Will the puns about the title for SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS ever end? Maybe, but not today. Because I’m very excited and not sorry at all to share a few exciting things that have happened to the book recently.
It was featured in The Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Best Books for Kids & Teens 2022 as a Starred selection.
It has been named as a 2022/2023 Red Cedar Awards Nominee. This is a kids’ choice award in British Columbia where kids get to read and vote on their favourite books.
SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS is also a 2023 Rocky Mountain Book Award Nominee. Another kids’ choice award but this one is for Alberta.
Yay for Western Canada! I’m so excited that these great things mean this book – the book of my heart – will find more kids who will enjoy and maybe even need it. I’m truly honoured and chuffed at these three amazing things.
And before you go, it’s just about two months until my NEXT book, THE BOOK OF ELSIE comes out in the world. There is so much packed into this little book about fighting prejudice and communities coming together. Not just serious stuff, but lots of funny moments too. I hope you’ll check it out.
There’s been a lot going on lately, between the OLA Superconference and the online events: Get to Know Hi-Lo and #IReadCanadian BUT I am super, SUPER excited to announce that I have more books coming, all with Orca Book Publishers.
First up is Fish Out of Water coming this August. Go here to read about it, but all you really need to know about it at this point is that it’s about a boy who wants to learn to knit as part of his bar mitzvah project but faces a lot of pushback, even from the people who love him the most. Do you love the cover? Yeah, you do. Ordering links coming soon, but until then, add the book to your Goodreads TBR.
Later, in Fall of 2021, the book of my heart, Tree of Life will release. This book has been a long time coming and is so, so, so important to me. Here’s my pitch for it:
Twelve-year-old Evelyn—Evie—Walman is not obsessed with death. She does think about it a lot, though, but only because her family runs a Jewish funeral home. At twelve, Evie already knows she’s going to be a funeral director when she grows up. Even if it means kids at school call her ‘corpse girl’ and say she smells like death. They’re just mean and don’t get how important funeral directors are.
Evie loves her part-time job at the funeral home. She cleans—dusting caskets, polishing pews, and vacuuming the chapel—and on funeral days, she dresses up and hands out tissues and offers her condolences to mourners. She doesn’t normally help her parents with the grieving families, until one day when they ask her to help with Oren, a boy her age who was in a tragic car accident that killed both his parents. Evie is to keep him company while they make the funeral arrangements with his uncle.
Evie knows all about funerals and is ready—even eager—to help the boy. Until it all goes terribly wrong. She quickly realizes that while she may know a lot about funerals, she doesn’t know very much about grief at all. She’s perplexed that her attempts to console and comfort the boy don’t work. He won’t speak, doesn’t care about her attempts at condolences, and even slams a door in her face.
Determined to make it right, and with a little help from her parents, Evie learns better how to deal with the grieving boy and they even develop a friendship. She’s committed to helping him heal as much as she can. Even if what he wants is for her to take him behind the scenes at the funeral home, showing him a side of the operation that few people ever see. And something she’s never seen—a real dead body.
TREE OF LIFE is a heartwarming, honest, respectful, and sometimes wry look at the inner workings of a Jewish funeral home through the lens of a tween who simply sees it as the family business.
What do you think? I’m so, so, so excited to share this book. Still early days so no cover or order links yet, but some kind soul has put it up on Goodreads so you can add it there.
More news coming soon, if you believe it, but until then, thanks for celebrating with me.
Yes, it’s been forever since you’ve heard from me but I’ve been busy behind-the-scenes and haven’t had much of interest to share, but now I do!
I have a new book coming out this year and I just got the cover and am so very excited. Check it out:
I. Love. It.
What do you think? It has all the great elements a cover should have – fun image, author name, and the name of the awesome publisher. Trifecta of awesomeness! Oh right, and the fun title. Okay, so that’s four things. A square of awesomeness?
About the book:
Victoria Adelman is lonely. Her best friend has moved away, leaving her to spend the summer alone. One day, on her way home from a bat mitzvah, she meets Jasmine, her next-door neighbors’ granddaughter. Tori hopes her friendless status is about to change.
Later, in her garden, she meets Jasmine again, but Jasmine doesn’t recognize the filthy, smelly girl as the one she met earlier. In a moment of insecurity, Tori tells Jasmine that the girl she met before was her twin sister, Vicky. Tori is sure she can fake being that girl in the dress—it’s only for two weeks.
But then Jasmine announces she’s staying with her grandparents for the school year. Tori needs to figure out what to do: come clean and lose her new friend, or live her life as a fake.
DOUBLE TROUBLE, coming from Orca Book Publishers, will land at the end of this summer but the great news is that it’s already available for pre-order. You can get it by ordering from:
