A Chanukah Noel: A True Story (By Sharon Jennings, illustrated by Gillian Newland. Second Story Press)
Backed by keenly realized images, Toronto’s Sharon Jennings tells a poignant story for kids aged five to nine, in which a young Jewish girl who has moved with her parents to a new country answers a classmate’s cruelty with an act of simple generosity that transforms the holidays.

Dust City (By Robert Paul Weston. Puffin Canada)
The Toronto-based author follows up the darkly clever verse of 2008’s Zorgamazoo with a fantastical yet streetwise tale in prose for young adults. With its tattered urban setting roamed by mobsters and addicts, Dust City has all the trappings of noir storytelling—except that its characters are wolves, foxes, and ravens, and the illicit drug eating away at the populace is an intoxicating form of fairy dust. It’s as if James Ellroy were one of the Brothers Grimm.

TreeSong (By H.E. Stewart. Tudor House Press)
Victoria author H.E. Stewart’s illustrations in this elegant hardcover are awash in the muted light of B.C.’s rainforests, with detailed layers of pencil and pastel laid down on thickly textured paper. The result is a sense of all-pervading life—the perfect atmosphere for the story of a towering, centuries-old Sitka spruce destroyed in a storm, whose wood is later used by a builder of cellos.

Far West: The Story of British Columbia (By Daniel Francis. Harbour)
The North Vancouver–based editor of The Encyclopedia of British Columbia sets out to show readers aged nine and up that local history is a lot more than a procession of dates and names. Using painted illustrations, archival photographs, and maps, Daniel Francis’s account of B.C.’s rugged, often wildly eccentric life brings the past out from under museum glass. Taking just 170 pages to cover 10,000 years—from First Nations ancestors to multicultural Vancouverites—the story is naturally fast-paced.

It’s a Book (By Lane Smith. Roaring Brook Press)
The ingenious illustrator of Jon Scieszka’s classic The Stinky Cheese Man creates a sweetly funny standoff between old and new information technology. Monkey loves his book but Jackass can’t see why: the silent, bound-paper thing has none of the twizzling, fully networked features of Jackass’s laptop. But that doesn’t stop Jackass from getting swept up in the tale of pirates that Monkey is reading. A witty, crayon-simple reminder of the joys of the printed page.