News from the Canadian Children's Book Centre & Friends
January Book List: Solving Mysteries
Creator's Corner: Remembering Brian Doyle
Experts' Picks
News from the Canadian Children's Book Centre & Friends
Get Published! Webinar coming soon. What does it take to get a children's book published in Canada? What are children’s book publishers looking for? Let our panel of experts show you what you need to do to get your manuscript published!
Join us on Saturday, February 28th from 12-1:30 pm EST for a webinar with three Canadian children's book professionals. Panelists include: editor Khary Mathurin and authors Tanya Lloyd Kyi and Monique Polak. Register now.
Our friends at IBBY Canada are still accepting submissions for Celebrating Young Indigenous Voices: From Sea to Sea to Sea, a writing contest for Indigenous youth ages 8-12. The new deadline to submit is February 13, 2026.
The winner of the contest will be invited to read their work at the Celebrating Indigenous Voices evening at the Canadian Museum of History during the 40th IBBY World Congress.
January Book List: Solving Mysteries
Meet some of Canada's favourite and upcoming young investigators, sleuths, and detectives. Are you into cozy clue-filled quests or twisting noir investigations? Do you prefer a classic caper, a whacky whodunit, or a paranormal puzzler? For all types of mystery fans, this book list has something for you!
Early Chapter Books
Bee & Flea and the Fall FiascoIL: Ages 6-9 RL: Grades 3-4
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Fern & Newt and the Lost Loot
Lark Wraps It Up
A Recipe for Robbery
Middle Grade Fiction
The Case of the Movie Mayhem
As Sam, Otter, Atim, and Chickadee take care of the cast and crew, a truck filled with specialty props and equipment disappears. Filming is halted—a disaster for everyone, including Mavis—and Windy Lake’s reputation is suddenly at stake. It’s up to the Mighty Muskrats to find the culprits and get the filmmaking back on track!
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Comic Shift ***
Danica dela Torre, Dream Detective Danica dela Torre has a new case on her hands—and this time, it’s personal. Danica has lost her relikaryo, a powerful amulet that keeps her safe from evil spirits. With the help of her best friends and fellow kid detectives, Jack and Kennedy, she follows the trail into a parallel realm where she hopes a ghostly presence on the other side will help reunite her with the precious talisman. Instead, she encounters the mysterious Detective Gray, author of her favourite investigator’s handbook—and Dani’s hero. The master sleuth needs Danica’s detecting skills to solve another mystery, one with deep roots in Filipino lore. As Danica pursues her biggest case yet, she discovers more about her family's deeply buried past, their connections to the shadowy detective, and her newfound ability to probe people’s memories by stealthily infiltrating their dreams.
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Izzy Wong’s Drama Disaster ***
The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall 
A Skeleton in the Closet Young Adult Fiction
Bad in the Blood
In the city of Puck's Port, where motorized vehicles fill the streets and new technological marvels abound, something rotten is lurking under the surface. A violent murder at the docks seems to point to a fey killer, igniting a powder keg of distrust between the city's humans and its fey inhabitants—folks who wield wonderful but often uncontrollable magical power.
Gristle Senan Maxim Junior finds himself caught in the middle. Forced into the reluctant role of private investigator, like his late father, he's working to solve the mystery of this fiery murder... mainly because his sister, Hawthorne Stregoni, is a fey herself with an unfortunate penchant for setting things ablaze.
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A Crane Among Wolves
Written by June Hur
Square Fish, 2025
IL: Ages 13-18 RL: Grades 8-9
1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings. Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, travelling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back.
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This Place Kills Me: A Graphic NovelAt Wilberton Academy, few students are more revered than the members of the elite Wilberton Theatrical Society—a.k.a. the WTS—and no one represents that exclusive club better than Elizabeth Woodward.
Breathtakingly beautiful, beloved by all, and a talented thespian, it’s no surprise she’s starring as Juliet in the WTS’s performance of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. But when she’s found dead the morning after opening night, the whole school is thrown into chaos.
Transfer student Abby Kita was one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive, and when local authorities deem the it-girl’s death a suicide, Abby’s not convinced. She’s sure there’s more to Wilburton and the WTS than meets the eye. As she gets tangled in prep school intrigues, Abby quickly realizes that Elizabeth was keeping secrets. Was one of those secrets worth killing for?
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Wicked Darlings Aspiring journalist Noa has a secret she's been keeping. Ever since her sister's tragic death, she's felt almost... relieved. Noa and Leah had been locked in competition with one another since childhood, and things came to a head when her sister scored a glitzy internship at a New York society newspaper. Noa can't help but revel in her new found autonomy.
But when she gets a lead about the sketchy circumstances surrounding her sister’s untimely death, she knows she needs to investigate—she owes it to Leah.
Noa sets out to infiltrate the seedy underbelly of Manhattan high society to investigate her sister’s final days. Along the way she finds herself entangled with the glamorous Avalons and their close-knit circle of friends and frienemies. But will Noa be able to resist the allure of the Avalons' world and uncover a shocking scandal. Or will she find herself in over her head... like Leah?
Three Things I'll Remember About Brian Doyle
By Gillian O'Reilly, CCBC Board President
Writer, teacher, mentor, Brian Doyle died on New Year’s Day at the Wakefield Hospice in Wakefield, Quebec.
