This I Know
Artist: Joanne Snook-HannPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95Originally written as a song by Michael Pendergast, one of Prince Edward Island’s best-known musicians, “This I Know” is a comforting verse about life’s passing. Beautifully written and illustrated, “This I Know” takes us on a spiritual journey, providing solace and inspiration to those who need it most.
This is How I Connect to You
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95This collection is challenge, intimacy, and myth, revealed or transmuted in the moments of everyday living
This Navy Doctor Came Ashore
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Dr. Read entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and worked for three years as a flight surgeon. When the war was winding down, he realized that his career as a flight surgeon was also over. But he remembered how much he had enjoyed the three weeks he spent in Charlottetown when he relieved the medical officer at HMCS Queen Charlotte. This city of 20,000, in which this landship was ‘moored’, was much to his liking partly because he had grown up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, just across the Northumberland Strait, where he thought the culture was very similar. He also knew that as the only medical officer there would be independence, significant responsibility and virtual freedom from naval protocol and politics. One couldn’t ask for more. But this was during prohibition on the Island and little did he know that a great deal of his time would be spent writing “prescriptions” for alcohol so that the officers could be allowed to drink. Nor did he know that because of the lack of family physicians on the Island, he would be asked to open a general practice in a rural area of the province. For a flight surgeon who had little experience in family medicine, this would be a whole new adventure. This book chronicles some of the noteworthy events of the time he spent spent as a country doctor.
Three Tall Trees
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$7.95Narrated by Enigma the Crow, this charming picture book for children aged four to seven, is a delightful rhyming fable that tells the story of three tall trees. Living in close proximity in the woods, the ancient trees “bump and collide constantly.” Jacob claims that his roots are the deepest. Paul brags that his branches are wider, while Elijah Ali insists that his sap is the purest of all. There is “war in the forest” until Enigma observes a basic truth: the trees aren’t three trees at all. They’re part of the very same tree. With its gentle humour and heartfelt message about the connectedness of all living things, Three Tall Trees is certain to captivate young readers.
Treasures to Find
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$12.95Dale McNevin is a much beloved PEI illustrator who has illustrated numerous books including Crosby and Me, Everything That Shines, and Three Tall Trees. Her characters from The True Meaning of Crumbfest were immortalized by the City of Charlottetown in re-created large statues painted by artists around the city.
Truck !
Publisher: Acorn Press$13.95It’s pedal to the metal reading fun with this vibrantly illustrated, road-tripping adventure story. When the school bus is late, no need to panic, just hop on a truck. There are plenty of options: fire truck, dump truck, garbage truck…and more! Vehicle loving children will fill up their tanks reading this zany, ride-along tale.
True Meaning of Crumbfest
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$12.95“Winner of the Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature; over 17,000 copies in print; animated Christmas special on TELETOON, with the spin-off series Eckhart The True Meaning of Crumbfest is the story of a curious little mouse named Ekhart, who sets off to discover the truth about that most abundant time of year called “”Crumbfest,”” when bounteous crumbs miraculously appear in the old Prince Edward Island farmhouse in which he lives. Much anthologized – particularly by CBC Radio’s “Fireside Al”- this a heartwarming tale of the magic that happens when the “Outside” and the “Inside” come together.”
Turk
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95Gerard “Turk” Gallant started playing hockey as a young boy in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He moved up through minor hockey, playing above his age group and garnering the attention of major junior teams and the NHL. The Detroit Red Wings drafted him as an eighteen-year-old and he became a rising young star, being selected to an NHL All-Star team the same year he played for Team Canada in the World Championships. When a back injury ended his playing career, Turk applied his talents to coaching. He began, in 1995, by shaping the Summerside Western Capitals into a winning junior A team. It won the Royal Bank Cup ( now the Centennial Cup) in 1997, the first from the Maritimes to win in the tournament’s twenty-six-year history. In the Quebec league, Turk did the same for the Saint John Sea Dogs, in 2011, as it became the region’s first major junior team to win the coveted Memorial Cup. Stints coaching at the semi-professional level led to a stellar career in the NHL, where he took two teams, the Vegas Golden Knights, in their inaugural year, and the New York Rangers, an Original 6, to the Stanley Cup finals. In 2021, Team Canada won a gold medal, at the World Championship, under Turk Gallant.
Turk has won numerous awards, most noteworthy are his three nominations for the Jack Adams Award, which goes to the NHL’s top coach. He won in 2018. He was also inducted into several sports halls of fame. Turk lives in Clinton, PEI, in with his wife Pam.
Variations on Blue
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95This year’s poetry book by an Island writer is by former P.E.I. bookseller Pam Martin; this is her first book. As a child Pam Martin had four very sudden and unexpected encounters with death. These experiences shaped her emotional life as she struggled to understand them and to find beauty in a world that seemed fraught with peril. The poems also examine, with delicacy and humour, the world she encountered as a teenager, a social worker and a wife.
