Winner of the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for Young People's Literature - Text In the town of Leamington, Ontario, a seventeen-year-old boy is suddenly stricken by a schizophrenic episode and wakes up in hospital. The boy's name is Calvin, and he is plagued by hallucinations. As the hallucinations persist, Calvin comes to believe that the answer lies in performing one grand and incredible gesture. And so he decides to walk across Lake Erie. In January. The temperatures have been below freezing for weeks. The ice should hold... The lake, it turns out, is more marvelous, and more treacherous, than Calvin had ever imagined - populated by abandoned cars (joy ride!), ice-fishing eccentrics, psychokiller snow beings, and a not-so-mythical sea witch named Jenny Greenteeth. Not to mention the man-eating tiger that looms just out of his sight lines as he treks. But the biggest surprise of all is that Calvin finds himself accompanied by Susie, the girl of his dreams. Or is it his dreams that have conjured up Susie? Part romance, part adventure story, part quest novel, Martine Leavitt brings her inimitable gentle wit, humor and compassion to a story about a teenaged boy struggling to gain control of his own mind and destiny.

Thirteen-year-old Heck is a pretty normal kid with some artistic talent and a hyperactive imagination. Life with his mother has been hand-to-mouth but not catastrophic. He has a modest, passive support system: his best friend and some kindly acquaintances. When he and his mother are evicted, she assumes he's staying with his friend. Heck, confident of his own ability to get by and wanting to protect his mother from criticism, decides not to ask for help. For the next few days he brushes up against a harsher reality than he anticipated. He's hungry, broke, homeless and plagued by a toothache. Heck has a series of encounters involving varying degrees of callousness, harshness, and risk. He sustains himself (and the reader) with his wit, imagination and optimism. As Heck faces the challenges of growing up on the streets — including drugs, pain, hunger, theft and homelessness — he must come to terms with his choices, his perceptions of himself, and his perceptions of others. Heck Superhero is award-winning author Martine Leavitt's second foray into the world of today's urban teenager. Heck is as real as Martine's other troubled teenager, Tom Finder (Red Deer Press, 2003). And, like Tom Finder, Heck must find the inner strength to face the truth.

Winner of the CLA Young Adult Book Award, selected for the CCBC Choices List, selected for the Bankstreet College of Education's Best Children's Books of the Year 2013, and honoured with the Horn Book Fanfare It starts when Call sees sixteen-year-old Angel stealing shoes at the mall. He just buys her Chinese food at first, but before long Call is supplying her with "candy" and saying he loves her. Angel ends up living with him and walking the Kiddy Stroll in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside -- a neighbourhood with a reputation for being the poorest postal code in the country, with one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. When Angel's best friend Serena goes missing, Angel starts to pay attention to the stories of other girls who have disappeared, and a mysterious Mr. P. who drives a van with tinted windows. But Call tells her she's crazy to worry, and the police turn a blind eye. And Angel remains trapped in her street life. Then Call brings home another girl. Her name is Melli, and she is just eleven years old, and suddenly Angel realizes what she must do. Save Melli at any cost, and perhaps save herself at the same time. This is a long-awaited new novel from Governor General's Award nominee and National Book Award finalist Martine Leavitt, who has created an unforgettable protagonist in the feisty and fragile Angel. Through her eyes, and in a haunting, startling verse narrative, we see Angel's life on the street and root for her as she tries to find a way out of violence and despair. Meticulously researched, this is a beautifully written, harrowing but ultimately redemptive story told with grace, wit, compassion and deep respect for the missing women -- the "Eastside angels" to whom the book is dedicated.

This riveting story is about a fifteen-yearold boy who, as the story opens, realizes he has no idea who he is-beyond his first name-or what has led to his loss of memory. From the outset, he's on the run, a street kid thrust out on his own, living by his wits and involved in a quest to find another lost teenager whose First Nations father is desperate for news of his son. In the process, he learns to survive and begins to get a sense of his strengths and character.