Last spring I read about fifty young-adult historical novels, the fruits of the astonishingly rich and prolific crop of Canadian writers currently ornamenting that field.
I was reading as a juror for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young readers, an annual award created in honour of the late historian and young-adult writer Geoff Bilson of Saskatchewan.
The winner we chose was a powerful and dramatic story called Good for Nothing by Quebec-based aboriginal writer Michel Noel. It's a story of kids from a traditional aboriginal community in northern Quebec in the 1960s, as industry, government, school, and social-welfare officials come pounding in to uproot the society.
In the current issue of The Beaver, I've written about the Bilson jury experience and what the flood of historical novels says about our kids and what they read. Take a look.
