Sam Sorts (One Hundred Favorite Things)

Written and illustrated by Marthe Jocelyn

(Tundra, 32 pages, $22.99, ages 3-7)

To her enduring classic Hannah’s Collections, Jocelyn adds this playful, brainy take on a boy tidying up. Sam has a heap of things — all the little objects he’s collected, saved, made or been given are strewn in his room, from Obo his homemade tiny robot “to yellow guy,” assorted plastic dinosaurs, fake foods, socks, boxes, badges, shells ... How many ways are there to organize them? By colour, pattern, texture, shape, pairs, sound, letter of the alphabet. By whether they float or fly, have wings or legs, are homemade or aren’t homemade. Categories, subsets, Venn diagrams — Jocelyn transforms these logical concepts with colourful, characterful hand-cut paper illustrations, providing enough detail and strangeness for us to imagine multiple backstories for Sam and his collection. In her inimitable way, she’s created (yet another) book that satisfies both simple and sophisticated readings.

When We Were Alone

By David A. Robertson, illustrated by Julie Flett

(Highwater, 32 pages, $18.95, ages 4-8)

As a girl visits with her grandmother, she begins to wonder about her grandmother’s habits. Why does Nókom dress so colourfully? Wear her braid so long? Speak Cree rather than English? Nókom explains the harsh rules of residential school, where she was denied choice, colour, language and family — and then tells of how she and others secretly kept their Cree ways alive, covering uniforms with bright autumn leaves, braiding long grasses into their hair, whispering words in their own language. Robertson’s text moves between the present and the past, the girl’s questions and Nókom’s memories, which deepen and intensify the quiet, powerful way she lives out her own culture, day by day, in the present. A beautifully rendered story of resistance and love, this is made all the more luminous by Flett’s art — not just by flashes of fuchsia or scarlet among ochre grasses, but by her precisely observed images of the compact bodies of the uniformed children, bowed beneath the weight of the scissors, or lovingly tending each other’s hair. Highly recommended.

Optimists Die First

By Susin Nielsen

(Tundra, 226 pages, $21.99, ages 12-14)

Youth Art Therapy (YART for short) meets The Breakfast Club — sort of — in Nielsen’s new YA novel, in which Petula’s gloomy anxieties about risk cause so much trouble that she’s sentenced to weekly art therapy with a motley cluster of variously traumatized teens. Petula’s anxieties stem from her sense that she’s responsible for her baby sister’s death two years earlier, a conviction she can’t shake until she meets, then falls for, YART’s newest conscript, Jacob. Jacob’s understanding, affection, and even more his great ideas for therapeutic art projects, set Petula firmly on the path to better mental health — until a revelation about his own back story puts everything into question. Nielsen’s a snappy, smart writer and this story fairly bowls along, enlivened by its savvy references to movies and actors, weird craft ideas, humour and inventive film projects. Its extensive array of social and psychological traumas is rather neatly resolved, but Nielsen carries it off with compassion and verve.

Trouble Makes a Comeback

By Stephanie Tromly

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(Kathy Dawson Books, 298 pages, $23.99, ages 12 and up)

Here’s something to while away the February blahs: the sequel to Tromly’s Arthur Ellis Award-winning Trouble is a Friend of Mine. Just when Zoe’s life has become a bit “normal” — a boyfriend on the football team, a couple of power BFFs, SATs next week — Digby’s back in town, still determined to resolve the mystery of what happened to his little sister, kidnapped almost a decade ago. Screwball, crime caper, rom-com, mystery, attitudinal teen TV drama — there’s plenty of energy in Digby and Zoe’s (known as “Princeton” due to her father’s aspirations for her) sleuthing, break-ins and high speed getaways in borrowed cop cars. And there’s just as much pizzazz in Tromly’s fast, funny prose, spiced with Zoe’s politically and colloquially aware commentary on everything from sexism to high school angst to the perils of wearing tight leather trousers. A buoyant confection.