Shauntay Grant: My Hair is Beautiful
A celebration of natural hair, from afros to cornrows and everything in between, My Hair is Beautiful is a joyful board book with a powerful message of self-love.
Governor General’s Award-nominated author Shauntay Grant brings her unique spoken-word style to this fun read-aloud, featuring minimalist text and vibrant photos of toddlers sporting fresh dos, and a mirror to reflect your own baby’s beauty.
Francine Cunningham: ON/me
Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn’t fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. On/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had.
Michael Christie: Greenwood
They come for the trees. It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and rapacious timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.
Transporting, beautifully written, and brilliantly structured like the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood reveals the knot of lies, omissions, and half-truths that exists at the root of every family’s origin story. It is a magnificent novel of greed, sacrifice, love, and the ties that bind–and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/588402/greenwood-by-michael-christie/9780771024450
Leanne Dunic: The Gift
The Gift: A Story and Music by Leanne Dunic and The Deep Cove
For years, she watched his music videos and interviews. Long before they met, she felt a kinship to his deeper self, and knew that one day they’d come together. She doesn’t tell him how, in order to create, she needs to break beautiful things.
The Gift contains a short story by Leanne Dunic and lyrics she wrote for a companion album of the same name by The Deep Cove.
Alessandra Naccarato: Re-Origin of Species
From hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.
A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.
bookhugpress.ca/shop/books/re-origin-of-species-by-alessandra-naccarato/