BV Booktalks

The Snow Willow nominees are exceptional this year. I don’t think that I can pick a favourite. I’d like to know which ones made you think or helped you to understand another person better. Just click on any comment section and let’s talk!

Mrs. Garnett

In order to pass social studies, fifteen-year-old Ian must complete community volunteer service. Choosing to work at “The Club” sounds like fun, until he arrives at what turns out to be a soup kitchen for the homeless in an unsafe part of the city. After a near-mugging, from which he’s saved by a fierce, pipe-wielding homeless man, Ian figures this will probably be the most depressing and scary assignment he’s ever had to complete.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

Edward Bathe, a 16-year-old prairie farm boy, giddy with the romantic ideals of war and desperate to fight the Huns in France, enlists in 1917. Edward learns that what he thought he knew about right and wrong, about heroism and courage, and about God and country, no longer holds true.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

The control car of the giant airship is almost entirely encased in ice, the ship’s name barely visible on her tattered skin: Hyperion. Matt Cruse can’t believe his eyes. Can this really be the legendary lost craft, now a frozen coffin to a ghostly crew and a vast treasure? Sequel to Airborn.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

Fifteen-year-old Greta Kovachi travels with her brilliant father to a laboratory habitat in a submarine on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Her father has created the first man-made black hole to prove that all matter in the universe is made up of infinitesimal particles of time. Then things go wrong……..

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

A medieval story, in which Keturah tells of her experience being lost in the forest, her eventual meeting with a dark figure on horseback who is Lord Death and her bargaining with him for her life and for the lives of the villagers who are threatened by an onset of the plague.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

Unable to attend school while she battles cancer, fifteen-year-old Kaleigh Wyse tries to complete her classes online by correspondence. What starts as a collaborative project becomes unwieldy and then flawed when it is apparent that all the project participants are hiding vital clues about their identities.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

For twelve-year-old Diego and his family, home is the San Sebastian Women’s Prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. His parents farmed coca, a traditional Bolivian medicinal plant, until they got caught in the middle of the government’s war on drugs and were mistakenly convicted of drug possession.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

Fifteen-year-old Francis’s father has committed suicide and nothing will be the same again. Suicide is ugly, unglamorous, and it is never a solution. Its aftermath is dreadful.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?

It’s tough when the kid has to act like the parent, because the parent is an alcoholic.

What do you think about this book? What did you learn, what made you mad, sad or laugh out loud? Which character is most like you and how? Were you shocked, surprised or disappointed? Were you happy with the way the author ended the book?