Books with author Charles G. Norris

Jacob Armstrong is 12 and he’s on a honeymoon. The honeymoon is his mother’s. Accompanying them are her new husband, Fred Finkle, and Fred’s annoying kids, ten-year-old Barney and eight-year-old Sam, and Jacob’s rebellious 15-year-old sister, Minerva. They’re heading from Vancouver through Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, all the way to Mexico in a pale blue 1982 Mercury Montego station wagon. So begins Norma Charles’s funny and thoughtful new novel for kids – especially boys – ages 8 to 13. Each child has a different strategy for getting through the trip: Barney tells nonstop cow jokes; Sam invents his own world with action figures; Minerva is permanently plugged into her CD player. And Jacob? He hugs his soccer ball, hoping one day to become a star player. When they finally arrive in Mexico, the family stays in a tourist trap without a single soccer game. How will he survive? Eventually the new family not only survives, but develops bonds that pull them closer together in this sweet story told from Jacob's wry perspective.

Short-listed for the Chocolate Lily Book Award, 2005 It's summer 1950, and for 11-year-old French Canadian Sophie LaGrange, Camp Latona on British Columbia's Gambier Island promises to be pure bliss. But then Sophie has to buddy up with a strange, unfriendly Jewish refugee girl named Ginette and things go sour. Soon Sophie learns that Ginette has her own secrets and anxieties, worries that explain the girl's seemly bizarre behaviour.

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Fiction. Young Adult. In this compelling tale, two very different stories intersect with surprising results. There's the story of two African children, Kalu and his cousin, Aisha, who escape from their village after it's destroyed by rebel soldiers. The kids flee to the coast where they find work on a fishing boat bound for Britain. They think they're safe, until the nervous fisherman leaves them with little food or water on Last Chance Island off the coast of Ireland. Elsewhere, Spike, a Canadian teen, finds out that her father has died, and she is being sent to live with a distant relative, a woman who tends the lighthouse on Last Chance Island. Spike can't wait to escape and join a troupe of musicians she's met in Dublin. But one day, she discovers the two Africans in desperate need of help. Will she change her plans to try to save these children?

Star Girl flies again in this sequel to the bestselling, award-winning Sophie Sea to Sea. Starting her new classes at the new French school in British Columbia, Sophie is happy to escape the old Alderson Avenue School where stuck-up Elizabeth Proctor and her friends rule. But trouble develops when the teachers go on strike and Sophie is forced back into Alderson. Will she have to endure as an outcast? Or will she, like Star Girl, save the day with a daring rescue?

Young Adult Fiction. In this fast-paced novel for readers ten and up, James Graham, a Canadian journalist, is kidnapped in a market in Buenaventura, Colombia, right in front of Marco, his thirteen-year-old son. When the kidnappers try to grab Marco, his father yells at him, "Run Marco, run!" Marco manages to escape, and seeing no possibility of help in Colombia, he stows away on a freighter headed to Vancouver where a good friend of his father is living and who may be able to help. During his search, Marco encounters what seem like insurmountable odds and learns that he must call upon his inner strength and nerve to keep going. "Valeroso; courage," he keeps saying to himself as he evades drug dealers, security guards, the police and the authorities who would send him back to Colombia—straight into the arms of his father's kidnappers. RUN MARCO, RUN is a riveting adventure about a plucky boy who will dare anything to save his father, and who learns that running away is sometimes the heroic thing to do.

Runner-up for the 2009 Chocolate Lily Book Award and commended for the 2009 Best Books for Kids & Teens In 1909, 13-year-old Luc Godin arrive in British Columbia from Quebec only to discover that the house they thought they'd move into hasn't been built. So the Godins have to make due with living in a railway boxcar with three other families. Luc's father and the many other newcomers to the Fraser Valley have come to work in the lumber industry. Their new home still has vestiges of the wilderness, and Luc and his family find find pioneering life difficult, especially as French speakers in a world of English. Luc's father, who becomes a teamster in one of the many lumber mills, is old-fashioned. Horses are what he knows, while Luc has an eye for the modern, particularly the new-fangled bicycles and occasional automobiles. However an accident with a bicycle has profound consequences for Luc and highlights the clash between the old and the new, the settled East and the brash frontier.