• Age: 11 to 15
• Grade: 6 to 10

Leonard prefers to watch the world around him-he doesn't want to "engage" himself, as his controlling mother would put it His observations lead him to discover that we all have our own personal obsessions: he watches his mother struggle for control over her home, her family, her garden; he watches his father grasp at the last vestiges of his youth (with some help from the purchase of a swanky red Corvette) But an unlikely friendship between Leonard and Vivian, the old lady next door with the hot tub, teaches Leonard that sometimes his obsession with watching the world go by is keeping him from truly experiencing his own life to its fullest

Barb Howard is a third-generation Calgarian who worked as a lawyer and a land contract analyst before receiving her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary. In 2009, Barb received the Writers’ Guild of Alberta (Howard O’Hagan) Award for short fiction. She has also won contests in Alberta Views and Canadian Lawyer, and was also a finalist at the Western Magazine Awards. Barb's first novel, Whipstock, was published by NeWest Press in 2001. Since then, Barb has published the novella Notes for Monday (Recliner, 2009), and the young adult novel The Dewpoint Show (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010). Barb currently lives in Bragg Creek, Alberta with her husband, a pair of easygoing sons, and one neurotic dog.

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