Showing titles in Coming of Age

Life is meant to be an adventure rich in love & laughter. Eight very different little girls going off on adventures that most children can only dream and imagine. Be it traveling to another world straight out of an RPG game or a Fantasy anime. Or becoming superheroes, protecting their home while struggling to find the balance of a college student. Or going off to discover the urban tales that had been passed down for generations.

Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz—a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights. It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi's mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist who’s lived and worked in Winnipeg all his life. He’s more or less content with the quiet and predictable days he shares with his partner of twenty-five years, Tony. That is, until he hears that Birdy O’Day—washed-up music icon and Roland’s childhood best friend and first love—is playing his first concert in Winnipeg since fleeing decades earlier. Holing up with a scrapbook of news clippings about Birdy, Roland recalls his childhood in the ’60s and his friendship with Birdy until the pair became estranged when Birdy left in pursuit of stardom.

When Anastasia’s beloved mother dies, she has no choice but to go to rural Skimpole and move in with ‘the Aunt’ – too fearsome for a first name, an outcast from the village who lives in a dilapidated mansion with two servants and an unruly pack of dogs. The many mysteries of Skimpole are irresistibly intriguing: how did Anastasia’s father really die? Who wrote the extremely raunchy love letters she has found in the Aunt’s bedroom, signed ‘Big Willy’? And why does everyone in the village hate the Aunt so much?

A local celebrity in the arts community of Quesinberry, Lolly Scarberry shines as one of the main acts at the Lotus Theatre. Always one to wear her heart on her sleeve, Lolly earns the affections of others quickly, loving openly and treating everyone with considerable care—even the town’s resident outsider MackLynn Brooks. A college transplant, Mack has thought about skipping town every day since graduation, but after years hanging around, it allowed her an accidental meeting with Lolly, and solidified her planting in the town she hates.

It’s the west end of Toronto, the apartments are small, and everybody is twenty-seven and making some kind of art. In the wake of her mother’s death, Sophie pays rent by making stained glass mosaics for rich people and plays house with her childhood friend and sometimes-lover, the beautiful boy Alex. Both are from Newfoundland but move easily in this world of crowded patios and DIY movie shoots. When Sophie meets the glamorous poet Maggie, who is the downtown product of a hundred cool queer bars, she falls into a bewildered infatuation.