2016 SYRCA Snow Willow Award — Shortlisted It’s the best summer of Dani’s life, until the bottom falls out. Dani’s mother is getting married – again – because that’s what she does, and while she and her new husband jet around Europe for six weeks, seventeen-year-old Dani is sent to stay with an uncle she didn’t know she had in a small community in Cariboo country she didn’t know existed. It promises to be the summer from hell. But Dani’s uncle turns out to be an okay guy. In fact, Dani really likes him. And she finds romance, too. Suddenly, a summer that had doom written all over it turns into one of the best times of Dani’s life. Until the bottom falls out. In a story about relationships and about how bad things happen to good people, Dani discovers that sometimes the only villain is life itself.

Commended for the 2011 Best Books for Kids and Teens When doing the right thing turns all wrong Sometimes a guy just cant mind his own business, no matter how hard he tries, and sometimes that guy gets mired in predicaments which are not of his making. Thats what happens to Jas, a Grade Seven boy who is putting all his energy into completing the artwork for an adventure comic he hopes will be his ticket into an elite summer art program. But when he meets Wren, an eccentric, crusading classmate, his efforts are derailed. Initially, Jas has no interest in getting involved, but circumstances and Wrens overpowering personality keep drawing him in until there is no going back. Wren is a person of values. She believes that if youre not part of the solution, youre part of the problem. When she sees things that are wrong, she sets out to correct them. Eventually she becomes the target of bullies, then, because of Jass inadvertent interference, the bullies turn their attention to him. They destroy his comic and his chances of getting into art school. What can Jas and Wren do to end the bullies' reign of terror?