Welcome Red Cedar Book Club Bloggers! Below this post you will see all the Red Cedar nominees listed by title in alphabetical order. Please scroll down to the book you are reading to make a comment. Visit the blog often and make comments on other people's comments! It's fun to discover that we all have different opinions on the same book.
As the summer holidays of 1978 begin, 13 year old Nat’s mother sells their home to get money to board their pony, Smokey. Nat, his 15 year old sister, Cid, their little sister, Queenie and his mother, Margaret Estabrooks move into a rented apartment in Eastview, a little town where “the only people who live in apartments are the ones the newspaper calls ‘unfortunate’”. Shortly after, Ma is hospitalized with severe pneumonia, and Nat and his sisters are visited by a man from Children’s Aid Society. Afraid they may be taken into care if their mother dies, Nat sets off on horseback for Illinois, to find the father who deserted them four years before.
Loathed for their dining habits and adored for their skins, alligators and crocodiles were hunted almost to extinction. But thanks to some creative conservation efforts, their status has improved dramatically. Even so, they are still at risk: eight species remain on the endangered list, and some hover on the brink of extinction. In Alligator and Crocodile Rescue, you'll meet people from around the world who are helping to ensure a future for these living links to dinosaurs.
Birds of prey, or “raptors”, are meat-eating birds that are extremely well-equipped to hunt. These predators’ eyes are up to 10 times as powerful as human eyes and many of them have ultra-sensitive hearing. Unfortunately, despite their powerful senses, many of them are endangered or threatened. In Pamela Hickman’s book Birds of Prey Rescue, you’ll meet people from all over the world who are fighting to ensure there is a future for these magnificent birds.
It’s 1924, and with her mother ill in the hospital, Kit Avery has been sent to live with her father. She travels alone to Saanichton, where she is disappointed to find her old home dirty and neglected. She is worried, too, about her father, who has abandoned farming to work at something he calls “night fishing.” He has a new and very fast boat, but there are no fish anywhere in sight. Kit also wonders about the boxes being stored under lock and key in the barn.
Will Trenom is suspicious of the mother and daughter who have moved into the old cottage in a cemetery across the street. For one thing, the girl, Megan, never comes outside. For another, Will hears screaming and crying in the cemetery. Then he sees a Banshee, a ghostly old woman who floats in the air outside the house and wails while combing her long grey hair. It turns out that the Banshee is after Megan – and the only way Will can save his new friend is by stealing the Banshee’s comb. Will he be able to outsmart the ghostly creature? Meanwhile, how can Will protect himself from Noah, a guest at his parents’ B&B? Noah says he is the Devil’s nephew – and proves it by making Will fly, float and perch on top of bookcases when he least expects it.
Everyone in Danny River’s family has a passionate interest. Mom is writing a romantic novel in the basement. Dad is digging up the front lawn to build a bomb shelter. Danny’s brother Beau, determined to become an astronaut one day, is an enthusiastic fan of the Gemini space program. Danny’s own passion is dogs. He loves dogs, and they love him back! But his dream of having his own dog seems impossible.
Who is the mysterious Hamish X? He looks like an ordinary 10-year-old boy except he wears big black boots he can’t take off and no orphan facility can hold him. Agents Candy and Sweet of the Orphan Disposal Agency don’t seem to know what to do with him, or do they have a master plan? They sell him to the dreadful Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory where a small army of orphans slave to make award-winning stinky blue cheese. Hamish’s plan of escape—with his new friends, the tough, courageous Mimi, 12, and the brilliant, inventive Parveen, 8,—is well underway when the dreaded Captain Cheesebeard and his marauding band of cutthroats attack the factory. They kidnap the orphan slaves and take them away to face an unknown but undoubtedly worse fate far across the Arctic on Snow Monkey Island. Now of course the three friends have to try to free them. As Hamish says, “Anything else would make for a very dull story.” This story is far from dull. It’s exciting, fast-paced and very, very funny.
