I’m a lucky person in many ways. One of the areas I am truly blessed is in my family. I have a large extended family (and super in-laws) and it’s a nice feeling. Another great part of my family is that there are a lot of women. I have a number of aunts who I [...]
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Posted in Ages 10-14, Ages 14 and above, Award Winners, Better than TV, Canadian Superstars, Good Canadian Stuff, Great Books for Boys, Juvenile Fiction, Unique Books, YA fiction on May 13th, 2011
The day before last I finally completed the 2011 Census and I think it was the short form for all of those who remember the hoopla of the long versus short form. Anyway it’s really easy and you can do it online. Right after I was asked to participate in another voluntary household survey and [...]
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Posted in Ages 10-14, Ages 14 and above, Better than TV, Blog Tours, Canadian History, Contests, Good Canadian Stuff, Great Books for Girls, Historical Fiction, Just Out, Juvenile Fiction, Launches and Events, Unique Books, YA fiction on Apr 25th, 2011
As a parent I often have this insatiable urge to shield my daughter from the unpleasant things in life. Whether in song verse (you’d be amazed at how negative, macabre and downright scary some popular children’s songs are if you really listened to them. I mean “down will come baby cradle and all” isn’t the [...]
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Sometimes the universe just comes together and things click. I was up at 3 this morning just being pregnant (i.e. meaning that I needed to eat RIGHT THEN) and began trolling my social media when I saw a Facebook update on the book launch of The Never Weres by Fiona Smyth (ISBN: 97815545152843, Annick Press, [...]
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My high school was a huge brown building with loads of kids and very few windows. It was a place that was both formidable and exciting to a young whippersnapper at the tender age when we leave the cushiness of elementary school behind and become thrust into teenage life. Once you arrived you learned [...]
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Maybe it’s because I am a woman and pregnant (initially I was going to write pregnant and a woman but then I thought about that sentence…) but lately I have been thinking quite a bit about the strength and power of women. Having gone through pregnancy and birth, nursing, parenting and surviving on little sleep [...]
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Last weekend I was in a bit of a down mood and it was more than just a case of the winter blahs. On the Friday evening I went to pick up Miss Mouse from daycare and found her right smack in the midst of a lively play-session. Suffice to say she did not want [...]
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It was a dreary depressing day last week when I read the graphic novel Skim by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki (ISBN: 9780888997531,Groundwood Books, 2008) and I have to say the story didn’t help bring me out of the doldrums, not in the slightest, and that was a good thing. The beautiful thing [...]
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One of the best things about being a book blogger and having a mission (to profile and highlight as many Canadian children’s books as I can) is being introduced to books I may not have necessarily noticed before. For instance, the graphic novel is such a genre that I’ve been intrigued by but never really [...]
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I can remember loving fairy tales in childhood, especially the Disney versions. There was always the added magic of being able to talk to cute little animals and the village breaking out in a song that still gets to me (much to my husband’s chagrin, I love the musical!) but it was also the somewhat [...]
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