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In the Upper Country / by Thomas, Kai,author.;
"Young Lensinda Martin is a protegee of a crusading Black journalist and activist in mid-18th century southwestern Ontario, finding a home in a community founded by veterans of the War of 1812 and refugees from the slave-owning states of the American south--whose agents do not always stay on their side of the border. One night, a neighbouring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman, whose name is Cash, refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before Cash is condemned. But Cash doesn't want to confess--instead she proposes a barter: A story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of life stories that reveal the interwoven history of Canada and the United States; of Indigenous peoples from a wide swath of what is called North America and the Black men and women brought here into slavery and their free descendents on both sides of the border. As Cash's time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed, not only about the complicated tapestry of her people's ancestry, but also of her own family history. And it seems that Cash may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny. Moving from Virginia to Kentucky, from Montreal to Indigenous communities on the shores of the Great Lakes and Black communties in southern Ontario and a fictionalized version of Owen Sound, these two women's life stories weave together love, tragedy, and survival, to map their own unexpected interconnections onto the history of North America in an entirely new and resonant way."--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Slavery;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Daughters of snow and cinders [graphic novel] / by Tamarit, Nuria,author,illustrator.; Allen, Jenna,translator.;
On the run from her treasured home, Joana boards a steamship bound for the frozen realm of wolves and men. Here, Tala guides a gold-hunting expedition into the heart of the wilderness. As storm winds loom and a fearsome she-wolf lurks in the shadows, these bold young women soon discover that Nature's wrath come for all who seek to plunder Her.
Subjects: Action and adventure comics.; Fantasy comics.; Graphic novels.; Animals, Mythical; Avarice; Gold mines and mining; Gold; Indigenous peoples; Monsters; Mountaineering guides (Persons); Nature conservation; Nature; Nature; Refugees; Voyages and travels; Wilderness survival; Wolves; Women refugees;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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The never-ending present : the story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip / by Barclay, Michael,1971-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The biography of Canada's band. In the summer of 2016, more than a third of Canadians tuned in to watch what was likely the Tragically Hip's final performance, broadcast from their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Why? Because these five men were always more than just a band. They sold millions of records and defined a generation of Canadian rock music. But they were also a tabula rasa onto which fans could project their own ideas: of performance, of poetry, of history, of Canada itself. In the first print biography of the Tragically Hip, Michael Barclay talks to dozens of the band's peers and friends about not just the Hip's music but about the opening bands, the American albatross, the band's role in Canadian culture, and Gord Downie's role in reconciliation with Indigenous people. When Downie announced he had terminal cancer and decided to take the Hip on the road one more time, the tour became another Terry Fox moment; this time, Canadians got to witness an embattled hero reach the finish line. This is a book not just for fans of the band: it's for anyone interested in how culture can spark national conversations."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Downie, Gordon, 1964-2017.; Tragically Hip (Musical group); Rock musicians;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Coexistence : stories / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.Short stories.Selections.;
"A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from a Giller-longlisted author and one of contemporary literature's most boundless minds. Across the prairies and Canada's west coast, on reservations and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They're learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment. An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school -- a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal. Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt's mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers."--
Subjects: Short stories.; Indigenous peoples; Interpersonal relations; Loneliness; Love;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Blood and treasure : Daniel Boone and the fight for America's first frontier / by Drury, Bob,author.; Clavin, Thomas,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The explosive true saga of the legendary figure, Daniel Boone, and the bloody struggle for America's frontier by two bestselling authors at the height of their writing power--Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the 13 colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America's "First Frontier" beyond the Appalachian Mountains engage in a never-ending series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, The French, and finally against the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world. This is the setting of Blood and Treasure and the guide to this epic narrative is none other than America's first and arguably greatest pathfinder Daniel Boone-not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and Revolutionary War hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life men and women, white and Native American, who witnessed it. This fast-paced and fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict over America's "First Frontier" that places the reader at the center of this remarkable epoch and its gripping tales of courage and sacrifice"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Boone, Daniel, 1734-1820.; Explorers; Frontier and pioneer life; Frontier and pioneer life; Pioneers; Indigenous peoples;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Good morning, monster : five heroic journeys to recovery / by Gildiner, Catherine,1948-author.;
"Catherine Gildiner is a bestselling memoirist, a novelist, and a psychologist who practiced privately for 25 years. This book focuses on five brave men and women who overcame enormous trauma--in her view, heroes who should be celebrated. With a novelist's storytelling gift, Gildiner recounts the details of her patients' struggles and their paths to recovery and weaves in her own tale of her growth as a psychologist. In therapy, patients have to become vulnerable by stripping away their defenses, but so do therapists, who cannot hide behind a title, a desk, or even their specialized knowledge. The five cases described include a successful but lonely musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman who, at the age of eight, had looked after her two siblings after her father, likely a murderer, abandoned them in a rural cottage; a glamorous workaholic whose wealthy, hideously negligent mother had greeted her each morning with "Good Morning, Monster"; an indigenous man who'd suffered greatly at a residential school; and a young woman whose abuse at the hands of her father led to a severe personality disorder. Each patient presents a mystery at first, one that will only be unpacked over years. They arrive, sometimes unwillingly, to try to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering is an entirely different matter. It will take courage to face those realities, and it requires creativity and resourcefulness from their therapist. Each patient embodies the virtues of self-reflection, stoicism, perseverance, and forgiveness as they confront the real source of their problems and work unflinchingly to face the truth. Gildiner's account of her journeys with them is moving and insightful and sometimes humorous. It offers a behind-the-scenes look into the therapist's office and explains how the process can heal even the most unimagineable wounds."--
Subjects: Psychotherapy.; Psychotherapy; Psychologists.; Psychologists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Daughters of the deer / by Daniel, Danielle,author.;
"In this haunting, groundbreaking, historical novel, Danielle Daniel imagines the lives of her ancestors in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family link to a girl murdered near Trois-Rivières in the early days of French settlement. Marie, an Algonquin woman of the Weskarini Deer Clan, lost her first husband and her children to an Iroquois raid. In the aftermath of another lethal attack, her chief begs her to remarry for the sake of the clan. Marie is a healer who honours the ways of her people, and Pierre, the green-eyed ex-soldier from France who wants her for his bride, is not the man she would choose. But her people are dwindling, wracked by white men's diseases and nearly starving every winter as the game retreats away from the white settlements. If her chief believes such a marriage will cement their alliance with the French against the Iroquois and the British, she feels she has no choice. Though she does it reluctantly, and with some fear--Marie is trading the memory of the man she loved for a man she doesn't understand at all, and whose devout Catholicism blinds him to the ways of her people. This beautiful, powerful novel brings to life women who have literally fallen through the cracks of settler histories. Especially Jeanne, the first child born of the new marriage, neither white nor Weskarini, but caught between worlds. As she reaches adolescence, it becomes clear she is two-spirited. In her mother's culture, she would have been considered blessed, her nature a sign of special wisdom. But to the settlers of New France, and even to her own father, Jeanne is unnatural, sinful--a woman to be shunned, and worse. And so, with the poignant story of Jeanne, Danielle Daniel imagines her way into the heart and mind of a woman at the origin of the long history of violence against Indigenous women and the deliberate, equally violent, disruption of First Nations culture--opening a door long jammed shut, so all of us can enter"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Arranged marriage; First Nations women; First Nations; Algonquin;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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