"On Our Radar" is a monthly 49th Shelf series featuring books with buzz worth sharing. We bring you links to features and reviews about great new books in a multitude of genres from all around the Internet.

*****

Becoming Lin, by Tricia Dower

Reviewed by Tom Sandborn in the Vancouver Sun:

Moving, well-crafted and thoughtful, Becoming Lin is a novel of ideas and of politics in the very best sense. Dower shows us the tectonic shifts that undergird a culture in transition while respecting and bringing to life the fine grain human details of the characters living out their own poignant stories on that shifting ground.

(Read the whole review here)

**

In This Together, by Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail (Editor)

Profiled by Michael Hingston at the Edmonton Journal

The book’s guiding principle is that reconciliation is a thorny, complicated subject that involves asking tough questions and, particularly if you’re not aboriginal yourself, doing a lot more listening than talking. But that’s no reason to avoid it altogether. On the contrary, In This Together wades enthusiastically into that complexity. And as a result, its 15 individual voices become much louder than the sum of their parts.

(Read the whole review here)

**

The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, by Sue Goyette

Reviewed by Vicki Ziegler at Bookgaga 

Sue Goyette’s The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl has left me breathless and heartbroken by a tragic story uniquely depicted. Goyette’s series of linked poems has also left me awestruck once again at her singular gifts for evoking emotion and revelations through startling juxtapositions of animate and inanimate, real and imagined, quick and dead, soulless and spiritual. 

(Read the whole review here)

**

Righting Canada's Wrongs: Residential Schools, by Melanie Florence

Reviewed by Jen Bailey at the National Reading Campaign

This resource-rich book is sure to spark both class and individual exploration. An index, glossary, and timeline will help teens navigate the rich content in this book, while links to online video and audio clips and the “For Further Reading” section will guide them beyond its pages. Teachers will also find lesson plans and other helpful tools in an accompanying series Resource Guide.

(Read the whole review here)

**

Elliot, by Julie Pearson and Manon Gauthier

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bird at School Library Journal

Cancer. Absentee parents. Down syndrome. Explaining just one of these issues at a time is hard. Explaining two at one time? I’d say it was almost impossible. Julie Pearson’s book Elliot takes on that burden, attempting to explain both the foster system and children with emotional developmental difficulties at the same time. It works in some ways, and it doesn’t work in others, but when it comes to the attempt itself it is, quite possibly, heroic.

(Read the whole review here)