Top Grade Spring 2012 Selections

2014 Forest of Reading, Silver Birch Award — Shortlisted, Fiction
2014 Rocky Mountain Book Award — Shortlisted

Are those cranky old folks at the retirement home really what they seem?

Twelve-year-old Willa Fuller is convinced that the old folks in the shabby boarding house down the street are prisoners of their sinister landlady, Miss Trang. Only when Willa is hired on as housekeeper does she discover the truth, which is far more fascinating.

Eldritch Manor is a retirement home for some very s …

Shortlisted for the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award and selected as an OLA Best Bet for 2012

Madeline's parents have gone missing. Her only clues? A note tacked on the fridge from someone called The Enemy, a file card covered in a squiggly secret code, and dozens of red eyes staring out the blackened windows of a car she saw speeding down her driveway. And Madeline could swear the driver was a fox . . .

Luckily, Madeline encounters two bunnies who have decided to take up detective work (detec …

Ghosts of the Pacific, the fourth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, begins with Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog undertaking a harrowing journey through the icy gauntlet of the Northwest Passage on the way to the South Pacific. Alfred wants to see those dark places of the earth where horrendous events have taken place. He sets his sights on exotic Micronesia - a beautiful place, but home to the nuclear testing of Bikini Lagoon; the SuicideCliffs of …

If discussing money is a difficult task for adults, it’s doubly so where kids are involved. Not only is the subject loaded with cryptic jargon (mortgages? Bull markets? Huh?), but it often fails to click with how a kid sees his or her world. Many preteens and young teens do not yet have a job, and even if they do, their responsibilities with their earnings are miles away from grown-up money issues. In other words, not only is money a little overwhelming and mysterious, it’s also seen as some …

In this, the final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling young adult trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte sails from Canada to Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage when she has to rescue Nick from being tortured as a spy in an alligator-infested South Carolina swamp. She must also find ways to bring freedom to a pair of teenage runaway slaves shehas befrie …

It is the end of the First World War, and thirteen-year-old Meredith yearns to become a teacher. But she must leave school to help support her family, moving to the city to work as a maid in a wealthy doctor's home. As the deadly Spanish Flu sweeps across the city, members of the household fall ill one by one. With the doctor working night and day at the hospital, only Meredith and the doctor's children, Maggie and Jack, are left to care for them. Every day the newspapers’ lists of “Yesterda …

When 14-year-old-Johanna learns that her orphanage is experimenting on babies, she kidnaps one of them and sets off for Amsterdam.

Johanna is a 14-year-old Jewish girl who lives in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 18th century. She feels stifled by the daily drudgery of her life and dreams of seeing what lies outside the confines of the Jewish quarter. Johanna lies about her identity and gets a job as a caregiver at an orphanage. Until it’s too late, she doesn’t realize a secret experiment is …

At fourteen, Steve Truscott was a typical teenager in rural Ontario in the fifties, mainly concerned about going fishing, playing football, and racing bikes with his friends. One summer evening, his twelve-year-old classmate, Lynne Harper, asked for a lift to the nearby highway on his bicycle and Steve agreed. Unfortunately, that made Steve the last person known to see Lynne alive.

His world collapsed around him when he was arrested and then convicted of killing Lynne Harper. The penalty at the t …