Many years ago, I read his book Up to Low with my older son. As the characters made their way up the Gatineau, his giggles turned to laughs until suddenly, “Stop! Stop! I can’t breathe.” He was laughing so hard that he was gasping for air. After a short break to recover, we resumed reading and a few pages later, I was weeping. That was Brian Doyle: the ability to make you laugh on one page and cry on the next.
Doyle set most of his books in a specific place—Ottawa and the Gatineau River—at specific times from the 1890s to the 1950s. Writing the particular, he made it universal, as evidenced by his sales in many countries. With honesty and respect for the intelligence of young readers, he talked about family, love, cruelty, unfairness, the sometimes unfathomable behaviour of adults and young people’s small acts of bravery. He believed that children could take in story and poetry and language, only to realize later what it meant and why it was significant. And when they did discover that, it “belonged” to them.
The third thing I remember about Brian Doyle is language—so much wonderful language—in his books and in everything he wrote. In a 1997 lecture at the Toronto Public Library’s Osborne Collection, Doyle recalled a teacher who disapproved of the word “fart” in You Can Pick Me Up at Peggy’s Cove and the reviewer who disliked the drinking in Up to Low (“Big No for Low”). He reflected on hearing the words and voices of his grandfather and other family members and discovering that same language in a book of Irish tales read by an Ottawa librarian. Then he turned to talk about what kids responded to when they heard him read from his books. “It’s the rhythm. Young readers appreciate rhythm. And imagery. And ellipses, and irony, and understatement, and sound, and syntax, and universal themes, and humour, and paradox, and all the poetic tricks. They don’t know it but they do.”
Brian Doyle’s first book, Hey Dad!, was published in 1978 by the fledging press Groundwood Books, and was soon followed by You Can Pick Me Up at Peggy’s Cove (1979), and then his wonderful series of books set in the Ottawa and Gatineau area: Up to Low, Angel Square, Easy Avenue, Covered Bridge, Uncle Ronald, Mary Ann Alice and Boy O’Boy. Patsy Aldana, founder and former publisher of Groundwood Books, said of Brian, “He wrote about people of all sorts with much love and understanding. And his mastery of the English language brought those people into our hearts.”
He won numerous honours and awards, including the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award (1983, 1989, 1997, 2004) and the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People (2004). He received the Vicky Metcalf Award for Body of Work (1991) and NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature (2005). His archives are housed at the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library.
Celebrate Brian Doyle by reading one of his books—or all of them. Remember, enjoy and revel in the words.
In the Winter 2006 edition of Canadian Children's Book News, the CCBC reprinted the speech that Brian Doyle gave at the 2005 NSK Neustadt Prize ceremonies. You can reach his speech here. Visit Groundwood Books' website for a list of Brian Doyle's novels.
Experts' Picks
Expert booksellers and librarians share their top picks for young readers. Check out what our experts are reading this January!
The Buzz on Wild Bees: The Little-Known Pollinators that Keep Our Planet Humming
Written by Kira Vermond
Illustrated by June Steube
Owlkids Books, 2025
IL: Ages 7-10 RL: Grades 3-4
Of the over 20,000 species of bees around the world, honeybees seem to get most of the attention. Wild, solitary bees (who live in nests below ground, don’t make honey, and rarely sting) make up more than 90 percent of all bees, and this informative non-fiction book gives these “gentle little fuzz-buckets” their day in the sun and much needed appreciation. Full of fascinating facts, Kira Vermond’s pithy, pun-filled text sheds light on the many ways wild bees help us during their short life spans, and offers tips on how young ecologists can help protect them.
June Steube’s detailed pencil, crayon and watercolour illustrations showcase such beauties as the Blue-banded bee and the Domino cuckoo bee in their natural habitats. Back matter includes a bibliography and glossary of buzz words. This well-researched homage to all the unrecognized, hardworking superstar pollinators buzzing around wildflowers and tomato plants is the bees’ knees.
Recommended by Linda Ludke, Collections Management Librarian, London Public Library
The Notorious Virtues IL: Ages 13 and up RL: Grades 8-9
In the first book of her latest trilogy, Alwyn Hamilton has created a complex, vividly-rendered world that is rife with political intrigue, dramatic tension, heartrending betrayal as well as loyalty, integrity and quests for identity and truth. When the heir to the throne is found brutally murdered, four cousins must compete in the Veritaz Trials to determine which of them will become the new heir. But soon there is a fifth competitor: Lotte, a cousin who had been hidden away in a convent from the time of her birth. Lotte struggles to understand this family she has never known anything about until now and to figure out how she fits into it, while Nora, daughter of the slain heiress, becomes obsessed with finding the person who killed her mother. Meanwhile, unrest is brewing in this city where there is tremendous resentment towards the wealthy Holtzfall family who control everything and care little for the plight of everyday citizens.
The narrative alternates between the perspectives of Nora and Lotte as well as a clever but poor journalist and a duty-bound knight. These four, each with their own agendas and motivations, eventually work together to try to achieve their own personal goals and to figure out how all of these seemingly separate mysteries are ultimately connected. A magnificent family drama and compelling murder mystery, readers will be spellbound for each of the 500+ pages and eager for the next instalment.
Recommended by Lisa Doucet, Manager, Woozles Children's Bookstore