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Noteworthy Books with Canadian Historical ThemesEnglish Titles
Cover reproduced by permission of Douglas & McIntyre
Ltd.
Freed from a monotonous future in a French convent when she becomes one of King Louis XIV's "filles du roi", the intrepid Jeanne Chatel travels to New France, weds a trapper with two small children, and embarks on a life where danger, adventure and, yes, romance are her constant companions. This colourful account of life in the New World does not, according to a publisher's note in the 1994 edition, pretend to present a true picture of Canada's First Peoples. Rather it describes, with charming intensity, how life might have seemed to the plucky young heroine.
This exciting adventure story recreates the events, in 1858, aboard an Arctic vessel in search of the last Franklin expedition to the northern seas. Peter Griffin, 14-year-old ship's boy, is the fictitious narrator. (The other characters and the mission itself are based on fact.) His fast-paced account, written in diary form, never flags, whether he talks about the weather or the search for mariners, the daily routine or an encounter with a polar bear, his new-found friendship with a Greenland Inuit lad or his homesickness. It is a gripping tale from start to finish.
Cover reproduced by permission of Stoddart Publishing
Co. Limited.
During World War II, young Naomi Nakane and her brother Stephen are moved from a happy family home in Vancouver to an internment camp near Slocan, B.C. and, after the war, to a dreary, dusty subsistence farm in Alberta. Uprooted from their home and separated from their parents, these Japanese-Canadian youngsters struggle to find some sense in the overwhelming hardship and prejudice which confronts them. The story raises many questions and issues for young readers, but it is not without hope. The road that Naomi follows is cautiously and courageously optimistic. Based on Kogawa's adult novel, Obasan (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981).
Cover reproduced by permission of Stoddart Publishing
Co. Limited.
Based in large part on Nellie McClung's own writings, this fictionalized biography reconstructs some events from Nellie's childhood and manufactures others to show how the attitudes of her family and of the times shaped her ideas, hopes, and aspirations. Part of a large, loving family living in rural Manitoba in the 1880s, the irrepressible Nellie L. never let her brothers get the better of her, was told to "hush her talk" in the presence of adults, and learned early to distinguish right from wrong. With good-natured determination she would grow up to become a political activist fighting for women's rights and a just world for all.
(The Night Hazel Came to Town/John Ibbitson.) Cover
reproduced by permission of Prentice Hall Canada Inc. (copyright 1993).
It's 1954. Newspapers are full of stories about the Cold War, Korean War, bomb shelters, and Communism, but high school dropout Lee Kendall isn't interested. That is, not until he lands a job as a copy boy with the Toronto Telegram. Then the action begins, as he falls in love with the smoke-filled frenzy of a fifties newsroom (and, after hours, with an older, sophisticated, left-wing actress). A funny, witty novel about the recent past with lots of local colour about daily life (and nightlife) in the newsroom and on the streets of Toronto.
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