You Are the Medicine by Asha Frost
Selected by Naomi Simpson, Champion for the New Tecumseth Public Library
In You Are the Medicine Indigenous Medicine Woman Asha Frost invites readers to follow the path of the 13 Ojibway moons with animal spirits as your guides to unlock powerful teachings that will help you directly experience your own medicine connection to your inherent healing powers. If you feel you don’t have access to your roots, ancestors, or spiritual connection and you look outside of yourself for answers, you are forgetting the medicine you need lives within you.
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Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Selected by Marzana Ahmed Khan, Champion for the Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library
Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.
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The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Selected by Mary Soucie, Champion for the Severn Township Public Library
Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose?
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Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
Selected by Alexia Daley, Champion for the Essa Public Library
In Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew, Lily is a Canadian-born daughter of Chinese-Malaysian immigrants whose mother, Swee Hua, vanished when Lily was eleven. Now a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with understanding her mother’s disappearance and travels to Southeast Asia to uncover the truth.
Through this journey, Lily confronts painful family secrets and gains a deeper understanding of the hidden tolls of migration, cultural disconnection, and mental illness.
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Ducks by Kate Beaton
Selected by Riley Ma, Champion for the Innisfil ideaLAB & Library
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is a graphic memoir that follows Beaton’s journey from her hometown of Mabou, Nova Scotia, to the oil fields of Northern Alberta. With limited job opportunities in her tourist-driven hometown and student loans to repay after earning a general arts degree, Beaton joins many other East Coasters in seeking work in the oil sands.
Over the course of two years, she experiences the physical and emotional challenges of life in isolated work camps, where the male-to-female ratio is roughly fifty to one. Beyond her personal story, Ducks offers a look at the broader implications of the oil industry, including its environmental impact and the exploitation of Indigenous lands.
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The Bittlemores by Jann Arden
Selected by Jennifer Ellis, Champion for the Midland Public Library
On mean Harp Bittlemore’s blighted farm, hidden away in the Backhills, nothing has gone right for a very long time. Crops don’t grow, the pigs and chickens stay skinny and the three aged dairy cows, Berle, Crilla and Dally, are so desperate they are plotting an escape. The one thing holding them back is the thought of abandoning young Willa, the single bright point in their life since her older sister, Margaret, ran away.
Written with Jann’s trademark outrageous humour and full of her down-to-earth wisdom, The Bittlemores is a rural fairytale, a coming-of-age story and a prairie mystery all-in-one, saturated with her observations of the world she grew up in and her deep connection to the animals we exploit.
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The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Selected by Gloria Martin, Champion for the Ramara Public Library
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.
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Our Crumbling Foundation by Gregor Craigie
Selected by Brett Glover, Champion for the Barrie Public Library
An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.
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