Long-listed for the 2011 ReLit Awards Jim Myers is a painfully shy kid living in Toronto’s west end Bloorcourt Village. Rarely is he able to muster enough courage to say anything beyond "ya" or "dunno." After school he hangs around with his neighbour and only friend, Oleg Khernofsky, playing basketball against a NO PARKING sign in a laneway. In the evenings, he haunts Nicky’s Diner, a restaurant owned by Oleg’s uncle. On the first day of junior high, Jim crosses paths with Charlie Crouse, a brash, mouthy kid full of wild stories about his past. Charlie takes Jim under his wing and introduces him to the electronic strip poker machine at the Fun Village Arcade in Koreatown, a Queen Street hooker who calls herself Steffi Graf, and the diverse sounds and utterances of his landlord’s three lovers. As Jim and Charlie’s friendship grows, however, the realities of looming adulthood seep into their lives with surprising consequences.

As a fatherless girl with a mother who persistently encouraged her daughter’s artistic temperament, Anna Wells is highly sensitive to the life developing in her when she discovers she is pregnant. Anna’s gynecologist boyfriend, Kevin, considers the time just not right to have children, so Anna moves to a 100-year-old house in Bareneed, an abandoned cove in Newfoundland, where she takes comfort in renovating the interior of her new home and working on a series of paintings detailing roses. Paralleling Anna’s own journey is a minutely detailed, day-by-day development of the embryo. All goes well until a car arrives delivering a court summons. Kevin has filed a statement of claim seeking the termination of the embryo as "return of property." One night, while still in Bareneed and upset over the impending legal action, Anna discovers an abandoned little girl almost frozen to death in her front yard. Mysterious circumstances continue to surround the children in Bareneed as pro-choice and pro-life factions marshal their forces.

Nina Dolgoy leads her neighbours on a campaign to renovate the community pool, but the only way she can think to raise money is to rob a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it. In a part of town so beaten down that even prostitutes and drug dealers have written if off, Nina Dolgoy imagines that if the local pool wasn’t boarded up, her little daughters could use it to burn off their wayward energy and avoid falling into utter degradation. So the bitterly self-proclaimed "welfare queen" leads her neighbours on a fundraising, pool-fixing community-improvement campaign that proves the sad old adage that no good deed ever goes unpunished. The only way Nina can think to raise money herself is by robbing a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it. Coincidentally, her brother, Frank, gets out of jail and robs one. The explosive events that are unleashed force Nina and the girls to flee for their lives, but their escape turns into a sublimely bizarre chase during which Nina somehow needs to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes.

A dark comedy about a young man’s aspirations to be something better than he currently is. Frustrated 35-year-old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father’s plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac’s had dreams of attending the University of Michigan that fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn’t stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical textbook and journal available to him. For practical experience, Isaac performs surgeries on the wildlife around his house, preparing for the day he attends Michigan. Yet the years continue to pass and Isaac remains stuck in Paradise, Michigan, as a plumber. That is, until this year, when an event pushes him to apply as an undergraduate for the first time. Exit Papers from Paradise is about the gap between the person we are and the person we desperately want to be.

Mort Halbman is the prime suspect in an arson investigation when his family home burns down, and he feels compelled to continually return to the ruins and to the memories the place still holds for him. Haunted by the memories of his former home and life, Mort Halbman risks everything in a daring attempt at a last shot at redemption. Halbman is a crotchety, divorced, 65-year-old garment manufacturer, who laments losing the one true love of his life, the Montreal Expos. Now the dream home he built in the late 1960s in the exclusive Montreal suburb of Hampstead, where he lived with his family for 20 years, has burned down under mysterious circumstances, andMort finds himself the prime suspect in an arson investigation. Meanwhile, his estranged gay son, Jacob, has announced that he’s getting married and wants Mort to participate in the rabbi-officiated same-sex ceremony along with his ex-wife, Mona, and her insufferable boyfriend, Gordon, Canada’s book reviewer extraordinaire. It’s the last thing Mort wants to do. He feels compelled to continually return in his Jaguar to the burned-out ruin of his former home, and to the memories the place still holds for him. With pathos and humour, Halbman Steals Home tells the story of Mort’s daring attempt to risk everything for a last shot at redemption.