Vet Behind the Years
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Bud Ings was born in 1926 on Prince Edward Island and graduated from the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, ON. He practised in rural King’s County, was a Liberal member of the legislative assembly, and served as agriculture and health ministers. A long-time member of the Queens County Fiddlers, Bud lives in Montague.
Village that Loved Oysters
Artist: Meredith LucePublisher: Acorn Press$9.95The Village that Loves Oysters is a children’s picture book that describes the quaint PEI village of Tyne Valley, and its odd obsession with Malpeque oysters. As the story goes, “the villagers eat oysters for breakfast and dinner and lunch, and on hot summer days they drink oyster-laced punch!”. The villagers get even more oyster-crazed at the onset of the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival, for which the story is written to commemorate. It will be launched during the 50th anniversary of the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival this summer.
Waiting for Still Water
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95These are the rules at foster mother Amelia’s farm–the rules that saved Rachel when she first came to stay at Walton Lake as a troubled girl. Now, after a horrifying crisis at work, Rachel has run back to the farm again.
But she doesn’t find the peace she’s hoping for. There are new fostered teens at the farm with their own demons, and the sprawling family she became a part of at Amelia’s farm seems to be full of heartbreak and worry.
There’s Crystal, grieving her twin sister. Jodie and Zac are struggling to bring a pregnancy to term. Kate is reeling from her mother’s abandonment.
And Amelia, stalwart and dependable and loving Amelia, their glue, has become worryingly forgetful.
A sweeping story of love and redemption, Waitng for Still Water will delight fans of Maeve Binchy and Lesley Crewe.
Welcome to Camp Fill-in-the-Blank
Publisher: Acorn Press$12.95Page’s perfectly organized life turns upside down when her parents send her to Prince Edward Island to babysit her cousins Crusoe and Danger (those are their real names) for the summer. The only problem is that her cousins feel that they are too old to have a babysitter—they would rather be at summer camp. Page realizes the solution to the problem is to give her cousins exactly what they want: summer camp in their own backyard. Despite Page’s meticulous efforts to plan a different theme for each week of Camp Fill-in-the-Blank, she quickly learns that life with her cousins rarely goes according to plan.
What If ? – Springvale
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95Students of Valerie Dockendorff’s grade 5/6 at Springvale Elementary, Halifax, have written and illustrated a book to address a variety of world issues in a positive manner. We wish to raise awareness about problems faced by kids all over the world by imagining what it would be like if the problems didn’t exist! All messages and illustrations depict positive images that send a message of hope and provide concrete ways for readers to take action to celebrate and improve our world….word by word.
What if? From Worries to Wonder
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Anxiety. It’s tough. It’s tough for kids. It’s tough to parent. That deep-rooted fear of what might happen, the atmosphere of self-doubt, the attack of fear: What if something bad happens? What if I don’t know? What if they laugh? Or if i cry? But…what if something good happens? What if you laugh? And you make a friend?
What If? Is a humour-filled, edgy, tender picture book that portrays what it feels like to have anxiety and responds to it with the potential of whimsy and joy. Doretta Groenendyk’s new book What if? takes the young, worried child to journey through layered images of panic and into the delight of possibility.
What Really Happened is This A Poetry Memoir
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult “only child” as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet’s struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.
When the Hill Came Down
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Keefe Williams lives a childhood of neglect and disconnect, feeling completely invisible. Known only for the story of the night his parents died and the freak event that killed them, he suffers silently holding on to the one thing in his life that sets him apart. When Keefe is a teenager Summer Barkley moves to the community. She is oblivious to the entrenched story of Keefe Williams’s life, giving him an opportunity to finally be someone separate from his tragic past. As their relationship develops, Keefe can claim his true identity.
Through Keefe’s art and Summer’s writing the need to truly explore and understand the past becomes something from which they cannot run. When the Hill Came Down explores greed, jealousy, love, loyalty and the very fabric of a community full of stories whose threads intertwine. The colour, texture and multi-faceted of any story in any community, bear scrutiny. Nothing is ever exactly the way it seems.
Who Departed This Life
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95George Wright has had a long history of interest in the Burying Ground, with at least nine direct ancestors buried there (great-great-great- and great-great-grandparents). The launch of the book coincides with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the City of Charlottetown.
Wild Foods of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$29.95Prince Edward Island is famous for potatoes and seafood, but our forests, meadows, marshes, and shores are home to hundreds of species of edible plants and fungi. Of course, edible and palatable are not the same and award-winning biologist and forager Kate MacQuarrie knows the difference!
