Billie Taylor is no stranger to risky situations, but when she attends a student protest at Columbia University with her college boyfriend, and the US is caught up in violent political upheaval, her mother decides to move the two of them to Canada. Furious at being dragged away from her beloved New York City to live in a backwater called Toronto, Billie doesn't take her exile lightly. As her mother opens their home to draft evaders and deserters, Billie's activism grows in new ways. She discovers an underground network of political protesters and like minds in a radical group based in Rochdale College, the world's first "free" university. And the stakes rise when she is exposed to horrific images from Vietnam of the victims of Agent Orange - a chemical being secretly manufactured in a small town just north of Toronto. Suddenly she has to ask herself some hard questions. How far will she go to be part of a revolution? Is violence ever justified? Or does standing back just make you part of the problem?

An out-of-this-world poetic exploration of the wonders of our solar system. From a ballad of Earth and an ode to the sun to a villanelle for Venus and a sestina for Saturn, here are 14 original poems about planets and other bodies in our solar system. Each different poetic form reflects the object’s unique characteristics, and each poem is bursting with intriguing details sure to capture readers’ imaginations. Information about both the object and the poetic form accompanies each poem. This innovative, immersive and beautifully crafted book blends science and poetry to create something strikingly new. Readers will be enchanted.

New York City in the 1960s is the humming backdrop for this poignant, gritty story about a girl who sees her parents as flawed human beings for the first time, and finds the courage to make a fresh start. Missy's mother has gone back to school to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. Missy's father works in advertising and takes Missy on secret midnight excursions to Harlem and the Village so she can share his love of jazz. The two write poems for each other -- poems that gradually become an exchange of apologies as Missy's father's alcohol and drug addiction begins to take over their lives. When Missy's mother finally decides that she and her daughter must make a fresh start, Missy has to leave her old apartment, her school, her best friend and her cats and become a latchkey kid while her mother gets a job. But she won't give up on trying to save her family, even though this will involve a hard journey from innocence to action, and finally acceptance. Based on the events and people of her own childhood, Amanda Lewis's gorgeous novel is driven by Missy's irresistible, optimistic voice, buoyed by the undercurrents of poetry and music. Key Text Features poems dialogue literary references epigraph vignettes