The latest installment of Joan Givner's series about a klutzy, feisty, brainy heroine named Ellen (Ellen Fremedon; Ellen Fremedon Journalist; Ellen Fremedon Volunteer) presents the adolescent, would-be writer from Vancouver Island with her most heart-wrenching challenge.

At first, Ellen's summer is full of promise. Pressured into competing in a provincial debating tournament and dressed down by the judge for wearing jeans and a juice-stained t-shirt, she goes home triumphant with the silver cup for best speech. So she's off to Toronto for a glorious month of big-city shopping, museums, concerts and art galleries.

Best of all, Ellen will be leaving behind her little brothers and their ghoulish delight in spiders. Then a call comes: Ellen's mom, who's been bedridden with MS, has been rushed to the hospital. That's the set-up for Ellen's Book of Life.

After her mother's death Ellen spends a lot of time down

at the marina where she stomps on washed-up baby crabs and kills them. She throws her best friend Jenny's unopened notes and gifts in the garbage. She rages at her Dad for encouraging Gran, her mom's mother, to come around more often.

Then she finds a hand-written letter that begins, "My dearest Ellen, One day you will want to find your birth mother...";

When Ellen's resultant search leads her hesitantly to a lawyer's office in Vancouver, she's astonished to discover the lawyer is the same short-tempered, frizzy-haired judge who chewed her out at the debating contest. And more astonishing-and downright appalling-this woman turns out to be her birth mother.

Ellen hopes to never see her birth mother, Sarah Maslin, ever again, and she believes the feeling must be mutual, but she finds herself increasingly taking the ferry back and forth to Vancouver. In a matter of weeks she finds herself growing closer to a new grandmother who deepens her awareness of a Jewish heritage.

And so Ellen learns about eating kosher, the sham children's opera performed at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the Book of Life, opened on Rosh Hashanah, in which the names of the righteous are listed.

Ellen's Book of Life concludes with the celebratory Seder meal and its symbolic foods-the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread-and a girl moving on with tentative resiliency and a slowly healing heart.

A self-described "sober academic type,"; Joan Givner lives in Mill Bay, a seaside village much like Ellen's hometown.

978-0-88899-853-8

[BCBW 2009] "Teenlit"