• Age: 12 to 18
• Grade: 7 to 12

The Courtship is a collection of short stories with characters from the very young to the elderly who seem uncannily familiar to us in their pain, delight, and love.

In The Dress a child's birthday party turns into a bizarre psychodrama. In The Courtship seventy-seven-year-old Mrs. Knickle romantically pursues eighty-year-old Mr. Van Buskirk with some hesitation, however, as she has come to enjoy her afternoons of peanut butter sandwiches and reading. And in Elliot's Daughter a writer, not only unrequited in love but unpublished, confesses his frustrations to his diary.

Budge Wilson (b. 1927) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and lived in Kingston, Ontario, before moving back to North West Cove, Nova Scotia. A former commercial artist and photographer, she has written more than twenty books, many of them for children and young adults; her awards include the Ann Connor Brimer Award for children's literature. "Mr. Manuel Jenkins" is included in her story collecton The Leaving (Anansi, 1991).

Budge Wilson's profile page