FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Myles Cook is having a rough time. Not only has his mother run off with Jocelyn, her yoga instructor, Myles and his dad have moved to a tiny rural island on BC's west coast to live in a log cabin. Garcia Island is nothing like Myles' old home in the city; there are no stores, the WiFi is sketchy, and let's face it, the people are strange. There's Clyde, the old guy in the silver airstream trailer who carves erotic demon sculptures from wood, Daisy Archibald, the island coven's high priestess (whom Myles secretly believes is a hack), and Axel Jespersen--a recumbent cyclist and angora goat farmer who is just plain nasty! Finally, there is Norm next door, a man who teaches Myles a little about llamas and a lot about life. Factor in a taxidermy raccoon (with superpowers), a first crush, and a whole lot of growing pains, and Myles quickly discovers that truth really is stranger than fiction. But people can be full of surprises, and as the saying goes, you can't always judge a book by its cover. And sometimes, when things are out of your control, the best thing you can do is simply stand tall, take a deep breath and just go with the flow. (Well, you can try!)

This book is incredibly BAD. It does not contain MAGIC. Or a mysterious ghost girl. Or spontaneous combustion. Or Spanish-speaking llamas. Nope. None of these things. Okay... maybe one of these things. But certainly not MAGIC. It’s just an ordinary tale of a normal boy who goes to summer camp on a desert island. Nothing exciting or weird happens. The camp is definitely NOT for crazy, badly-behaved kids, and there are NO SECRETS or MYSTERIES at all. And absolutely NO MAGIC whatsoever...

This charming tale from the popular Phonics Readers series has been specially adapted into a new, board book format, complete with embedded sound chips. Pressing the buttons on the pages means children can hear the story as they read along, encouraging confidence in beginner readers.

Language and Identities offers a broad survey of our current state of knowledge on the connections between variability in language use and the construction, negotiation, maintenance and performance of identities at different levels - individual, group, regional and national. It brings together over 20 specially commissioned chapters, written by distinguished international scholars, on a range of topics around the language/identity nexus. The collection deals sequentially with identities at various levels, both social and personal. Using detailed, empirical evidence, the chapters illustrate how the multi-layered, dynamic nature of identities is realised through linguistic behaviour. Several chapters in the volume focus on contexts in which we might expect to observe a foregrounding of factors involved in the definition and delimitation of self and other: for example, cases in which identities may be disputed, changing, blurred, peripheral, or imposed. Such a focus on complex contexts allows clearer insight into the identity-making and -marking functions of language. The collection approaches these topics from a range of perspectives, with contributions from sociolinguists, sociophoneticians, linguistic anthropologists, clinical linguists and forensic linguists.

This book explores the writings of James Joyce from his early poetry and short stories to his final avant-garde work, Finnegans Wake. It examines not only the significance of the ordinary but the function of natural and urban spaces and the moods, voice, and language that give Joyce's works their widespread appeal.

The rules are simple when you live the way Eddie and his sister, Maya do: lay low, trust no one, and make sure you have plenty of duct tape on hand. But Maya is growing up fast. She's forgetting how to play the game and Eddie is finding it harder and harder to keep them both safe from the outside world. When their lives become suddenly complicated through a mistake Maya makes, Eddie begins to lose his composure. And why wouldn't he? He hasn't had time to address his own emotional scars. He's been too busy looking out for his sister. But even in the worst of times, even when you think you've hit rock bottom, there is always hope.Told in the third person, present tense, along with first-person excerpts from the pages of Eddie's sketchbook/journal, THE PICASSO PROJECT is a novel about strength and courage, and what can happen when you finally own your past, let it go and open yourself up to possibility.