Year My Life Turned Upside Down

Told in diary format, 14-year-old Franny journals about the year when she is sent away from the only home she’s known to live with family members she didn’t know she had all while her father goes to Japan on a research trip.

Franny is a feisty 14-year-old with a gift for turning her thoughts and feelings into drawings. She lives in Montreal with her father, a sewing machine repair man by day and inventor by night. When he’s invited to pursue his research in Japan, Franny is sent to a small town far away from Montreal and all her friends. She will meet a part of her family she has never heard of before and will have to adapt to a new school and a new life. Soon, she will discover that this is the town where her mother lived before she died, when Franny was very young. This leads Franny to investigate the mystery behind her mother’s death and discovers a terrible truth.
 

Author Stéphanie Lapointe is a jack-of-all-trades who loves to do everything - even the dishes because it relaxes her. When she sings, records, plays the piano, or plays characters in TV series or movies, she feels good. Even if she does not particularly like to get on a plane (especially not the little ones with doors through which the air from outside infiltrates), Stéphanie does it occasionally to go and shoot different documentary projects. 

It is thanks to one of her friends that Stéphanie embarked on the adventure of writing. She has won the Governor General’s Award for her book Grandfather and the Moon, as well as for the Fanny Cloutier series.

She is well-known in Canada as she is a singer, song writer, actress and humanitarian activist. She is known for winning the second season of the reality TV show Star Académie, winning the title of “next solo singing sensation”.

Today, Stéphanie lives in Montreal in a white and pink house she built with someone she loves.

Illustrator Marianne Ferrer was born in Venezuela and arrived in Canada as a child. She started drawing at the age of three and never stopped since. She works surrounded by plants and animals (her little dogs Negrita and Pancake) “because I need life around me. She is known for her original, personal style. She worked for almost three years with Stephanie Lapointe to create the Franny Cloutier series.

Translator Ann Marie Boulanger was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to an anglophone mother and a francophone father. After earning a college diploma in liberal arts, she heard about an acquaintance who was studying translation… and that’s when the lightbulb went off!

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in translation from Montreal’s Concordia University, she was hired by start-up translation firm Traduction Proteus Inc., which she now owns. When she’s not translating novels and children’s books, Ann Marie is an accomplished medical translator.

A life-long learner, Ann Marie earned an MA in translation studies from Concordia in 2018. She is a mentor, a trainer, and a part-time lecturer in translation studies at McGill University. Her first literary translation, The Woman in Valencia, by Annie Perreault, was named a World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2021. She lives in Montreal with her son.