I've been thinking a lot about how when I was a kid white settler Canada seemed like just the way of things and we knew we had a lot of shit to answer for and yeah yeah there were a lot of Songhees kids at my school and yeah yeah yeah also "white" meant "multicultural" but mostly white and all that, but a human lifetime is long, and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting some kind of a look in on historical time and recognizing how very different the Canada of 2100 will look from anything the children of 1980, still weirdly steeped in British imperial pageantry, could recognize. Nothing's permanent, even though everyone feels it is. And I'm not of course saying anything like "oh this white boy ghost and the Chinese boy who replaced him," which is far from the intent of this book, but the white boy's world was the one we were taught we belonged to, were the continuation of, where the fact is waves of migration will come eternally and change this place, and that's a much bigger and more amazing thing but there is also an undeniable ghostly feeling to it. ( )

This book is a story about a little boy who is adjusting to a new country through his new friendship with the boy in the attic. A little boy moves to the United States from China. Playing in his new backyard, he spots a boy in the attic next door, which turns out to be the ghost of the little boy that used to live in the house. The boys understand each other even though they do not actually speak the same language. The book is a story about friendship and afterlife.

Genre: Fiction
Age(s): 6-10 ( )