Kate's Ring

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About Kate's Ring

Product Description "Grassby's portrait of the urban and rural communities of Nova Scotia are filled with details of a bygone era, but astute readers will see contemporary echoes in Kate's tribulations." --Booklist "Kate's Ring is a marvellous story, a modern day Anne of Green Gables, gritty, sometimes desperate, tender, and in the end triumphant. It tears at your heart." --Sandra Birdsell An industrial town where smoke laden with reddish-orange dust from the steel plant darkens the sky. A place where it's not easy to raise a family, especially one with its fair share of problems. But thirteen-year-old Kate takes on the responsibility and tries to keep her embattled family going. And it's Kate, in the end, who thinks she can get her parents, her brothers and sisters through heartbreak and tragedy. Set in a hardscrabble East Coast town in the 1920's, Donna Grassby's novel paints a vivid portrait of people in crisis, exploring issues as relevant today as they were then. The resolution leans as much on hope as it does on family. Review "Kate's Ring is a beautiful story about a family struggling to deal with illness and loss. The adults in Kate's family cannot solve their problems or even agree on how to try. Still, the whole family rallies, and this ring of family support allows them all to emerge from their tragedies with hope. Kate's Ring is a triumphant and moving coming-of-age story."— Foreword Reviews Starred review "Kate's Ring, by Donna Grassby, is a well-written, grittily realistic story set in 1925-6 Cape Breton about a 13-year-old girl taking on adult responsibilities in a dysfunctional family. Many readers may find that their own problems pale in comparison to Kate's. Other readers, those with challenges in their lives to do with family, will read this book and feel they are not alone. They may even gain some insights into their situation. . . In the last third of Kate's Ring, Kate is severely tested, not only by having to care for the younger children in a shack, but also by her mother's deteriorating physical and mental condition and tragic death. The hardest thing for Kate to accept is that she is not a superwoman and cannot do the impossible. It is this message that will resonate with readers of today, particularly those facing tough circumstances and decisions. The novel rings with authenticity, both in dialogue and in geographic and historic detail.Highly Recommended"— CM Magazine "Setting Kate's Ring in 1920s Cape Breton, Donna Grassby makes sure young readers see that childhood was not always about play and school. Sometimes it was whatever was needed to help the family out. And by contrasting life in towns and in rural areas, where you might or might not have electricity and plumbing, where travel happened by horse, car and train, and not all children were fortunate enough to go to school, Donna Grassby embeds that story of loss and hardship in families of different shapes. It's family created, sustained and reconfigured that makes Kate's Ring real for the time and for now."— CanLit for Little Canadians "What did you like about the book? The story here is riveting, wondering just how it will all end up, how Kate will cope along with her family. The location of Cape Breton is very real and as alive as the characters.Anything you did not like about the book. No.To whom would you recommend this book? American kids encounter very few books written by Canadian authors that take place in Canada. The exposure here is really worth a read. It could be used as a classroom readaloud.Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4.5"— Youth Services Book Review "Use this novel to teach about equity in the classroom and society, to expose students to the issue of autism, and to demonstrate that a seeming disability might really be none other than a different way of perception and navigating daily life."— Canadian Teacher Magazine "Grassby's portrait of the urban and rural communities of Nova Scotia ar