Follow the Goose Butt to Prince Edward Island
Artist: Odette BarrPublisher: Acorn Press$12.95“This is Aviator 123…Prepare for landing!”
The loveable young Canada goose, Camelia Airheart, is back again for another comical adventure! While attending the Gathering of the Geese in New Brunswick, Camelia takes off on an unexpected side trip and flies over the Confederation Bridge to the red sands of Prince Edward Island. Although she loves to fly, Camelia is easily distracted and has difficulty navigating with a faulty GPS—goose positioning system. She also has trouble with her landings. Camelia gets lost (a lot!) and relies on new friends she meets on her travels to help find her way. Whether it is golfing with Gilbert, the great blue heron, discovering sands that sing with Josie, the jellyfish, or causing chaos at Green Gables, Camelia has an exciting and eventful time following the Island’s coastline. She even learns important life lessons along the way.
Will Camelia be able to find her way around the Island and get back to her flock? Is her GPS as faulty as she has always believed?
For the Love of Sea View
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It all started with a familiar sign: House for Sale: To Be Moved. Family farms on PEI had disappeared in the thousands in the mid-1900s.Tourists would scoop up the farmhouses, fix them up and speak glowingly of the authenticity they had re-introduced to the old building. But this wasn’t a house like those houses. It had started out at Park Corner, on the pond Lucy Maud Montgomery called “The Lake of Shining Waters.” Then it moved up above Brander’s Pond and finally became know as “a little dollhouse” on the Sea View landscape. Once she saw it, Hilary fell in love and couldn’t stop herself from buying it, starting a thirty-year adventure with an Island community she came to love.
Freda the Fry
Artist: Marla LesagePublisher: Acorn Press$14.95A fun tribute to fries and one of Prince Edward Island’s major food exports, this endearing story will appeal to fry lovers, young readers, educators, parents, and beyond. The twist at the end is simply delicious and handled with a light touch that will earn more laughs than tears.
From Humble Beginnings A History of the Credit Union Movement On Prince Edward Island, 1936-2016
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95D. Scott MacDonald’s new book From Humble Beginnings: A History of the Credit Union Movement on Prince Edward Island 1936-2016 traces the story of the credit unions on Prince Edward Island over the past eighty years. Telling the history through the seventy five different and unique credit unions that were incorporated up until the present day. Today there are seven credit unions still operating in the province, all owing their success to the humble beginnings and dedication of many pioneers of the movement. Filled with historical and present-day photos, this history chronicles the impact of credit unions on their community and the importance the movement had on the settlement of the Island.
Ghost Boy of MacKenzie House
Publisher: Acorn Press$11.95Ten-year-old Chloe Sutton arrives on Prince Edward Island from her home in Ontario after the tragic loss of her parents in a car accident. Her Aunt Laverne (Larry) is a doctor and her only relative able to take her in. Chloe isn’t sure what to make of her aunt’s big old house on the red cliff overlooking the Northumberland Strait, or the skinny, red-haired and heavily freckled boy who wants to be her friend. Her first night in her new home, Chloe is tormented by the loss of her mother and father and hides in the dark to speak to them. When she does, she unknowingly invites the attention of a ghostly boy who inhabits the oldest part of the farmstead. Terrified but intrigued by the encounter, Chloe decides to uncover his history, setting her off on a set of adventures. When she does finally find the ghost boy’s secret, she realizes he has been blaming himself for years for the death of his brother, much like she has been blaming herself for surviving her parents. With the wrong made right, Chloe is finally let go of her own grief and accepted her new life.
Great Day Fer Livin’
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95After living in Australia for 18 years, Juliet Wilson returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended stay. The Island’s allure hit her front on: not just the vibration of the gently rolling landscape, with its patchwork quilt of red soil and emerald fields, but the beauty of the people who make up the rich fabric of the Island, their sense of place, and their way of being.She spent the summer of 2009 driving the back roads of Prince Edward Island, introducing herself to people she met on the wharves and in the fields and in their shops, and getting to know them by listening to their stories and eventually photographing them. Like an informal anthropological study, this 48-page book gives a glimpse into the culture, belief, and practices of the primary producers who make up the backbone of Prince Edward Island.
Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Growing Up With Julie is the story of Gerry Steele’s childhood with a French-speaking mother in an English-speaking community. Set in Miscouche, near Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in the early part of the 20th century, the story is an historical snapshot of a life heavily influenced by the Catholic church, poverty and the Depression, alcoholism, and cultural tensions between the Acadians and the Scots. At the head of the family is Steele’s grandmother, a woman unwavering in her beliefs—regardless of their merit, validity, or tendency to offend. It is also a story of one woman’s determination to educate her children in a hard-living rural society coming to terms with modernity.
