Kindness is the single most powerful thing that we can teach our children.
Follow Maddy through her day at school, where your child will learn how easy it can be to spread kindness
From taking turns on the swing to including everyone in the game - this storybook shows that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
A lightbulb lesson of kindness is found on each page
Included in the book is a Weekly Kindness Challenge to help encourage your child to: Say Sorry, Be Polite, Take Turns, Be a Helping Hand, Include Others, and Show Respect.
If you value raising kind kids that make the world a better place, then this book is for you
The Kindness Starts with You Series is intentionally written for children aged one through five.
A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world's biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald's Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet's, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don't always hold up as well as they promise.
While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora's mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother's love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of the dead where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, attempts to retrieve her half-brother, and heal her mother's broken heart.
At ten years old, Kid is increasingly disturbed by strange spider-infested visions of his next-door neighbour's shed. Pursued by shadowy memories that torment his waking thoughts, Kid falls deeper and deeper into a haunted inner world, retreating from his family and friends. Beneath this overwhelming pressure, the text itself begins to crumble, splintering as the workings of Kid's imagination become animate -- and language self-destructs. Emerging from this anguish, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she navigates love, sex, addiction, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But, when a family member falls ill, she is forced to return to her hometown and confront all the old fears she thought she'd left behind.
Yellow Barks Spider is an unforgettable portrait of trauma, isolation, and self-compassion. It is a deeply-felt exhumation of memory, love, and the human spirit, and it announces a bold new voice by a debut author.Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It's a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love.
Standstill takes us on a journey through Ohio's two-thousand-year-old Hopewell Earthworks, which include the largest geometric earthworks in the world. But these are also the landscapes of a writer who lives in the present. Rice's evocative stories show us art that has saved lives--sometimes hundreds of lives--and a social history of those who literally have lost their power of speech. These are scenes that affirm the best that is in us and the persistence of beauty, which he says is stronger than we think and outlives us all.
In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler's poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Shambolic and precise, these poems are unskinned. Including a mini-essay on the author's OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement.
Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller. A ship's carpenter becomes stranded on a small Mediterranean island. He has completely lost his memory but in exchange has acquired the ability to speak, write, and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later, in Beirut, he's hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for Black September. Feeling disillusioned with both of these occupations, he treks on foot across the Galilean hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange communities evoking biblical times. He eventually settles with a Palestinian family and unwittingly becomes entangled in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
Between 1869 and the early 1930s more than 100,000 children were rounded up from the streets of Britain to be used as labourers in Canadian homes; often little more than slaves. Today there are two million or more descendants of what were derisively known in Canada as 'home children'. Writer and journalist, Sean Arthur Joyce was shocked to learn in middle age that he was one of those descendants. These child immigrants had no choice: they could live in abject poverty on the streets of Britain, or be shipped to a strange country, never to see one's home or family again. The lives of Canadian child immigrants were rife with suffering: for the boys, back-breaking labour from dawn 'til dusk on a farm. The girls were earmarked for domestic service, mostly in isolated farm households, that left them vulnerable to sexual abuse due to their isolation. While some children would be welcomed into loving homes, others were exploited as cheap labour, little different than pack animals and many did not live to be adults. Laying the Children's Ghosts to Rest is a captivating blend of memoir and history and offers the reader a personal, and highly readable narrative on the subject of Western Canada's 'home children'. With painstaking research and an ability to bring personal details to life, Joyce imbues the stories of 'home children' with a sense of redemption and human dignity.
Earth-cool, and Dirty iis a timely debut collection by Jacob Lee Bachinger, full of wisdom, and beautiful reflections on the state of humanity. It is a call to pay careful attention to the earth, to nurture it in the same way we attend to the people we love. In My Son Asleep, Age 4, he observes: What no one told me, /what I've had to learn for myself: /to love this much is painful.
Loss. Grief. Centipedes. Silence. The word no. The word yes. A high school poetry contest that may or may not be linked to the end of the world. The characters in this collection are under attack. A grief-baffled son hopes to save an innocent insect from a toxic genocide, a daughter struggles to accept loss while visiting a community overwhelmed by denial, a sorrow-stricken father recalls his bizarre final conversation with his only child; the individuals in these stories discover how difficult it can be to let go of what's gone in order to live with what's left.
In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book.
I hope that telling and preserving my Garlic Flats stories will keep the past alive. I want to chronicle what it was like to grow in this place. Life was simpler back then. Basic. No indoor plumbing. We hauled water from a local standpipe. Our houses were simple and functional. We planted big gardens and we ate well. We were people of several cultures, each with its own peculiarities, exuberant inventiveness and unorthodox thinking. We were a family of makers. Our hands were always making things. The prairie landscape and my love of gardening shaped my life and how I look at the world and how I express myself through art. And that is part of this story too.
--Vic Cicansky, 2018
With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction -- Publishers Weekly
Strange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that live in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated, in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Miranda, a young woman who travels across what had once been the West, meets Dave, who has peculiar theories about the apocalypse.
The dahlias on Sara's dress scrunched and stretched with her body as she spun on the grass and Alana couldn't understand why no one else was mesmerized. Tiny Ruins is a coming-of-age and coming out story that follows Alana, as she grows up, discovers, and tries to understand her bisexuality. Small windows offer us a glimpse of Alana's memories, often fragmentary, fleeting, and touching. When she confides in her sister that she is attracted to girls, she is met with disbelief, and so the secret is kept and Alana continues as the outsider looking in.
Luka Dekker and her sister Connie are the inheritors of a secretive and disturbing family history going back three generations to the disappearance of their great-grandfather. Their troubled mother, Lark, also mysteriously disappeared; and their beloved grandmother, who raised the two girls, had a life haunted by a traumatic event that is only revealed after her death. The story unfolds against a backdrop of the drug-fueled Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the horrific pig farm murders, the seductive beauty of rural Saskatchewan, and the glittering lights of a famous prairie dance hall. Luka's quest for her mother, and for peace and love, is a disquieting, moving, and thoroughly engaging examination of intergenerational trauma and forgiveness.
A playwright possessed by her muses, an actress desperate to succeed, and a doctor haunted by a lost love. Three people cross time and space to meet through the playwright's bizarre creative process: to create, the playwright must become her characters; to tell her tragic story, the actress must speak from the grave; to heal his harrowing past, the doctor must surrender to his patient - the playwright.