protect his baby sister from bad dreams when she is asleep.

Maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette makes a final destructive bid for glory at the Calgary Folk Festival. Travel in the entertaining company of a man made of equal parts bullshit and inspiration, in what is ultimately a twisted panegyric to the power of strange music to change people from the inside out. At turns funny and strangely sobering, this "found memoir" is a picaresque tale of inspired, heroic deceit, incompetence, and - just possibly - triumph.

It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. "You should've been born a boy," Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world.

Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor's life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature's least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M.

On a Saturday bright with harbingers of spring, Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their family prepare to celebrate the season. Joanne's life is full, and at 60, she has been given the chance to understand a part of her history that for years was shrouded in secrecy. Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend.