The Several Lives of Orphan Jack - Softcover

SARAH ELLIS is a celebrated author, teacher and children’s literature expert. She has written more than twenty books across the genres, and her books have been translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Chinese and Japanese. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award (Pick-Up Sticks), the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award (Odd Man Out) and the Sheila Egoff Award. Her first novel, The Baby Project, remains a children’s classic, still in print more than thirty years after publication.

Sarah is a masthead reviewer for the Horn Book Magazine, and she is a former faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Bruno St-Aubin is one of Canada's most renowned children's book illustrators and to date has written or illustrated over 130 picture books and novels.

*Starred Review* Gr. 3-6. Jack lives at the Opportunities School for Orphans, where his most cherished possession is a battered dictionary, with the B section missing. When he learns that he will be apprenticed to a firm of bookkeepers, he's ecstatic; he thinks he'll be protecting books. But when the job turns out to be adding numbers ("sums, sameness, and scorn is the life of a Ledger lad"), he takes off, making a detour at a fair, where everything changes after he spontaneously tells a woman that he sells "whims." Soon the somber townsfolk are not only paying for Jack's whims (by gluing little pieces of metal to the soles of your shoes, you can makes music when you dance) but also his concepts, plans, opinions, notions, and fancies. Ellis has created a small gem here, with messages about following your heart tucked into the sentences, phrases, thoughts, and ideas that she seamlessly weaves together. By ingeniously ending each chapter with Jack's dictionary words describing each new circumstance ("boldness and bundles . . . that's the life of an ex-bookkeeper"), she threads a ribbon through the book that sews together both the joy of language and the vicissitudes of a life of possibilities. St-Aubin's ink-and-wash pictures are not always up to the text, but his jaunty cover art will draw in readers. Ilene Cooper
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