Children figure large in Canada Reads books

Four of the books chosen by this year's Canada Reads all-star panel are about children or told from a child's point of view.

The panel, featuring winners of the five previous years, introduced their books Monday in the CBC Radio competition to choose a single book that should be read by all Canadians.

Musicians Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo and John K. Samson of The Weakerthans faced off against author and broadcaster Denise Bombardier and novelist Donna Morrissey.

Samson's choice, Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill, is told from the point of view of a Montreal teen who spins stories to help her cope with a harsh life of poverty.

He described the book as a "harrowing and beautiful coming-of-age story."

"It's really about the triumph of story-telling and art, of trying to get you through awful events," he said.

Morrissey chose Anosh Irani's The Song of Kahunsha, a portrait of Mumbai told through the fantasy of a 10-year-old boy.

The boy has "an idyllic vision of what the city will be like and runs away from the orphanage where he lives and discovers great sadness, violence and poverty," she said.

"When you get a gifted child in a deprived environment, they often go inward and when they go inward, they create."

Bombardier wascritical of thechild's eye view in these books, saying it'snot quite believable.

"You see the adult and the writer behind the child A very good writer puts himself or herself in the place of child and it's very difficult to do well," she said.

Bombardier's choice is Gabrielle Roy's Children of My Heart, in which a teacher in rural Manitoba describes the hardscrabble lives of children around her.

Page's choice, Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis, is a short story collection that reflects on the immigrant experience, again from the point of view of a child.

"It is connected short stories about a family that emigrated from Latvia to Toronto in 1980 when the main character is six years old and follows him for 20 years."

This allows an evolution of the protagonist's viewpoint, as he enters adolescence, he said.

Set in Scarborough, it is "an exacting portrait of a community I know pretty well," Page said.

No child as central character

Only Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor's novel about a Vancouver chef's efforts to run a restaurant and reconnect with his homeless father, defended by Cuddy, does not have a child or children as its central characters.

"The father is living in Stanley Park to study the roots, or lack of them, among homeless people," Cuddy said.

Cuddy said he wasn't drawn to the coming-of-age stories in part because of the precocious wisdom shown by the child characters. Stanley Park is about characters who are adults, but still unsettled, he said.

"What I like about the people in the novelare that they are forced to go their own way," Cuddy said.

In a departure from the previous Canada Reads format, panelists were not asked to vote on a book on Monday, but will have Tuesday to again defend their choices.

Canada Reads airs at 11.30 a.m. (12 noon NT) and 7.30 p.m. (8 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio One.