Loris Lesynski is always curious! She is also always writing. Often she writes poems. If someone asks her ‘Why?’ she just might answer with a poem..WHY...?I did it because – well the reason was – it was really because because... I did it because – because everyone does – because because because... In I Did It Because... Loris helps you to write your own poems and to get excited about poetry. She says “poems don’t have to rhyme to be poems”. The book helps you to find the rhythm of words and, most of all, will show you how to have FUN with words. Why? Well, just because...!
Fifteen-year-old Andrew likes his new best friend, Brian. They enjoy hanging out together and telling jokes. But one day, soon after Brian has revealed that “Brian” is not his real name and that he and his parents are in the Witness Protection Program after his father informed on some bank embezzlers, Brian and his family go missing. Now Andrew has to step into action. Enlisting the help of his mother, who tests electronic surveillance gear, and his father, an environmental biologist, Andrew sets out to find and rescue his friend. Will his mother’s high-tech gadgets – and his courage – be up to the task? If you like fast-paced books full of danger and cool tools, you’ll like I, the Spy.
Any book with the name ‘poop’ in the title will be an interesting one, right? Try to predict what kind of topics the author covers in this book... How can you write a whole book about dinosaur dung?
Kip is the ‘Odd Man Out’ in a household of females. While his mother has gone to Hawaii for her honeymoon, he’s been sent to spend a month in the summer at his grandma’s island home with five girl cousins. Gran’s house has been sold and is about to be torn down so almost anything goes. Kip and his cousins are allowed to demolish the walls, write anywhere, do anything, as long as they don’t tear down bearing walls or are mean to each other. The cousins have fun with beach campfires, swimming and exploring tide pools, but Kip is often overwhelmed by the craziness of his girl cousins and he just has to get away. He escapes to the attic which becomes his sanctuary. There he finds a complicated mystery connected to his father when he was a boy. As Kip explores a thick scrapbook which once belonged to his father, he finds out more and more about him and his strange imagination, and about himself.
This book is a lot of fun. You can take an exam to see if you’d make a good spy (Are you average looking so you could disappear in a crowd? Are you fit enough to escape pursuers?) You’ll read about the role of spies in history, learn how to disguise yourself, and to tell if someone is lying (hint: watch their body language). You can test your observation powers and learn the secrets of codes from easy to difficult.
Do you know that by the time you’re an adult, you’ll have about 96,000 km of blood vessels—enough to reach around the earth twice? Or that when your heart will beat roughly 2.5 billion times over your lifetime? Or how to make model blood from lemon jello? You can find out even more wonderful things about blood from this book. It’s well illustrated with drawings and has some interesting follow up activities—like how to find out if your hands are as strong as your heart.
Orphaned Joey Sexton is half-black, half-Jewish. He was too white for his mostly black Bronx neighbourhood. Now he has been sent to live with his mother’s family in a Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn, where he’s taunted for being black. This new place is his only chance of having a real home. But how can he belong here, when everything he does seems to infuriate his unbending, overly-strict Grandfather? How will he—a passionate baseball player and Yankees fan—ever feel at home here when everyone in his new family roots for the Brooklyn Dodgers? Baseball seems to be a symbol of all that’s insurmountable between him and his relatives, but in the end it turns out to bring them together. Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in the major leagues, inspires this change, too. Read and find out how. The story also features a very spunky girl cousin who plays a mean game of baseball. Not just for baseball fans.
Sundancer is the story of a beautiful high-spirited chestnut horse and the girl who came to care for him. ‘Bird’, short for Alberta, is a girl with a rare gift: although she doesn’t talk to people, she can talk to and understand animals in her mind. When her aunt Hannah has a horse which arrives on her farm acting upset and unreachable, it’s Bird who cares for him and they form a strong bond, performing many unusual feats together.
Who doesn’t love car races? The noise. The speed. The excitement. Fasten your seatbelt for facts, photos and fun as you learn about the cars, the tracks and the competitions.
Dog lovers, come one, come all! Dr. Stanely Coren has written a book for you, full of little stories and interesting facts about dogs. Do you know which are the most popular breeds of dogs? Do you know how to calculate a dog’s age in human years (No, it’s not by multiplying by 7!)? Can you read a dog’s ears? Do you know how to make a pupsicle? You will after you read this book.
