New Releases by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

In this high-interest accessible novel for middle readers, a young teen starts to suspect that he and his family are being followed by a Bigfoot while on a camping trip.

Charlotte is going to prove her grandma is right—the lake monster is real! When Charlotte gets a drone for her fourteenth birthday, she’s determined to get footage of Dottie, the elusive lake monster of Dorothy Lake. Her grandma, who has dedicated her life to searching for the monster, is the joke of the town. But when Charlotte manages to capture a video of the monster and posts it online, she’s the sudden target of a media storm. Now everyone is making fun of her too. Worse, droves of monster hunters arrive in her town, crowding the lake. When their boat propellers threaten to hurt Dottie, Charlotte is faced with a difficult choice. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for middle-grade readers who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read! The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.

Seventeen-year-old Jen is shocked to discover that the dad she grew up with is not her biological father. Jen loves to sing. But the rest of her family can’t carry a tune. When a stranger named Mike gives her roses at her concert and reveals that he is her birth father, Jen''s world flips upside down. Mike is a musician, just like Jen, and now she understands why she looks nothing like Steve, the only dad she’s ever known. When Steve learns the truth Jen''s mom has been hiding all these years, he moves out, and Jen can''t help but feel responsible. Worse, she doesn’t know who she is anymore. It feels like her whole life has been a lie. Is Steve still her dad? What about Mike? When it feels like her family is falling apart, Jen doesn''t know where she belongs. The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.

National Bestseller If the man you love went missing, how far would you go to find him? Someone is watching Piper, and she thinks she knows who it is: the bushman. But there’s more than one danger lurking in this temperate rainforest. Poachers are taking down old growth trees and jeopardizing plans for a park, a project Piper is passionate about. When she pressures her husband, Ben, a natural resources officer, to identify the culprits, he takes his drone into the wilderness to track them down. And then, just as a snowstorm hits, he goes missing. Refusing to believe her husband is gone, Piper begins a desperate search for him, one that continues long after the rescue team has given up. But as she begins to uncover what really happened to Ben, Piper is pursued by a stalker who may have taken her husband’s life and now threatens to take hers.

Key Selling Points On a camping trip, a young teen starts to suspect his family is being followed by the mythical Bigfoot. Themes of self-worth and responsibility are explored. Like the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman, the appeal of this mythical creature is eternal. The author is the international-award-winning author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and several other bestselling novels. She also mentors up-and-coming writers. The author has also written a number of short novels for striving readers, including The Ride Home, which was nominated for the BC and Yukon Book Prize. Enhanced features (highly-readable font, cream paper, larger trim size) to increase reading accessibility for dyslexic and other striving readers.

Marc est un garçon de la ville qui est allé vivre chez sa grand-mère à la campagne pendant que sa mère est en cure de désintoxication. Pour la première fois de sa vie, il doit voyager en autobus scolaire. Le long trajet dans un véhicule bruyant n’a rien à voir avec les transports en commun de la ville : il y a un genre de code secret pour savoir où on peut s’asseoir, les jeunes crient sans arrêt et quelqu’un essaie même de mettre le feu au siège de Marc. Marc juge rapidement que tous ces jeunes sont fous et qu’il doit tout faire pour les éviter. Toutefois, lorsqu’un accident survient, il apprend qu’il a plus de points en commun avec ces ados de la campagne qu’il ne le croyait. Cet ouvrage en format ePub est entièrement accessible. Également disponible sous le titre The Ride Home en anglais.

If you almost had everything that you wanted, how hard would you fight to protect it? Kira is engaged to the man of her dreams: he’s charming, handsome, wealthy, and a great dad to their baby, Evie, and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Olive. Having grown up with a troubled relationship with her mother and mostly estranged from her father, Kira craves a close family and secure home, and with Aaron, Evie and Olive, she almost has it. The only problem is Aaron’s ex-wife, Madison, who’s out of control and trying to get to Olive. When Kira takes the girls out of town to her childhood summer home and finds out that Madison has followed them, she panics. Between the beach and the forest on Manitoulin Island, Kira fights to protect Olive, Evie and her fiancé, until a dark secret threatens to unravel the life that is almost hers. With the future she has built hanging in the balance, and her past haunting her at every turn, Kira must choose who to believe and who she wants to be.

Key Selling Points This book examines bullying in middle school and how everyone has a story to tell. The entire story takes place during one bus ride home from school. Gail Anderson-Dargatz has written many hi-lo or literacy learner novels for both YA and adults working to strengthen their literacy skills. The author confessed that she was the “weird” one on the bus when she was a kid. Now her own kids take a long bus ride home too. The Ride Home was shortlisted for the Sheila A. Egoff Children''s Literature Prize and the Chocolate Lily Award. Enhanced features (dyslexia-friendly font, cream paper, larger trim size) to increase reading accessibility for dyslexic and other striving readers.

