SOURCE: "News from the North," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. LXIX, No. 5, September-October, 1993, pp. 636-38.

Ellis is a Canadian author of children's books, an educator, and a children's librarian. In the following excerpt, she applauds King's storytelling abilities and his focus on history, Native themes, and the marginalization of indigenous peoples in A Coyote Columbus Story.

"At the margins is where the meanings are." This conviction, expressed by writer Thomas King, struck a chord in me, as I suspect it would for many children's writers and readers of children's books. The subversive quality of many "classic" children's books has been ably elucidated by Alison Lurie, and I think that quality, a quiet acceptance of alternative values, lives on in children's books even in this mass-market, "hit-driven," conservative publishing climate. King is better known as an adult writer, and the context of his remark was a response to...