White Pine Award (Grades 9 - 12) includes Shattered, Keturah and Lord Death, Little Brother, Mostly Happy, The Monkeyface Chronicles and , The Gathering (2011).
With a Foreword by Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire (Ret'd), force commander for the United Nations Mission to Rwanda, Shattered is an unforgettable story, one that asks what one person can do to make a difference.
Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Prissy Fallwell smoked Players Plain, played crib for money and drank Wild Turkey when she was between men. Prissy had a lot of boyfriends when I was growing up. I had a lot of crushes - Jack Lord from Hawaii Five-O, Hawkeye Pierce, Jerome the Giraffe and Jesus. Well, GOD actually. It was an on again off again sort of affair. This is our story _ So begins Bean E. Fallwell's life story in Mostly Happy.
Caught in the tight space between love and fear, Bean gallops through her early life picking up shiny bits of beauty along the way and tucking them into a red Samsonite suitcase. This suitcase, a dominant metaphor in the novel, becomes Bean's touchstone that keeps her from spiralling into the dark worlds of her beautiful, screwed up mother and all the stray men she brings home; her sad, exhausted father; and her magnetic stepfather as he transforms from family saviour into drunken dragon. Without remorse or bitterness Bean moves forward, seeking her friendships where she can, casting spells to protect her younger sister, and seeking solace from whatever small sanctuaries her transient life offers.
There are intense, cruel and terrifying moments in her family life that shred her innocence, but as Bean is battered and almost broken a few times by them, she also learns how to cope, recover and laugh. From engaging episodes as a religious-sponsored youth missionary in England and Europe, and the orchestrated pursuit of becoming an actress in Toronto, to the novel's road's end in Wyoming, Bean's life is as relentlessly whimsical as it is sad. And as she migrates from schoolgirl to teen, to young woman, and her dreams unfold from grill cheese sandwiches to self-sufficiency, she evolves into one of fiction's most memorable characters.
Strange things are happening in Maya's tiny Vancouver Island town. First, her friend Serena, the captain of the swim team, drowns mysteriously in the middle of a calm lake. Then, one year later, mountain lions are spotted rather frequently around Maya's home—and her reactions to them are somewhat . . . unexpected. Her best friend, Daniel, has also been experiencing unexplainable premonitions about certain people and situations.
It doesn't help that the new bad boy in town, Rafe, has a dangerous secret, and he's interested in one special part of Maya's anatomy—her paw-print birthmark.