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The FINAL WORD 2010

Join us on Thursday, March 4, 2010 when we meet with the other book clubs at Smithville CHS and celebrate books with author Eric Walters.

Safe as houses by Eric Walters

From the Publisher

The date is October 15, 1954. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, who lives in the Toronto suburb of Weston, is a typical grade 8 girl. She has a secret crush on a boy in her class and she thinks Elvis Presley is "dreamy." Elizabeth also has a part-time job babysitting an adorable little grade 2 girl named Suzie, and Suzie's not-so-adorable grade 6 brother, David. Elizabeth's job is to walk Suzie and David home after school and then stay at their house with them until their mother gets home from …+ read moreThe date is October 15, 1954. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, who lives in the Toronto suburb of Weston, is a typical grade 8 girl. She has a secret crush on a boy in her class and she thinks Elvis Presley is "dreamy." Elizabeth also has a part-time job babysitting an adorable little grade 2 girl named Suzie, and Suzie's not-so-adorable grade 6 brother, David. Elizabeth's job is to walk Suzie and David home after school and then stay at their house with them until their mother gets home from work. David resents Elizabeth because he thinks he is too old for a babysitter, and he goes out of his way to make life miserable for her.

On this particular evening, however, Elizabeth has more than a badly behaved boy to contend with. It is on this October night that Hurricane Hazel roars down on Toronto, bringing torrential rains that cause extensive flooding. David and Suzie's house is on Raymore Drive, a street that will be practically wiped out by the floodwaters.

David and Suzie's parents are unable to reach the house, which means the children's safety on this most deadly of nights is Elizabeth's responsibility. She finds herself increasingly isolated. They are surrounded by rising water. The electricity goes out. The phone goes dead. Still, Elizabeth is sure they will be safe as long as they remain in the house.

But are Elizabeth and the children really as "safe as houses"? Before this terrifying night is over, Elizabeth and David will have to learn to communicate and cooperate if they are to save their own lives and Suzie's. Their survival in the midst of one of Canada's worst disasters will depend upon their resourcefulness, maturity and courage.

About the Author

Eric Walters published his first novel, Stand Your Ground, in 1993, and has since become one of Canada's best known and most prolific writers of literature for children and young adults. He has had 39 novels published, including Safe as Houses. Eric's books are available in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand, and have been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. Eric's novels have won more than 30 awards; among them the Red Maple, Blue Heron, Snow Willow, tiny Torgi and …+ read moreEric Walters published his first novel, Stand Your Ground, in 1993, and has since become one of Canada's best known and most prolific writers of literature for children and young adults. He has had 39 novels published, including Safe as Houses. Eric's books are available in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand, and have been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. Eric's novels have won more than 30 awards; among them the Red Maple, Blue Heron, Snow Willow, tiny Torgi and Ruth Schwartz awards. Eric has also received awards from the Canadian Library Association and UNESCO. He is the only writer who has won the Ontario Library Association Silver Birch Award three times. A long-time teacher, Eric still interacts with children and teenagers, doing presentations that blend storytelling, drama and audience participation. In his research for Safe as Houses, Eric interviewed people who had survived the great storm, and incorporated some of their actual experiences into the story.

Megiddo's shadow by Arthur Slade

Fueled by anger at the death of his two brothers in World War I, 16-year-old Edward abandons his ailing father on their farm and leaves Canada to enlist. After proving that he can tame any wild horse, he's is sent to Jordan to fight with the Cavalry.

Luckily, his horse is the extraordinary Buke; in battle, a trooper's horse is the key to life and death, and his true companion. In the harsh desert, Edward is grateful for the camaraderie of his tent mates, Cheevers and Blackburn,and letters from Emily, a nurse he met at base camp. As they close in on the enemy Edward finds that the glory and noble vengeance he seeks is replaced by the horror of war and the realization that he must fight not only to survive, but also, to kill.

About the Author

Arthur Slade is the author of Dust, a national bestseller and the winner of the 2001 Governor General's award for children's fiction, the Mr. christie's Book award and the saskatchewan Book award. His novel Tribes was acla Young adult honour Book and was nominated for five other literary prizes. He is also the author of Monsterology, the Canadian Chills series and Northern Frights series. Arthur Slade and his wife and daughter live in Saskatoon. Visit his website at www.arthurslade.com.