Psychologists offer an increasing variety of services to the public. Among these services, psychological assessment of personality and behavior continues to be a central activity. One main reason is that other mental health professionals often do not possess a high level of competence in this area. And when dealing with children and adolescents, psychological assessment seems to take on an even greater role. Therefore, it follows that comprehensive graduate-level instruction in assessment should be a high priority for educators of psychologists who will work with these youth. This textbook is organized into three sections, consistent with the authors’ approach to teaching. Part I provides students with the psychological knowledge base necessary for modern assessment practice, including historical perspectives, measurement science, child psychopathology, ethical, legal, and cultural issues, and the basics of beginning the assessment process. Part II gives students a broad review of the specific assessment methods used by psychologists, accompanied by specific advice regarding the usage and strengths and weaknesses of each method. In Part III, we help students perform some of the most sophisticated of assessment practices: integrating and communicating assessment results and infusing assessment practice with knowledge of child development and psychopathology to assess some of the most common types of behavioral and emotional disorders in youth. A text focusing on assessment practices must be updated every four to six years to keep pace with advances in test development. For example, several of the major tests reviewed in the text, such as the Behavioral Assessment System for Children and the Child Behavior Checklist, have undergone major revisions since the publication of the last edition making the current content outdated. Further, another major test, the Conners’ Rating Scales, is undergoing substantial revisions that should be completed before publication of the next edition. Finally, the evidence for the validity of the tests and the recommendations for their appropriate use evolve as research accumulates and requires frequent updating to remain current. For example, there was a special issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology published focusing on evidenced-based assessment of the major forms of childhood psychopathology that will need to be integrated into the chapters in Part 3. This latter point reflects an important trend in the field that should influence the marketing of the book. That is, there are several initiatives being started in all of the major areas of applied psychology (e.g., school, clinical, and counseling) to promote evidenced-based assessment practices. These initiatives have all emphasized the need to enhance the training of graduate students in this approach to assessment. This has been the orientation of this textbook from its first edition: that is, Clinical Assessment of Child and Adolescent Personality and Behavior has focused on using research to guide all recommendations for practice. The ability of the textbook to meet this training need should be an important focus of marketing the book to training programs across all areas of applied psychology.

Jim Myers is a shy kid living in Toronto's Bloorcourt Village. On the first day of junior high, Jim crosses paths with Charlie Crouse, a brash, mouthy boy full of wild stories about his past and present. Charlie takes Jim under his wing, and as their friendship grows, the realities of adulthood seep into their lives with surprising consequences.

2015 IPPY Award Silver Medalist in the Parenting Category In moving and refreshingly candid prose, Rescuing Julia Twice tells Traster's foreign-ado!--?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /--ption story, from dealing with the bleak landscape and inscrutable adoption handlers in Siberia, to her feelings of inexperience and ambivalence at being a new mother in her early forties, to her grow­ing realization over months then years that something was "not quite right" with her daughter, Julia, who remained cold and emo­tionally detached. Why wouldn't she look her parents in the eye or accept their embraces? Why didn't she cry when she got hurt? Why didn't she make friends at school? Traster de­scribes how uncertainty turned to despair as she blamed herself and her mothering skills for her daughter's troublesome behavioral is­sues, until she came to understand that Julia suffered from reactive attachment disorder, a serious condition associated with infants and young children who have been neglect­ed, abused, or orphaned in infancy. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /-- Hoping to help lift the veil of secrecy and shame that too often surrounds parents struggling with attachment issues, Traster describes how with work, commitment, and acceptance, she and her husband have been able to close the gulf between them and their daughter to form a loving bond, and concludes by providing practical advice, strategies, and resources for parents and caregivers.

Rob Rimes' largest work yet, Scalping Jackals covers the day-to-day developments of the 2012 presidential election cycle from the earliest moments of the Republican primary debates all the way through to the final result of the showdown between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Deconstructing every event in this 18 month political journey from the point-of-view of an often times inebriated Ron Paul supporter, Rimes offers up the same hardcore commentary and insight he has been best known for in his previous books, as well as on his former blog TheSwash.com. A year and a half in the making and several thousand shots of bourbon later, Rob Rimes leaves you with his magnum opus - the story of a man going from trying to tame and overcome the failed political process to loathing it to the point of anarchistic disdain. Don't say that you haven't been warned; this isn't for the faint of heart or the overly sensitive and easily offended.