Having a middle-grade author on our blog is a first for us, and we are delighted to kick off what will hopefully be the first of many middle-grad lit features with Anna Rosner, the award-winning author of Eyes on the Ice (Groundwood Books, 2024).

This story follows ten-year-old Lukas and his brother Denys, who want nothing more than to play hockey, but it’s 1963, and they live in Czechoslovakia, where everyone is on the lookout for spies of the state.

This is a thrilling read, and one young readers have been enjoying.

Welcome to the Power Q & A series, Anna!

Q: What is the importance of historical fiction in the high-speed world of young readers today?

A: In his 2015 article from Le Devoir, “Our era traps us in immediacy” (Notre époque nous enferme dans l’immédiateté), Marc Chabot explains that everything in our lives is instantaneous. He laments our detachment from history and literature, or “the permanent”. And this was in 2015, before the creation of TikTok! The immediacy problem has increased exponentially in the past decade. We view thousands of fleeting images, read copious online news bites, and stare blankly at Tweets and videos. We forget scandals and tragedies the moment they are replaced by new scandals and tragedies. It’s almost impossible to navigate this fast-paced world of “now”, and it’s that much harder for a young person.

Which leads me to reading. My years as a doctoral student were easily the calmest of my life, which runs contrary to the experiences of most students. During that time, I lived in books, the primary sources written 300-400 years ago. Reading those early works taught me so much: how women lived, how class systems functioned, how revolutions came to be. I engaged with my work slowly, leisurely, gathered information, and thought about one single sentence for a week or more.

When we encourage a child to read from a young age, their attention span increases. A good book enables them to leave this world of Instagram and the immediate, and take a long, deep breath. Turning a page can be therapeutic. Through the written word, children can visit and learn about places that would otherwise be unknown to them; places that are impossible to grasp in a fifteen second video. Studying history in school can be a challenge for young people, especially when they are obligated to memorize facts and statistics for exams. But when they read historical fiction, it’s less of a struggle. Historical fiction transports the child back in time, teaches them about where we came from and where we went afterwards. It helps them connect past and present. The narrative is history, written in a child’s voice, and it makes learning so much easier. Which is what I hope I accomplished in Eyes on the Ice. Those who read the book won’t be able to explain the effects of Stalin’s tyranny, but they’ll have a general understanding of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. And it’s stories that we remember best.

More about Anna Rosner:

ANNA ROSNER is a teacher and writer who holds a PhD in French literature. She is the award-winning author of two hockey biographies for young readers — Journeyman: The Story of NHL Right Winger Jamie Leach and My Left Skate: The Extraordinary Story of Eliezer Sherbatov. Anna is the director of Books with Wings, which provides new, quality picture books for Indigenous children living in isolated communities. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.