"In an unflinching look at love, sex, and fertility, and inspired by real stories of mothers during the Canadian birth-control movement of the early twentieth century, one of Canada's most celebrated playwrights vividly recreates a couple's struggles with reproduction. It's Ottawa in the 1920s, before birth control is legalized. Sophie, a young working-class girl, falls madly in love with her sister's suitor, and eventually marries, a stablehand named Jonny. After two difficult childbirths, doctors tell Sophie she shouldn't have any more children, but don't tell her how to prevent it. When Sophie inevitably becomes pregnant again, she faces a grim dilemma."--

Howard Engel has written the perfect parody of a present day Christmas in the suburbs. In his irreverant yet delightfully nostalgic style, Howard Engel tells a story of family, laughter and love. Engel's ear for the rhythm of Thomas' original book combined with his hilarious accounts of uncles, aunts and cousins stuffed into an overcrowded living room, draining the punch bowl and scavenging for presents, brilliantly captures the comic and nostalgic moments of the season.

Nearly 14, Pauline has discovered that her life is far more interesting if she records it as a great work of fiction -- featuring, of course, herself as the tragic heroine. Pauline's hand-wringing accounts of misbehaving boyfriends, backstabbing friends, and general angst are intermingled with more serious issues like her parents' divorce and her beloved teacher's loss of a best friend to AIDS. Laced with the pop-culture references young readers love, Pauline's "novel" reveals the realities of today's teenage life.

With life simply overflowing with pungent melodrama, it's all Pauline and her purple pen can do to record each twist of the plot. First, her best friend splits to become a teen ice queen. Then, Pauline's dragged into the revolting details of her divorcing parents' love life. And to top it off, she finds herself falling for a self-described "neo-existentialist" -- much to the displeasure of her loyal boyfriend. How will she ever write her way out of this one?

"Eva is unlike anyone Adele and her two sons have ever met. Her rare beauty, the dazzling tales she tells them - of her travels, of wondrous places and creatures, even of the dangers she faced during the war - change their lives, as do the exquisite illuminations contained within the pages of the Miscellany. The two boys, Joseph and Asa, fall in love with Eva, and as Joseph recounts the story and his love for her, and the past begins to intrude upon the present, he finally reveals the novel's secrets, the darkness to which we are all subject."--BOOK JACKET.