Two mommies

[daemonluna]

The not-so-great: We picked up House on DVD, which means I watched the one ep I hadn't seen yet, 1x04, "Maternity." Kudos to them for completely matter-of-factly having a lesbian couple with a newborn and no-one bats an eye, but the kid died. That's right, the only baby that dies is the lesbians'. Gah.

On the up side, there is The Girl from Turtle Mountain by Deborah Ellis, part of the Our Canadian Girl series (which is a really good mid-elementary historical fiction series with some awesome writers, ie, Deborah Ellis, author of The Breadwinner). Keeley and her father have just moved to the mining town of Frank, Alberta. It's 1901, and if you're from Alberta, you probably know that yup, in two years, that mountain is coming down. (The town of Frank? Is no longer. Instead, there's an interpretative center, and it's on the maps as "Frank Slide." Taking that particular highway always creeped me out as a kid.)

Anyhow, her best friend down the road lives with her two grandmas: "That's me, and there's my mother and father--they're dead--and here's Grandma Mable and here's Grandma Ethel. Well, Grandma Mable is my real grandmother. Ethel is her friend. It's just easier to call them both Grandma."

Hooray for inclusionary representations of same-sex couples outside of problem novels, is all I have to say.

Comments

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they do tend to center around dramatic historical events. I picked up one of all of them for the school. *g* Though I wish they were a bit more culturally diverse--most of the girls are white, though there's one black girl (she and her parents escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad), a Metis girl, and another who's half-Ojibway.

Have you read any of the Dear Canada books? They're a bit older, and all diary-style. And really, you can't go wrong when Jean Little is one of the authors. (She wrote Orphan at My Door, and another one I can't remember write now.)

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

I liked An Ocean Apart, but felt it kind of faltered at the end, plot-wise. I went through a bunch of related books after reading The Jade Peony and All That Matters last year, and The Bone Collector's Son by Paul Yee was also good. (Yeah, from CanLit back to CanKiddyLit, but I say that with the utmost affection.) More of a boy book, with ghost and dead bodies, and a male main char. Dead Man's Gold is also by Paul Yee, and is all awesome ghost stories from Gold Mountain.

Oh, also, Ties that Bind, Ties that Break and the companion book An Ocean Apart, A World Away are great (YA fiction, set in China in the early 1900's.)

... okay, I'll stop now. *g*

[miriam-heddy.livejournal.com]

I would say that it's part of “House” being on FOX, but then again, ER is on NBC, and they couldn't let both parents survive there. Sigh. It's just TV, and it sucks.