• Age: 9 to 18
• Grade: 4 to 12

Canadian Library Association Honour Book

Red Cedar Book Award Nomination

When the construction of monster houses alters Ivy's Vancouver neighborhood, she plans a defiant prank. When it backfires, she wonders if her life will ever be the same again.

There Goes the Neighborhood deals not only with issues of race and cultural values, but also addresses how we cope with change.

As a third generation Vancouverite, Valerie Rolfe Lupini fled the city to raise her family on Bowen and Vancouver islands. After the birth of her second son came the publication of her first book There Goes the Neighbourhood, followed by a decade of mothering and homeschooling. After that she wrote her second book, The Whistle, though fiction, developed after she delved into her family's colourfull homesteading history.

Valerie Lupini's profile page

"The success . . . is due to the sober, carefully observed portraits of the children and their cultural differences."
— Books in Canada

"A powerful, thought-provoking story that handles discrimination, compromise, uprooting and friendship meaningfully . . . It is also lively and entertaining."
— Kliatt