Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese My rating: 5 of 5 stars Masterfully written. This is my first encounter with Wagamese but certainly not my last. I admire his ability to weave the novel as the background stories reveal themselves. This is a must-read in the Canadian canon. I think anyone would like this book but […]
Delusion Road by Don Aker My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is nominated this year for an Ontario Library Association White Pine award and It is hopping off the shelves in my secondary school library. At first I found the book to feel very abrupt as the chapters interchange between the two essential […]
Trillium by Jeff Lemire My rating: 5 of 5 stars Jeff Lemire ‘s graphic novel reminds me of this version of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. As Nika and William come together through time and space and then are separated again, Lemire presents this as happening on two separate planes of […]
The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston Give me a book about dragons in the White Pine section of the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading http://www.accessola.org/web/OLA/Fore… and I am your girl. Now if you set that book in my area of Ontario and revise Canadian history to include all sorts […]
Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I find it amazing how quickly Brian Vaughan’s characters can be developed in this short graphic novel. As usual, Vaughan’s visual aesthetic does not disappoint. However because there are about 4 pages of nudity and sexuality that are outside the limitations of […]
The Bear by Claire Cameron My rating: 4 of 5 stars The UGDSB has just chosen this book as our board-wide novel for secondary students and author Ms. Cameron will be visiting schools in May 2015. After reading this terrifying novel, I am nervous about the problematic areas in Cameron’s choices. As a parent, I […]
Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10). The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes. But one thing is […]
I don’t think of myself as a gamer. I have been known to play lots of those Flash-based Facebook games with my Candy Crush Saga friends, and occasionally a great puzzle-based novella will come along like Gabriel Knight 2, Syberia or Ripper that I devour, but generally I didn’t think they were a big part […]
Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden My rating: 5 of 5 stars Boyden allowed me to feel that I had been to Moose Factory and felt the complicated nuances of self-government and survival that happen there. And yet it’s a wonderful modern mystery as we try to understand what has happened to Suzanne and we […]
I submitted this paper today in fulfillment of the requirements for my M.Ed. INTRODUCTION From curious to competitive I always felt most comfortable working with students in portfolio courses where students knew what they needed to accomplish and had ample opportunity to do and re-do their assignments until they were satisfied. I came into being […]
I start off trying to set context for 4 variables in redefining reading: reader, user, hardware and software using myself as the reader/user. Then I add in various perspectives on how digital reading is changing reading and finally I suggest that teachers and teacher-librarians can play a key role in levelling the playing field for […]
“>Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks My rating: 4 of 5 stars I think my favourite thing about the main character, Maggie, is that her personality is so well-developed. Before the ghost is even introduced we find out that: she’s the only girl with 3 brothers, her Dad has a new job, and her […]
DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1 by Darwyn Cooke My rating: 5 of 5 stars I selfishly chose to read DC: The New Frontier because I’m doing an assignment on DC and I wanted more meat. I’m a self-acclaimed noob when it comes to graphic novels and The New Frontier was my first foray into […]
Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol My rating: 5 of 5 stars It’s not surprising to me that Vera Brosgol, author/illustrator of Anya’s Ghost, has chosen Neil Gaiman’s critique to highlight on her front cover of this graphic novel. I can make a direct comparison between Gaiman’s character Coraline and Brosgol’s Anya who are both ordinary […]
In this article Martha Cornog, longtime reviewer for Library Journal, interviews Graterford Corrections librarian, Philip Ephraim, about the inclusion of comics in his prison library. Ephraim talks about the circulation statistics of comics noting that they are a small portion of the collection but well-used by patrons. As a result, Ephraim has observed an increase […]
threadbare beauty 