Little brother by Cory Doctorow

The ultimate tale of teen rebellion -- one seventeen-year-old against the surveillance state. Big Brother is watching you. Who's watching back? Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works -- and how to work the system. Smart, fast and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they're mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

About the Author

Cory Doctorow is a coeditor of Boing Boing and the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He writes columns for Make, Information Week, the Guardian online, and Locus. He has won the Locus Award three times, been nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, won the Campbell Award, and was named one of the Web’s twenty-five influencers by Forbes magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He hopes you’ll use technology to change the world.

The hunger games by Suzanne Collins

From Amazon.com
Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When Kat's sister is chosen by lottery, Kat steps up to go in her place.

About the Author
SUZANNE COLLINS’s debut novel, Gregor the Overlander, the first book in the Underland Chronicles, received wide praise both in the United States and abroad. The series has been a New York Times bestseller and received numerous accolades. Also a writer for children’s television, Suzanne lives with her family in Connecticut.

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit adapted by Charles Dixon illustrated by David Wenzel

From Amazon.com

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
The hobbit-hole in question belongs to one Bilbo Baggins, an upstanding member of a "little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves." He is, like most of his kind, well off, well fed, and best pleased when sitting by his own fire with a pipe, a glass of good beer, and a meal to look forward to. Certainly this particular hobbit is the last person one would expect to see set off on a hazardous journey; indeed, when Gandalf the Grey stops by one morning, "looking for someone to share in an adventure," Baggins fervently wishes the wizard elsewhere. No such luck, however; soon 13 fortune-seeking dwarves have arrived on the hobbit's doorstep in search of a burglar, and before he can even grab his hat or an umbrella, Bilbo Baggins is swept out his door and into a dangerous adventure.
The dwarves' goal is to return to their ancestral home in the Lonely Mountains and reclaim a stolen fortune from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they and their reluctant companion meet giant spiders, hostile elves, ravening wolves--and, most perilous of all, a subterranean creature named Gollum from whom Bilbo wins a magical ring in a riddling contest. It is from this life-or-death game in the dark that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, would eventually spring. Though The Hobbit is lighter in tone than the trilogy that follows, it has, like Bilbo Baggins himself, unexpected iron at its core. Don't be fooled by its fairy-tale demeanor; this is very much a story for adults, though older children will enjoy it, too. By the time Bilbo returns to his comfortable hobbit-hole, he is a different person altogether, well primed for the bigger adventures to come--and so is the reader. --Alix Wilber --

About the Author

A writer of fantasies, Tolkien, a professor of language and literature at Oxford University, was always intrigued by early English and the imaginative use of language. In his greatest story, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954--56), Tolkien invented a language with vocabulary, grammar, syntax, even poetry of its own. Though readers have created various possible allegorical interpretations, Tolkien has said: "It is not about anything but itself. (Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.)" In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), Tolkien tells the story of the "master of wood, water, and hill," a jolly teller of tales and singer of songs, one of the multitude of characters in his romance, saga, epic, or fairy tales about his country of the Hobbits. Tolkien was also a formidable medieval scholar, as attested to by, among other works, Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics (1936) and his edition of Anciene Wisse:English Text of the Anciene Riwle.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Kate has escaped rural Ontario to lead the life of a distinguished zoologist, but she's drawn back to the siblings left at Crow Lake. Publishers in nine countries have bought the rights to this Canadian work, and that many publishers can't be wrong.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a farming community in southwestern Ontario. A distant relative of L. M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables), she moved to England in 1968, and now lives with her husband in Surrey. She returns to Canada every year. Asked on CBC's This Morning what she misses most about Canada, she says without hesitation that it's the rocks of the Canadian Shield. England has rocks, she says, but they are not smooth and rounded and "whale-like."

Lawson is a firm believer in the strength of the influences we receive as children, a theme explored in the book. Lawson's father was a research chemist for an oil company in Sarnia, Ontario, and the family lived in Blackwell, which was then a small farming community -- though not nearly as remote as that of Crow Lake -- and spent summers at a cottage up north.

She studied psychology at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-sixties, and says that Montreal was an eye-opening experience after growing up in Blackwell. "We had the radio, but we had no television, and relative to what kids know today … they are just so much more knowledgeable than we were." She graduated in 1968 and went to England, finding work in a steel-industry research lab in London, which is where she met her husband, Richard.

