Responses to The Proof that Ghosts Exist

These are comments from both Canadian and American reviews of the novel by Carol Matas and me, The Proof that Ghosts Exist, the first book of the Ghosthunters trilogy.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books:
As this is the first novel in a planned trilogy, there is little resolution offered as to the likelihood of their [...]

Helen Frost’s The Braid

Frost, Helen.  The Braid.  New York: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus, 2006.
The book consists of a series of “poems”–or, I guess, would-be poems, for I fail to see much in the way of what I would personally consider poetry in them.  The language isn’t terribly distinguished or even all that interesting in and for itself (i.e., as [...]

A.M. Jenkins’s Beating Heart

Jenkins, A.M.  Beating Heart.  New York: Harpercollins, 2006.
The alternating narratives are visually distinguished from each other–his is third person present narrative that looks typically novel-like, hers a first person collection of thoughts set out on the page to look sort of like poetry (but hardly actually ever achieving anything poetic–the only thing this spacing of [...]

Bruce Coville’s I Was a Sixth Grade Alien

Coville, Bruce.  I Was a Sixth Grade Alien. New York:  Minstrel-Pocket, 1999.
In alternating narratives, an American boy and the son of an alien ambassador to Earth describe what happens when the alien starts attending a typical American school as a way of helping the two peoples to know each other.   (Interesting how an American writer [...]

More on John Smelcer’s The Trap

When I wrote my earlier post on John Smelcer’s The Trap, I accepted the truth of the description of the author on its dust jacket as being “of Ahtna Athabaska descent.”  In doing so, I’d forgotten an earlier discussion on the child_lit listserv in which Debbie Reese raised the question of whether or not this [...]

Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road

Boyden, Joseph.  Three Day Road. Toronto: Viking, 2005
The author is, according to the jacket “a Canadian of Irish, Scottish, and Metis roots–which makes him, at best, a quarter aboriginal, but also constitutes a claim to aboriginality, significant in terms of cultural wars in recent years about who has the right to tell native stories.  Legalistically [...]

William Mayne’s Drift

Mayne, William.  Drift.  1985.  Bath: Lythway-Chivers Press, 1986.
From the perspective of twenty years later, this is a dangerously and foolishly brave book.  The last third of it is from the perspective of a character who is both female and aboriginal–in 1985, clearly, Mayne had no qualms whatsoever about either writing from the viewpoint of a [...]