Through Different Eyes

Indigenous teenager Brenda Joe is driven to find notoriety by having a relationship and sleeping with an older man, so she pursues Michael Clydesdale, eventually sleeps with him, and becomes pregnant at 16. At the same time, her aunt Monica leaves a relationship in Vancouver and returns to the Island and falls in love Michael. This engaging Canadian novel for grades 10-12 is suitable as an independent or literature circle novel to encourage critical thinking, to explore family dynamics, relationships in small communities, foster care, decision-making and its implications, colonialism, and the residential school system, and to study characterization, conflict, and point of view.