The Can Caravan (Travellers Tales)

When Janie’s neighbor Mrs Tolen goes into hospital with a broken hip, it looks as though she will have to move out of her old caravan and into a house. Janie is desperate to help, but all seems lost until her school visits a local recycling plant. All it takes from there is imagination, a supportive community, and lots and lots of hard work to transform Mrs Tolen’s old caravan into a safe and secure new home!

Wanjiku, Child Of Mine

No matter where she goes, or how big she grows, Wanjikũ knows her name. In the lush Kenyan countryside, a young Gikũyũ girl helps her grandmother with daily tasks. Here, as she tends to the cows, carries water, and plays in the fruit trees and sugarcane, she is called Wanjikũ. On the busy city streets of Nairobi, where she goes to school, she is called by her English name, Catherine. But at home with Wangarĩ, the maid who cooks and cares for her, she is again Wanjikũ. All grown up in boarding school, Catherine is the leader of her class, surrounded by friends from different cultural backgrounds. But at night, when she gathers with her fellow Gikũyũ sisters to speak her mother tongue, she is Wanjikũ once more. Gloriously illustrated, alive with the joie de vivre of girlhood, and based on the author’s own beloved childhood memories, Wanjikũ, Child of Mine is an ode to the heritage that walks alongside us, and a love song for the sisters we make on the journey.

Stitches Of Tradition

As she grows up, Tatiana, a young Ojibwe girl, celebrates the big events of her life by wearing the beautiful ribbon skirts she creates with her nookomis (grandmother), a tradition connecting her to generations of her family.

Alfred Nobel: The Man Behind The Peace Prize: Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel was the man who founded what became known as The Nobel Prizes. Nobel also invented dynamite, becoming very wealthy from his invention. Saddened by its use for harmful destruction, Nobel left his fortune to create yearly prizes for those who have rendered the greatest services to mankind.

Tamales For Christmas

Before the first Christmas light is strung, Grandma is hard at work, making thousands of tamales to sell so she can buy gifts for her family!

The Ofrenda That We Built

The candles are lit, the food is prepared, and the sweet smell of copal floats in the air on Día de Muertos. Built with love and dedication, the family ofrenda stands with pride. As everyone gathers to share in this ritual, each element added to the ofrenda is infused with significance-from the sugar skulls placed with care on top of the embroidered cloth to the golden petals that guide the way. Told after the style of the English nursery rhyme, The House That Jack Built. The Ofrenda That We Built invites readers to learn about and celebrate the Day of the Dead by joining in the building of a family ofrenda. With warmth and brightness, this gorgeously illustrated book is a joyful ode to family traditions, bonds that transcend time, and the memory of loved ones who have passed but who we continue to remember.

Chaos Monster (Secrets Of The Sky, Book One)

Ten year old Kinjal knows something strange is going on. But he does not expect his dog, Thums up, to disappear before his eyes in the middle of the night! Even stranger, two enormous flying horses appear and insist on taking Kinjal and his twin sister, Kiya, to a place they have never heard of: the Sky Kingdom. The twins have no choice but to go if they want to see their dog again, even if that isn’t why the winged pakkhiraj horses showed up in the first place. They have come to this dimension to seek help, bees are disappearing, along with the nectar the horses need to survive. Whisked away to a magical realm, the twins must use Kiya’s scientific skills and Kinjal’s love of books and language to help the horses. Once there, they discover that the disappearance of the bees is more nefarious than they thought, and the plot goes all the way to the top.

Uprising

Twelve year old Lidia’s life is forever changed by the Nazi occupation of Poland, leading her to join the resistance movement to fight against the Nazis and aid Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII.

The Immortal Boy

“Two intertwining stories of Bogotá. One, a family of five children, left to live on their own. The other, a girl in an orphanage who will do anything to befriend the mysterious Immortal Boy”–

Lipstick Jihad

As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution. Moaveni’s homecoming falls in the heady days of the country’s reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran’s rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran — ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes — is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.