Skip to content

Rossland's 21st century reads

Rossland Reads returns with the theme of award-winning Canadian novels of the 21st century.

Once again it's time for Rossland Reads and this year's theme is award-winning Canadian novels of the 21st century.

Based on Canada Reads, Rossland Reads pits four debaters against one another, each defending their own book.

Lise Levesque will be defending The Birth House by Ami McKay, Penny Johnson will be defending Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, Maddie Snelgrove will be defending This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, and Jane Therriault will be defending The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.

The four debaters will defend their books in a debate led by Jennifer Ellis, who's moderating for the third year in a row.

“She's got a pretty good system down,” said Beverley Rintoul, director of the Rossland Public Library. “She asks questions that surprise the debaters, and I always think that's a good thing.”

The first debate will be held on Thursday, Nov. 5 at New Editions Café & Books, and before the night is over one of the four books will be eliminated, but the defender of the eliminated book will still return the next week to participate in the debate.

The other two debates will be on Nov. 12 and 19.

Audience members will have the chance to vote for the book they think should win, and can ask debaters questions while the votes are being counted.

Debaters also get to vote and get two votes each.

For those who miss a debate, this year there will be a podcast to help them catch up.

“I went and recorded an intro podcast with Aerin Guy of SpaceRace the week before last,” says Rintoul. “That one will be going up hopefully this week. They'll be on our website. And all the debaters and our moderator are going in beforehand to sort of do introducing themselves, and then that'll be another podcast.”

Podcasts of all three debates will also be posted to the library website.

As for audience participation during the debate, Rintoul says so far there's been no heckling. In fact so far the proceedings have been very Canadian.

“[The debaters] were all pretty polite. They would say something mean about somebody else's book and then apologize,” she says.

Two copies of each book are available at the library and New Editions Café & Books has the books for sale.