Gifted with an excellent memory for detail, Gerry Steele delivers a story that is rich in integrity and precision, with a good dose of humour to brighten up the dark corners.
Headliner
Publisher: Acorn Press$12.95Franny Callaghan feels invisible. With a missing mother only seen occasionally who speaks to the family through the closed door of her bedroom or the ensuite bathroom and a father and younger sister, who travel most of the time, home long enough to wash their underwear and re-pack before heading to the next competition so her sister can be an Olympic speed skater, Franny feels alone most of the time.
Franny’s brother died a few years before and is only seen in the photos on the wall. Her family hasn’t spoken of him since the day of his big funeral and all the news coverage of the tragic accident that killed eight members of the Ridgewood High School Orchestra and one of his teachers. And Franny Callaghan remains… just the awkward middle kid in a family that used to look like everyone else’s.
What if Franny just took off to go see her brother’s favorite band on the anniversary of his death? Maybe that would be the jolt her family so badly needed.
Her Teeth are Stones
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Each of Judy Gaudet’s poems is a path to somewhere resonant, redolent of memories and anticipations both bittersweet and beautiful. She traces the paths the mind and body takes purposefully, as well as those it happens onto, by chance or consequence. The poems light on home and history, travel afar, return again. They are marked by the toughness of wholly looking and experiencing and are leavened by wry humour and true gratitude for the beauty and magic that touch the earth’s days — and our human ones, tripping over the stones of her path. Her Teeth Are Stones is Judy Gaudet’s first full-length poetry book, following her chapbook Poems, you say.
Here and There
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Inspired by the places, people and sounds around his home town of Morell, Prince Edward Island, Roderick MacDonald pens lycrical poetry that nourishes his reflective nature. Especially inspired by the shore line, MacDonald evokes feelings and memories of Island days spent whiling away at the beach, breathing in the salty air and listening to the sound of the waves. He also writes evocatively about many aspects of the Island way of life throughout the seasons, from a rainy, spring day to a the experience of sharing pint of beer with a friend. The poetry of MacDonald’s collection Here and There will resonate with both Islanders and people who love P.E.I. It is the perfect companion to any bedside.
Here for the Music
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
Here for the Music
$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
Historic PEI : Vintage Postcards of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Throughout Canada’s early days, Prince Edward Island was a thriving province with a strong tourist industry. Historic Prince Edward Island portrays the quaint lifestyle and the busy industry that Canada’s smallest province had to offer. With unique messages to friends and family, these early postcards paint a picture of history not available in history books.
Hockey Morning Noon and Night
Publisher: Acorn Press$12.95Hockey Morning, Noon and Night is a warm, light-hearted story about one little boy’s love of the game. Based on her seven-year-old son’s real-life obsession with hockey, author Doretta Groenendyk has created a delightful book for young budding stars, with bright, colourful ink and acrylic illustrations..
Home Plate, Blue Helmet: From Charlottetown to the Holy Land and Back
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Michael Conway grew up in Charlottetown’s historic north and east ends. After grade ten, Conway left PEI for a career in the Canadian Forces. We follow Private Conway through the rituals of training — rigorous, comic, and occasionally tragic. He shows us the challenges and rewards of military life for a marriage. We join Conway overseas with Canada’s NATO troops and United Nations’ peacekeeping forces. He often returns, in his mind and on leave, to his beloved neighbourhoods, remembering the Lebanese shopkeepers and J.R.’s famous nite-club where Anne Murray and Stompin’ Tom launched their careers. Conway’s memoir is the story of a soldier’s return to his home ground, to his people in their aspirations and camaraderie, struggles and triumphs.
House of Bears
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95When Luba Kassim reluctantly returns home to Northern Ontario, the strained relationship with her traditional Ukrainian mother only heightens her feelings of alienation and isolation. A family crisis reunites her extended family and reignites old rivalries and the pain of long-held family secrets. Slowly, Luba begins piecing together her family’s unspoken past, starting in the 1930s in Ukraine, followed by emigration to England and settlement in Canada. In the process, she uncovers some startling truths about her own identity, and learns that she and her mother have much more in common than she thinks.
How Boys Grow Up
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Sean Wiebe is an assistant professor of education at the University of Prince Edward Island. His recent research explores how poets have influenced teaching practice and are insightful theorists in understanding life’s complexities. He has edited two collections of poetry, The Last Red Smartie (1996) and A Nocturnal Reverie (1994), and has had his poetry published in several literary journals, including Standards: International Cultural Studies Journal, Cha: As Asian Literary Journal, Blue Skies Poetry, and Ascent Aspirations Magazine. He and his family live in Charlottetown.
