Peacekeepers (Coteau Books, 2003)

Nellie Letitia Hopkins is a student in Grade Seven at James A. Wyandotte School, known to her unaffectionately as JAWS. Nell, as she prefers to be called, is new to the school, having moved to her Uncle Martin's house while her mother is away on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. Included in the move and complicating the mix is her highly imaginative eight-year-old brother Mike.

Nell is angry at her mother for "caring more about kids in a far away country than she does for her own children." She feels she needs her own peacekeeper when she becomes the target of increasingly vicious bullying behavior at school. But she's afraid to tell the principal, even though he's interested. Her Uncle is a bachelor who doesn't inspire confidence and her brother is just a little kid.

Nell's only friend is a boy named Sam she meets at school and indirectly his mysterious brother Ziad who sometimes makes it his business to take care of her. She imagines her own life as a series of land mine encounters. But when she reads e-mails from her mother and becomes caught up in the story of a little boy named Edin whose daily life half way around the world really involves those encounters, tragedy becomes all too real a part of her life. As she comes to terms with that tragedy, she begins to understand the true nature of peace.

Peacekeepers is a novel recommended for Grade Seven by Alberta Education, and Grade Eight by Saskatchewan Learning. A complete teacher's guide, written by the author, is available for free downloading at Coteaubooks.com under teacher's resources.

Praise for Peacekeepers

In Peacekeepers, [Ms.] Linden has deftly crafted a strong coming-of-age story with such complex themes as a twelve-year-old girl enduring cruel bullying at school while her mother, ironically, is on a Canadian peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, thousands of kilometers away.
Olenka Melnyk, The Edmonton Journal

Peacekeepers by Dianne Linden is one of those books everyone in the family will enjoy.
Lisa Crandall, The Maple Leaf

Labels are handy for your preserves and files, but when it comes to a good book, a label can be misleading. Peacekeepers, Edmonton's Dianne Linden's first novel, is labeled "juvenile fiction" but this beautiful, multi-layered story is for everyone.
Carolyn Pogue, The Observer