BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offers Jimmy the prosperity of his new American home, a large modern house fully equipped with everything, including a capable new wife. In contrast, Jimmy’s mom, Marlene, is a failed wife and a weak, tentative mother. The home she has made for herself and her son “on the Canadian side of nowhere” is provisional and shabby: half finished, ill equipped, badly decorated.
Jimmy’s conflict is writ large as the play dramatizes Canada’s struggle to negotiate a unique identity in the shadow of its brash, superpower neighbour. Although global realities have shifted in the decades since the play’s inception, its themes of personal and cultural identity endure.
Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
Kelly Rebar’s play Bordertown Café won the 1990 CAA for Drama. This comedy-drama is set in a café on the Canadian side of the Alberta/Montana border and is about a family whose members are torn between their unrealized goals and dreams. In addition to theatre, Rebar also writes for television and film and has several screenwriting and story editing credits to her name. She has also adapted several of Alice Munro’s short stories, including the television feature based on Lives of Girls and Women.
“An iconic piece of Prairie Canadiana.”
– Winnipeg Free Press
“Family relationships simmer in humorous cross-border comedy.”
– Ottawa Citizen
“A humorous, human, touching and recognizable look at one family’s search for individual identity.”
– Hamilton Spectator