2024 Festival:
October 21–27

10: Mecca, Mitzvah, and Milestones (Grades 8–12)

10: Mecca, Mitzvah, and Milestones (Grades 8–12)

All 2022 Festival Youth events can be attended in-person or viewed online. Please ensure that you select the correct ticket option during checkout.

Join two authors renowned for their page-turning plots and deft portrayal of the challenges of navigating family, faith, and one’s evolving identity in teenage years. S. K. Ali’s debut was a finalist for the American Library Association’s William C. Morris Award and winner of the Middle East Book Honor Award. Her latest, Love from Mecca to Medina, is a story about love, adventure—and what it means to lead a spiritual life in the 21st century. Méira Cook’s Adult/ YA crossover novel, The Full Catastrophe, is a tender and funny exploration of defining oneself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets can propel. Moderated by Shannon Ozirny. Grades 8–12.

Event Participants:

S. K. Ali

S. K. ALI is the author of Saints and Misfits, winner of the APALA Honor Award, and Middle East Book Honor Award; and Love from A to Z—the prequel to Love from Mecca to Medina—which was a Today show Read with Jenna Book Club selection. (ONTARIO)

Méira Cook

MÉIRA COOK is the author of previous novels The House on Sugarbush Road—which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award—and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. The Full Catastrophe is her stunning coming of age novel. (MANITOBA/SOUTH AFRICA)

Shannon Ozirny

SHANNON OZIRNY is the Head of Youth Services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. She has taught a children’s materials course as an adjunct at the UBC iSchool, reviewed young adult books for The Globe and Mail and contributes regularly to Quill & Quire as a feature reviewer of picture books.