Curriculum Connections: Differences

For Tara and her brother, Suraj, the year their mother and grandfather fled the village of Morni in the middle of the night has been a nightmare. Their new stepmother is cruel and deceptive, and the village itself is lacking a healer. What's more, men of the village have been disappearing, often returning in a strange, altered form.

When a new healer, Zarku, a mysterious man with a third eye possessing strange power, suddenly appears in Morni, all are mesmerized by his magic -- all except Tara, who sees through his evil disguise.

After a shipwreck in 1809, Peter finds himself the victim of amnesia. The sea captain who finds the teenager gives him the only name he knows, while others derisively dub him Peter No-Name.

Fourteen-year-old Casey Templeton has recently moved with his family to the southeastern Alberta town of Richford. One night Casey seeks refuge from a snowstorm in an abandoned farmhouse and stumbles upon his nearly frozen, unconscious science teacher, Mr. Deverell. Casey attempts to revive his teacher and searches the house for something to make a fire with. In the attic he makes a frightening discovery -- a sophisticated office filled with computers, a printer, and racist posters and flyers!

It is the year 2213. Fifteen-year-old Felix Taylor is the last person on Earth who can speak and read Latin. In a world where technology has defeated war, crime, poverty, and famine, and time travel exists as a distinct possibility, Felix's language skills and knowledge seem out of place and irrelevant.

But are they?

Fifteen-year-old Mackenzie Hill knows something is up when she arrives home to find her father making a home-cooked dinner, instead of his standard delivery pizza. But nothing prepares her for the bombshell announcement: Mackenzie and her dad, alone since the death of her mother a year ago, are moving to Jerusalem, where her father has taken a position as a visiting professor at a university.

Living in grim Depression-era Toronto with her actress mother, Frannie, Ivy Chalmers has never met her father.

Avi Greenbaum is Jewish and lives in West Jerusalem. Moussa Shakir is Palestinian and lives in East Jerusalem.

Mike Watson's team has just won the Alberta Bantam Provincial box lacrosse championships.

Meet Little Jane Silver, the twelve year-old granddaughter of notorious Treasure Island pirate Long John Silver.

Johanna is a 14-year-old Jewish girl who lives in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 18th century.