Published under the "New Face of Fiction" program at age 55, Lawson calls herself a "late starter," though she began writing when her sons were small. She joined a creative-writing class, which she continues to attend, mainly for the companionship, and she took literature courses to study other writers. She describes the first novel she wrote, which was set in England, as a disaster: though it was a good story with characters and plot, she didn't know what she wanted to say. "It was a story without a point."

Then her parents fell ill with cancer, and she spent a lot of time in Canada. She started writing Crow Lake shortly after the double trauma of her parents dying and her sons leaving home. "I was thinking a lot about the passing of time and different types of loss and the importance of family and the significance of childhood. I think you are particularly receptive when you are a kid, and you take in not just the physical landscape, but the society and the culture and what matters to people. And it all just sits there -- eventually, if you are a writer, it comes out."

At length, a short story she wrote in the 1980s for Woman's Realm magazine in England was transformed into Crow Lake. She sent the manuscript out several times before it found the right agent, who then responded enthusiastically within twenty-four hours. The characters in the novel are entirely invented, with the exception of the baby, Bo, who was modelled closely on her own little sister. She was interested in exploring the brother-sister relationship and the notion that family members establish roles for one another which are hard to break free from ("In my family…I'm the 'Emoter'," she notes). In particular, she wanted to look at hero worship and what happens "to the worshipper and to the hero" when the hero fails. While indebted to J. D. Salinger for pointing her towards using children as a subject, and to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the technique of writing a book with a child as narrator, Lawson says it was having her own children that taught her that people are born as individuals.

With its powerful emotional resonance, Crow Lake has already won the hearts of many readers, and Lawson's next novel will be anxiously awaited.

The book of Negroes

"Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. Crossing water never improved my life, always worsened it. If you, Dear Reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water, seize your freedom by any means necessary . . . and cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Especially if it's from the light of the dying sun. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but the way that it spills across the water in the late afternoon constitutes nothing short of sleight of hand. . . . What benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel?"

From the Author

Interview with Lawrence Hill Excerpted from the forthcoming P.S. material in the Perennial edition of his bestselling novel, The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill was kind enough to answer a few questions about his inspiration for the book and what it was like to write from a woman's perspective. HarperPerennial: When did you first come across the ledger called the Book of Negroes, and did you know immediately that you would write about it? Lawrence Hill: I first heard about the Book of …+ read moreInterview with Lawrence Hill

Excerpted from the forthcoming P.S. material in the Perennial edition of his bestselling novel, The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill was kind enough to answer a few questions about his inspiration for the book and what it was like to write from a woman's perspective.

HarperPerennial: When did you first come across the ledger called the Book of Negroes, and did you know immediately that you would write about it?
Lawrence Hill: I first heard about the Book of Negroes in 1980 when I read The Black Loyalists, a scholarly book by Canadian historian James Walker. Even before I wrote my first novel, Some Great Thing, which was published in 1992, I knew that one day I would write the fictional story of a woman who had to have her name entered into the Book of Negroes. It wasn't until I began to research and write the novel in 2002, however, that I examined reproductions of the actual ledger. The research and writing took about five years.

HarperPerennial: How did you know when you'd researched "enough"? Did you ever feel overwhelmed by the weight of the history you were trying to capture in the novel?
Lawrence Hill: Completely. I had to assimilate and then play with the history in so many locations-Mali, the South Carolina sea islands, Charleston, Manhattan, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. It felt as though I was writing several novels in one.

Research is captivating, but it also serves itself up as the quintessential avoidance strategy. "How did your work go on the novel today?" "Fine, I spent eight hours in the University of Toronto library." Eventually, you have to put down all the books and start mining your own soul for the story that waits within. The novel was more far-reaching in its first drafts. I chose to pare it back, whittling out hundreds of pages as I strove to make the story more manageable and engaging for the reader.


HarperPerennial: What was your most surprising finding?
Lawrence Hill: The first discovery I made remains the most striking. In 1792, twelve hundred Black Loyalists set out in a flotilla of fifteen ships to sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. A number of the adults on board were not just travelling to Africa-it turns out that they had been born on that continent, so they were literally travelling back to Africa. This back-to-Africa exodus took place more than a century before the famed Jamaican Marcus Garvey urged blacks in the Diaspora to return to the motherland. It took place decades before former American slaves founded Liberia. The first massive back-to-Africa exodus in world history set off from the shores of Halifax, but to date, few Canadians know it.

