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Teen Reads
Accessible eBooks for Young Adults, or Adults that are young at heart.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 35 results
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A Secret Music
$21.95Word Guild Award for Best Young Adult fiction 2016
Grace Irwin Award 2016
Literary Classics silver medal for Y/A fiction 2016
Shortlisted for the Frank Hegyi Award-Ottawa Independent Writers Literary Classics silver medal for High school fiction 2017
Set in 1936 Montreal, A Secret Music is the story of Lawrence Nolan, a sensitive fifteen-year-old piano prodigy who grows up in the shadow of his mother’s mental illness. Forced to keep this shameful secret, he attempts to raise himself and his ten year old brother. He counteracts the deep ache and creeping mistrust caused by his mother’s emotional absence by escaping into the intense realm of Chopin and Schubert, the only language he understands. When his brother becomes ill, he is left with enormous responsibilities. At a piano competition in Montreal, Lawrence makes a climactic decision that puts his future on hold in order to salvage his family life.
In A Secret Music, Susan Doherty Hannaford re-creates the Depression-Era world of Montreal and demonstrates how music can redeem a life.
Set in 1936 Montreal, A Secret Music is the story of Lawrence Nolan, a sensitive fifteen-year-old piano prodigy growing up in the shadow of his mother’s mental illness. Forced to keep this shameful secret, he attempts to raise himself and his younger brother. He counteracts the creeping mistrust caused by his mother’s emotional absence by escaping into classical music, the only language he understands. When his brother becomes ill, he is left with enormous responsibilities. At a piano competition in Montreal, Lawrence makes a climactic decision that puts his future on hold in order to salvage his family life. -
All the Things We Leave Behind
$19.95Shortlisted for the New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction
A novel of absence and adolescence by the author of the award-winning The Town That Drowned.
It’s 1977. Seventeen-year-old Violet is left behind by her parents to manage their busy roadside antique stand for the summer. Her restless older brother, Bliss, has disappeared, leaving home without warning, and her parents are off searching for clues. Violet is haunted by her brother’s absence while trying to cope with her new responsibilities. Between visiting a local hermit, who makes twig furniture for the shop, and finding a way to land the contents of the mysterious Vaughan estate, Violet acts out with her summer boyfriend, Dean, and wonders about the mysterious boneyard. But what really keeps her up at night are thoughts of Bliss’s departure and the white deer, which only she has seen.
All the Things We Leave Behind is about remembrance and attachment, about what we collect and what we leave behind. In this highly affecting novel, Nason explores the permeability of memory and the sometimes confusing bonds of human emotion.
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Belinda’s Rings
$19.95Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother–although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left alone to puzzle out her life, the world, and her unique place within it.
With a warmth and a boisterous sense of humour reminiscent of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness and Peter Hedges’ What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? author Corinna Chong introduces us to two lovable and thoroughly original female characters: persnickety, precocious Grace, and her impractical, impulsive mother Belinda–very different women who nevertheless persistently circle back into each other’s hearts.
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Black Dog
$17.95The Breakfast Club meets Shirley Jackson in a fusion of live theatre and technology that tells a darkly comic but hopeful story of four teenage outsiders struggling with death, depression and the shadow of a black dog.
Two is fraught. While dealing with the impossible expectations of her parents, she is trying to understand why her brother, a bright and talented teenager, has taken his own life. It’s not until a fateful school detention that she meets three other students who all seem as lost as she is. There’s Three, a quiet, misunderstood guy who doesn’t quite know how to care for himself; Four, the fashionable, popular kid and class clown; and Five, a rebel ready to fight against everyone and everything. Despite their differences, they each grapple with depression and anxiety and become an unlikely source of comfort to one another. As the four unite to battle teachers, parents, therapists and their own demons, their promising futures begin to reveal themselves.
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Claws of the Panda
$24.95Claws of the Panda tells the story of Canada’s failure to construct a workable policy towards the People’s Republic of China. In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage. Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents. The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.
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Concord Floral
$17.95Concord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighbourhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls from the grave. It’s time for the teens of Concord Floral to start talking.
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Dear Twin
$18.95Poppy wants to go to college like everyone else, but her father has other ideas. Ever since her twin sister, Lola, mysteriously vanished, Poppy’s father has been depressed and forces her to stick around. She hopes she can convince Lola to come home, and perhaps also procure her freedom, by sending her twin a series of nineteen letters, one for each year of their lives.
When not excavating childhood memories, Poppy is sneaking away with her girlfriend Juniper, the only person who understands her. But negotiating the complexities of queer love and childhood trauma are anything but simple. And as a twin? That’s a whole different story.
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Delicate
$14.95Ivy’s seemingly perfect, master-of-social-causes boyfriend breaks it off in the school hallway before their final exam. So much for love. It turns out Jeremy wants to get good and laid by someone new over summer vacation, before they both head off to different universities in the fall.