Fourteen-year-old Iggy comes from a famous family. Well, sort of. His dad directs a cheesy sci-fi Web series, his mom writes for it, and his sister has a successful YouTube channel. Iggy doesn’t have the acting bug, so he feels like an outsider. Wanting to prove himself, Iggy starts his own podcast about what interests him: insects. But it’s not until Iggy embarrasses his famous sister on air that his podcast really takes off. He’s thrilled with his own success, until she fires back. Now it’s all-out war. Iggy’s World is an exploration of the age-old problem artists face: when we find inspiration from our real lives, what will our friends and family think? And, of course, just how much of our private lives do we really want to reveal online? This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for middle-grade readers who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read!

Sadie works as a framer, building houses. Sadie lost her own home in a recent divorce and now lives with her two daughters in a rented bungalow. When her landlady says she needs to move out, Sadie finds there''s a housing crisis in her community. She can''t find a place to live and is forced to move her family into a travel trailer at a local campsite. When her ex-husband finds out, he insists that the girls come live with him in another city. Desperate to keep her daughters with her in their home community, Sadie is forced to rethink her dream of living in a full-sized house. In the short term, she moves her girls into a co-worker''s apartment. Then, with the help of her friends and daughters, she builds a tiny house. In the process she finds living with less has its rewards and that living in a small space brings her family closer together. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for older teen readers and adults who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read! The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.

Cookie is about to lose her job at the local bakery. Cookie dreams of owning her own bakery but doesn''t think she has the skills or money to do it. Most of all, she doesn''t have the self-confidence. When she takes a course at the local college, she finds she has much more going for her than she imagined. With the help of her community, she figures out how to make sure no one has to go without her famous doily cookies for long! This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for older teen readers and adults who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read! The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.

Race Against Time is the third novel in a series of mysteries featuring journalist and sleuth Claire Abbott. Small-town reporter Claire Abbott wakes from a nightmare, convinced a bomb will go off in the local school. And then, strangely enough, there really is a bomb scare. After the school is cleared by police and their sniffer dog, Claire is certain the threat isn''t over. People are behaving strangely. Claire believes a bomber will attack the school. But when? And who is the bomber? Claire must track down the culprit and stop him before the bomb goes off. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for older teen readers and adults who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read!

Playing with Fire is the second in a series of mysteries featuring journalist and sleuth Claire Abbott. Small-town journalist Claire Abbott has a sixth sense, what the fire chief calls a "radar for crime." When a string of suspicious fires breaks out in town, Claire thinks she knows who the firebug is. Or does she? She finds there is much more to the story than she imagined. Worse, no one will believe her. The firebug is getting bolder, and the fires he sets more dangerous. Claire is now in a race against time to catch the arsonist in the act before he takes a life. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for older teen readers and adults who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read!

Search and Rescue is the first novel in a series of mysteries featuring journalist and sleuth Claire Abbott. When a young woman goes missing on a nature trail, small-town journalist Claire Abbott is first on the scene, as usual. The clues to the woman’s whereabouts are misleading, but Claire has a sixth sense—what the fire chief calls a "radar for crime." Trusting her intuition, Claire insists that the search and rescue team look elsewhere for clues to the woman’s disappearance. When they fail to follow up on her lead, she pursues it on her own, embarking on a snowy chase up a mountainside that puts herself and others in danger. She’s more than just a journalist chasing a story. Claire is determined to do the right thing at any cost. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for older teen readers and adults who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read!

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and A Recipe for Bees, brings readers once again into the heart of rural Canada with A Rhinestone Button. As funny as it is tender, it is a novel full of true-to-life characters, natural wonder, and sweet surprises. Despite growing up in the small farming town of Godsfinger, Alberta, Job Sunstrum was always a bit of an outsider. A thin young man with blond, curly hair, he loved baking and cooking, and certainly did not fit in with the rough-and-tumble farm boys around town. Even when Job takes over the farm after his father’s death and his brother’s departure to train as a pastor, his community remains his animals, and perhaps the church women with whom he shares his baking on Sundays. Lonely beyond belief, overwhelmed by religious guilt, and taut with fear at the thought of what life might have in store for him, Job can only turn to God and hope that someday, things will turn around. Only his synesthesia — his ability to see sounds as colours, and feel vibrations as solid forms — provides him with passing moments of solace, but it also reaffirms for him that he experiences the world in a way the other people of Godsfinger could not possibly understand. Then one year, Job’s “tightly coiled” life begins to fall apart, and even the small sureties that got him through the days are torn away from him. The colours even disappear from sounds. Faced with change on every level and not knowing how to live outside the world he was brought up in, Job allows himself to be caught up in the Pentecostal drive of a preacher named Jack Divine, in hopes that clinging to his beliefs, proving his faith, and doing what others expect of him will make everything all right. But when his new-found religious fervour only accelerates his despair and his world continues to crumble, Job is surprised to find that true faith can be found in earthly experiences, and come from the most unlikely of sources. That a world without the familiar colours and shapes of sound is not half-heard, as he feared, but freed to break out in song. Like Anderson-Dargatz’s previous novels, A Rhinestone Button is a loving and magical portrait of small-town life that makes us question what we believe is real, and true.

