Penny’s Triumphant Turnaround by Stacey MacLean, illustrated by Danelle Vautour

One is never too old for a picture book. Penny’s Triumphant Turnaround by Stacey MacLean, illustrated by Danelle Vautour, is a picture book with a difference.

Cover of Ups and Downs. A drawing of a woman carrying a girl by piggyback on a yellow background.

UPS and DOWNS by Nancy MacNairn and illustrated by Doruntina Beqiraj

She reads them beautiful stories and loves them very much giving them lots of hugs and kisses. But she suffers from Ups and Downs. Some days she has so much energy that she is up all night doing laundry, some days she has no energy and spends the day in bed.

The Suicide Tourist by Myna Wallin

Wallin leaves no stone unturned in this collection, probing her memories to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, as well as coming to terms with being an unreliable narrator of her own life, and what it means to be disabled in a world that has yet to accept the less “challenging” forms of mental illness.

The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War by Kristen den Hartog

A trickle that began in 1915
turned to a flood of soldiers returning to Canada needing care for their often-devastating injuries:
missing limbs, ravaged lungs, faces and minds destroyed. Many of them ended up at Toronto’s
newly opened Christie Street hospital, also known as the Dominion Orthopedic Hospital (DOH).

A green cover with three flowers. A white flower in the top left hand corner, a yellow flower in the bottom left, and a red flower in the bottom right. The title is in the center of the image, and a blurb is on the top right.

Medicinal Perennials to Know and Grow

Some of my musings of late have been inspired by this rather practical little book which reminds us that flowers aren’t only there to be beautiful. Many of them offer health benefits and — best of all, as far as the lazy gardener in me insists — the flowers in these pages, perennials, keep coming up on their own, year after year.

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health by Jason Schreurs

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health follows the transformational journeys of Schreurs and the other punks he learns from, revealing the healing power of a misunderstood and underestimated music community.