At her grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday party, Ivy is in no mood to socialize. In fact, she’s downright delicate. Unfortunately, sixteen-year-old Lucan’s peanut allergy reaction happens right in front of her eyes. As Ivy keeps him company the two realize they’re second cousins who haven’t seen each other in six years due to a mysterious family feud.
The old drama is the last thing on Lucan’s mind. He has more immediate problems, like his mom’s noisy playtime activities with her brash younger boyfriend. On top of that, Lucan’s a constant witness to his best friend’s toxic relationship, which he begins to suspect has become abusive.
As the weeks pass, Lucan and Ivy’s summer seems more like a minefield of disastrous events — but at least they have their developing friendship with each other to count on. Or is that what’s really going on?
At her grandmother?s seventy-fifth birthday party, Ivy is in no mood to socialize. Unfortunately, sixteen-year-old Lucan?s peanut-allergy reaction happens right in front of her eyes. As Ivy keeps him company, the two realize they?re second cousins who haven?t seen each other in six years due to a mysterious family feud. As the weeks pass, Lucan?s and Ivy?s summer seems more like a minefield of disastrous events—but at least they have their developing friendship with each other to count on. Or is that what?s really going on? -
Extraordinaire
Extraordinaire raconte l’histoire d’une solution communautaire extraordinaire à un problème chronique : la pénurie de médecins dans le Nord du Canada.
La communauté a décidé que la solution était de former ses propres médecins.
L’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a produit plus de 700 médecins dont un pourcentage étonnant exerce dans le Nord du Canada pour répondre aux besoins uniques de leurs communautés d’origine, quelles soient rurales, autochtones ou francophones. La plupart des diplômées et diplômés sont non seulement restés travailler dans le Nord mais apportent aussi une contribution à l’École en tant que mentors, précepteurs et membres du corps professoral.
En presque vingt ans depuis sa création, l’École de médecine du Nord de l’Ontario a transformé les soins de santé dans le Nord et laissé une marque loin d’être ordinaire.
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Ghost Boys
$18.95Finalist for the Saskatchewan Young Readers’ Choice Awards, Snow Willow, 2018
Named to Best Books for Kids & Teens, Spring 2018Fifteen-year-old Munna lives with his Ma and sisters in a small town in India. Determined to end his family’s misfortunes, he is lured into a dream job in the Middle East, only to be sold. He must work at the Sheikh’s camel farm in the desert and train young boys as jockeys in camel races. The boys, smuggled from poor countries, have lost their families and homes. Munna must starve these boys so that they remain light on the camels’ backs, and he must win the Gold Sword race for the Sheikh. In despair, he realizes that he is trapped and there is no escape . . .
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Great Village
Retired schoolteacher Flossy O’Reilly has spent almost all of her eight decades in the seaside community of Great Village, Nova Scotia. It is now a quiet Maritime village: where relationships between friends and family move at the pace of the tides; where there is no rush because, sooner or later, everyone finds out what they need to know with a trip to the general store.
When Ruth, the teenaged granddaughter of an old friend, arrives from Ontario for a three-week stay, time suddenly catches up with Great Village. As Flossy watches the sometimes tactless young woman grow into her own, she begins to question whether maintaining the calm surface of her life was worth keeping secrets from and about those closest to her — or if everyone could benefit from a little more candour.
With grace, patience, and wisdom, Mary Rose Donnelly paints a rich portrait of life in small-town Nova Scotia, and of relationships as charming as they are complex. -
Haunting of Adrian Yates, The
Adrian’s best friend and his boyfriend don’t get along. Oh, and his boyfriend is a ghost.
Adrian Yates expected his summer would involve sharing Slurpees with his best friend Zoomer and pretending not to hear his dads’ whispered fighting. And that’s exactly how it was going, until the night Sorel appeared in the graveyard by Adrian’s apartment. Sorel gets Adrian in ways no one else has; the fact that he’s not technically alive only makes things exciting. But Sorel can’t always control his otherworldly behaviour, and Zoomer’s worried he might be hiding something. On stormy summer nights behind the cemetery’s iron gates, Adrian and Sorel meet in secret and the pair begin to experiment with consensual possession. Despite the warning signs, Adrian is certain he has everything under control–until suddenly he finds himself fighting for his life.
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Home Truths
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Lightning Lou
$12.95When a team in an all-girls’ hockey league comes to recruit players, twelve-year-old Lou’s dreams seem to be coming true. But the dreams hinge on one thing: never letting on that Lou is a boy. But the road to stardom is not easy, as Lou discovers that the competition is fierce, and that he’s got a lot of work to do to match the skills of the league’s star player and his chief rival, Albertine Lapensée. All the while, he has to keep his secret, and wrestle with the moral dilemma of taking a place on the team away from a deserving girl.
Loosely based on a true story, Lightning Lou is a riveting and thought-provoking story for middle-grade readers.
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Love, Ish
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Magdaragat