Near the beginning of writer and copyright activist Cory Doctorow’s new graphic novel, Anda and her friends are listening to a speaker at their Arizona high school. Liza, a “kick arse” gamer in a massive multiplayer role-playing game called Coarsegold has a pitch for the girls in the class: probationary memberships in her prestigious gaming guild on condition they play using female avatars. Read more…
YA and Kids
OUTSIDE IN
by Sarah Ellis
Sarah Ellis’ latest YA novel tackles issues of waste, consumerism and family in a Borrowers-style tale about close encounters between those who live in, and off, conventional society. Read more…
JANE, THE FOX AND ME
by Fanny Britt, Isabelle Arsenault ill.
Fanny Britt is well known in her native Quebec as a translator, playwright and children’s author. As well as being the first of her books to be translated into English, Jane, The Fox & Me is also her first foray into the graphic novel genre. She’s fortunate to be supported in this endeavor by the beguiling Isabelle Arsenault, whose illustrations for Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf deservedly won the Governor General’s Award in that category a year ago. Read more…
CREEPS
by Darren Hynes
In Darren Hynes’ story about two disaffected teens in a small Labrador mining town, Pete “the Meat,” a snarling, be-muscled thug, is a bully in the classic mold. He and his posse’s victim of choice is Wayne Pumphrey, singled out for his smallness and the fact he never fights back. Beginning with verbal taunts (“faggot” and “pussy”) the attacks quickly get physical: Wayne’s tormenters hurl ice balls at his face and make him eat yellow snow. When things get really bad Wayne wets himself. Read more…
THE LAKE AND THE LIBRARY
by S.M. Beiko
In S M Beiko’s florid debut, 16-year-old Ashleigh’s fantasy to escape her “bitter, broken” Manitoba town is finally about to come true: her chain-smoking nurse mother has announced they’ll leave at summer’s end. An incurable romantic, “Ash” spends her time painting, reading literature and dreaming of a love that will feed her “Coleridge soul and Neruda-spurned pulse”; one she knows she’ll never find in Treade. Read more…