In the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, a young girl must come to terms with haunting memories from the voyage. It is May 1912, one month after the horrific sinking of the Titanic, and twelve-year-old survivor Dorothy Wilton is sent home from school in disgrace when she strikes another student. Although she's expelled, her sympathetic teacher encourages Dorothy to write an account of her experience on the ship, with the hopes that it will help Dorothy come to terms with her trauma. And so begins a truly remarkable story, which reads like a time capsule of the era: Dorothy writes about visiting her bohemian grandparents in England before setting sail back home, the luxurious rooms and cabins on board, a new friend she makes, and the intriguing people they observe. However, amidst all of this storytelling, a shadow lurks, a secret Dorothy is too traumatized to acknowledge -- a secret about her own actions on that fatal night, which may have had deadly consequences. Through young Dorothy's eyes, award-winning writer Sarah Ellis expertly takes a unique perspective on the Titanic tragedy, exploring the concept of survivor's guilt with devastating honesty.

A young Jewish girl recounts her experiences during a horrifying time in recent history. As Rose begins her diary, she is in her third home since coming to Winnipeg. Traumatized by her experiences in the Holocaust, she struggles to connect with others, and above all, to trust again. When her new guardian, Saul, tries to get Rose to deal with what happened to her during the war, she begins writing in her diary about how she survived the murder of the Jews in Poland by going into hiding. Memories of herself and her mother being taken in by those willing to risk sheltering Jews, moving from place to place, being constantly on the run to escape capture, begin to flood her diary pages. Recalling those harrowing days, includingwhen they stumbled on a resistance cell deep in the forest and lived underground in filthy conditions, begins to take its toll on Rose. As she delves deeper into her past, she is haunted by the most terrifying memory of all. Will she find the courage to bear witness to her mother's ultimate sacrifice?

Through the diary of 10-year-old Victoria Cope, we learn about the arrival of ragged Mary Anna, one of the thousands of impoverished British children who were sent to Canada at the beginning of the century. Mary Anna joins the Cope family as a servant and is treated well, but she has to cope with the initial apprehension of the family members and the loss of her brother, Jasper, who was placed with another family. Victoria vows to help Mary Anna find her brother, so they can be a family once again.

Twelve original holiday stories from the top children's writers in the country! What an incredible gift book for Dear Canada fans! The twelve stories in this treasury are set around Christmas time and feature the young girls from a dozen previous Dear Canada books. Readers will be thrilled to reconnect with their favourites and get a glimpse of each character's life a year or so after the events in the actual diary are over. Anyone new to the Dear Canada series will be introduced to characters so compelling, they'll want to read more.

"I can hardly bear to look at Fanny. She is grey and her breath rasps and gurgles and wheezes. She has lost pounds. Her face is all hollow and a dark colour. A bluish grey. That is one of the symptoms of this Flu, Aunt told us. Nobody is saying the word, but we all know. So many have died, but not my Fan. I will not leave her no matter what anyone says." Fee uses her diary to record all of her fears when the Spanish Flu rages through Toronto. It comforts her when she almost loses her twin sister -- and when it actually takes their older sister Jemma.

With more than 200,000 books in print, Dear Canada has fast become the historical fiction series for young girls. It has been two long years since Eliza's beloved older brother, Hugo, went away to war. Caught up in his enthusiasm, she couldn't understand her parent's less-than enthusiastic reaction. Now that her other brother Jack has also enlisted, she yearns for the safe return of both brothers. If only she had a friend that she could talk to about her feelings....

An eleven-year-old orphan is reconnected to her mother's family, but her courage and strength are tested as she is put to work in a textile mill. Flora is a young, imaginative girl who has dreamt of having a family to call her own since her parents died from pleurisy when she was three. She dreams of family dinners. She dreams of friends. But mostly she dreams of leaving the orphanage. As the diary begins, Flora is still in an orphanage in Kingston, but her Auntie Janet has just married, and she and her husband James send for Flora to come and live with them in Almonte, Ontario. Once she arrives at her aunt's, Flora begins work in the Almonte Mill, even though she is underage -- typical for many children of the era. She works from dawn to dusk, near huge and noisy machines, and she sees the effects of the mill on workers who have lost an arm or their hearing. Still, this life is better than going back to the orphanage. But when Uncle James loses several fingers at the weaving machine and can't work anymore, money is really tight, and it's up to Flora and her aunt to find a way out of the predicament. Through all her trials, Flora writes down her feelings in a journal, one she addresses to "Dear Papa and Mama", because it makes her feel close to the parents she lost when she was young. Days of Toil and Tears includes historical background giving readers the social context of young mill workers, and a map of the textile industry of Canada, as well as fascinating photographs from this era.