We had a snow day last Monday. For those of you that know anything about Vancouver, Canada and the surrounding suburbs, a snow day is incredibly rare. I also know that those of you who live in more wintery climates may have been inclined to laugh at the amount of snow that constituted a snow day as I am sure it would have been considered a light dusting in many other areas of the world. In British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, however, a dumping of snow is a rare event and a school closure due to snow an even rarer event.

For my Monday snow day, I decided to take advantage of the unanticipated day off to do some reading. There is something to be said about being able to immerse yourself in a book and read it cover to cover in one sitting as snow softly falls outside your window.

The book I ended up reading was The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, which is a powerful modern dystopian novel where the world has nearly been destroyed by climate change. The majority of the people who have survived the natural disasters that comes with climate change have lost the ability to dream with the exception of the indigenous people of North America who can still dream. Because of this, the indigenous people of North America are being hunted for their bone marrow because their bone marrow carries the key to recovering the ability to dream.

I picked up this book on that snowy Monday because I wanted the time to read it more closely. I had actually first encountered the book a few years ago when it was part of the CBC Canada Reads competition and have since added it to the rotation in my dystopian literature circle unit. Canada Reads is a yearly competition where several Canadian novels are nominated (each year the nominated books all centre around a theme). The Canada Reads website describes the competition as being like a “literary survivor” where each book is read and championed by a Canadian celebrity. Each week the champion of each book will debate the merits of their book and one book a week is voted off until the remaining book is declared champion.

While I have followed Canada Reads for many years, a few years ago I introduced it to my Honours English 11 class and had the students participate in their own version of Canada Reads. In groups, they each choose one of the Canada Reads novels to champion and they participate in our own “literary survivor” in class at the same time as the Canadian celebrities. Using the “literary survivor” model in my class has had a huge impact on my students. They have been introduced to some great Canadian reads, but have also become excited and analytical readers of their novels as they are debating for the survival of their chosen book each week. They love to see how their arguments stand up to the celebrity arguments (and I find my students’ arguments are often much better than the celebrity ones) and to see if the book that survives the longest in our class is the same one that survives in the Canada Reads competition. At the end of the class competition, the students have closely read a novel, analyzed it and debated it without feeling like they have done any work at all.

Pam McMartin is English department head and Senior School teacher librarian at a school in Tsawwassen, British Columbia. She is currently thawing out after our short burst of unusual winter weather and is looking forward to the return of more mild temperatures.

Follow her on twitter @psmcmartin