HarperPerennial: Do you find that Canadians are surprised, or even unwilling to accept, that our history involves poor treatment of the Black Loyalists?
Lawrence Hill: Canadians have had little exposure to aspects of the black experience that-unlike, say, the Underground Railroad-reflect badly on our country and history. Although they saved the Black Loyalists in New York, the British betrayed them in Nova Scotia. In the early and mid-1780s in communities such as Shelburne and Birchtown, Nova Scotia, blacks faced outright segregation, were forced to work for wages inferior to those earned by whites for the same work, were kept (in many instances) in slavery or as indentured servants, were largely denied the farming land that they had been promised in exchange for serving the British during the Revolutionary War, and were attacked physically during Canada's first anti-black race riot. It is a disgraceful time in Canadian history, and-outside academic circles and certain black communities-Canadians have largely avoided discussing the matter. I didn't write The Book of Negroes to wag a finger or to apportion blame. I wrote it because it is an astonishing and revealing story that readers deserve to know. It forms but a small piece of the history dramatized in The Book of Negroes. I carved out this work of fiction to celebrate one woman's journey and to chart her miraculous survival, both physical and emotional.

HarperPerennial: Why did you choose to make your central character a woman? And do you find it a challenge to write scenes, such as the birthing one, from her perspective?
Lawrence Hill: The Book of Negroes is a woman's story and it was from the moment of conception. As a dramatist, I locate stories in the lives of the people who have the most to lose. Her own role as a mother is at risk in this story, yet Aminata has to do what she must to survive, and carry on catching other women's babies. On one hand, it was an immense challenge to write the life story of an African woman in the 1700s. On the other hand, it was liberating and riveting to create a character that I could never be. I have always felt more comfortable writing about people who bear no resemblance to me.

I find the texture of her life fascinating. In the novel, one African who is stolen from her homeland becomes bitter to the point of turning murderous. Another African is so traumatized by the dislocation of slavery that he loses the ability to speak. Aminata somehow manages to keep going and to do so with love in her heart. This is what interests me most about her character. She can't stop all the evil in the world, but she will not stoop to it.

About the Author

Lawrence Hill is the author of several novels and works of non-fiction, including Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada; Any Known Blood; Some Great Thing; Women of Vision: The Story of the Canadian Negro Women's Association and a children's book, Trials and Triumphs: The Story of African Canadians. Lawrence Hill lives in Burlington, Ontario.

The boy in the striped pajamas

Where is 'Outwith' and who is Bruno? How is he connected? Soon he will meet the boy in striped pyjamas and befriend him. But why must the boy stay behind the wire?

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Eleven-year-old Anne was not the boy her adoptive parents were expecting-but the imaginative, feisty, red-haired girl soon won them over...and captured the hearts of readers forever.

Acceleration by Graham McNamee

It’s a hot, hot summer, and in the depths of the Toronto Transit Authority’s Lost and Found, 17-year-old Duncan is cataloging lost things and sifting through accumulated junk. And between Jacob, the cranky old man who runs the place, and the endless dusty boxes overflowing with stuff no one will ever claim, Duncan’s just about had enough. Then he finds a little leather book. It’s a diary filled with the dark and dirty secrets of a twisted mind, a serial killer stalking his prey in the subway. And Duncan can’t make himself stop reading.

What would you do with a book like that? How far would you go to catch a madman?

And what if time was running out. . . .

2010 CHS book club list

The selected books for the book club this year are:
Acceleration by Graham McNamee
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
The Hobbit (graphic novel) by JRR Tolkien illustrated by David Wenzel
Megiddo's shadow by Arthur Slade
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Safe as houses by Eric Walters
The book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
Little brother by Cory Doctorow
The hunger games by Suzanne Collins
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Book club 2010 is coming soon....

Welcome to the 2010 Christian high school book club! We have our selection of titles to be read and discussed this year. You must read five of the ten titles to vote on your favourite. All the votes from all the participating schools will be tallied and a winning novel will be declared in March 2010.