My memories are so like that hat full of butterflies, some already deteriorating the moment they are collected, some breathed back to life now and again, for a brief moment, by the scent on a passing wind–the smell of an orange, perhaps, or a whiff of brown-sugar fudge–before drifting away, just out of my reach. How much of myself flits away with each of these tattered memories? How much of myself have I already lost? (Turtle Valley, p. 289) It is the end of a long, dry summer in Turtle Valley, British Columbia, and when a raging forest fire threatens to destroy Kat’s childhood home, she returns with her son and estranged husband to help her elderly parents prepare for evacuation. Haunted by memories of the relationship she had with a man she loved and left fifteen years before, Kat discovers a ghostly link between her mother’s tragic past and her own quest to find a love that has the power to fulfill and sustain her. Sure to be remembered as one of her most satisfying novels, Turtle Valley is a page-turner filled with the lush descriptions, emotional truths and dark poetry that have made Gail Anderson-Dargatz an international literary sensation.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz''s evocative novel of one woman''s simple but passionately lived life reminds of us of the pleasure to be found in human contact and simple, natural things. Raised by her silent but companionable father and a mother who kept bees, headstrong Augusta marries shy, deferential Karl, twelve years her senior, and goes to live with him on his father''s remote farm. Terrified that she will literally die from loneliness and isolation, she finds work in town, and for a short time, fulfillment with another man in a romance that will reverberate throughout her life. Not until many years later does she find her salvation in beekeeping, the practice she first learned from her mother. It is beekeeping that reconnects her to the world and at long last brings fire to her steadfast marriage.

"The cure for death by lightning was handwritten in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favourite oatcakes: Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more." So begins Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s extraordinary first novel, a seductive and thrilling book that captures the heart and imagination, as filled with the magic and mystery of life as it is with its lurking evils and gut-wrenching hardships. The Cure for Death by Lightning sold more than a staggering 100,000 copies in Canada alone and became a bestseller in Great Britain, later to be published in the United States and Europe. It was nominated for the Giller Prize, the richest fiction prize in Canada, and received a Betty Trask Award in the U.K. The Cure for Death by Lightning takes place in the poor, isolated farming community of Turtle Valley, British Columbia, in the shadow of the Second World War. The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death; children go missing on the nearby reserve; an unseen predator pursues Beth. She is surrounded by unusual characters, including Nora, the sensual half-Native girl whose friendship provides refuge; Filthy Billy, the hired hand with Tourette’s Syndrome; and Nora’s mother, who has a man’s voice and an extra little finger. Then there’s the darkness within her own family: her domineering, shell-shocked father has fits of madness, and her mother frequently talks to the dead. Beth, meanwhile, must wrestle with her newfound sexuality in a harsh world where nylons, perfume and affection have no place. Then, in a violent storm, she is struck by lightning in her arm, and nothing is quite the same again. She decides to explore the dangers of the bush. Beth is a strong, honest, and compassionate heroine, bringing hope and joy into an environment that is often cruel. The character of Beth’s haunted mother infuses the book with life by means of her scrapbook of recipes scattered throughout, with luscious descriptions of food, gardening, and remedies, both practical and bizarre. Seen through Beth’s eyes, the West Coast landscape is full of beauty and mysteries, with its forests and rivers, and its rich native culture. The Globe and Mail commented that The Cure for Death by Lightning was "Canadian to the core," with hints of Susannah Moodie and Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Anderson-Dargatz’s vision of rural life has drawn comparisons with William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. A magic realism reminiscent of Latin American literature is also present, as flowers rain from the sky, and men turn into animals. Yet the style of The Cure for Death by Lightning, which the Boston Globe called "Pacific Northwest Gothic," is wholly original. Launched in a year with more than the usual number of excellent first novels (1996 was also the year of Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels), this book with its assured voice heralds a worthy successor to Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.