It’s Dani’s first summer break, her best one ever! Dani is staying on an island with Ella, her best friend in the world. They play all day long. They build huts, fish, and spy on wild animals. They go swimming five, six, seven times a day.
Featured in WOW Review Volume X, Issue 1.
The sun is setting, and everyone in the forest is getting sleepy. The mice, rabbits, and deer all give great big yawns as they snuggle up with their families for the night. But someone isn’t sleepy just yet.
For fourteen-year-old Alix, life on Hayling Island off the coast of England seems insulated from problems such as war, terrorism and refugees. But when Alix and her friend Samir go to the beach and pull a drowning man out of the incoming tide, her world changes.
Cello is in crisis. Princess Ko’s deception of her people has emerged and the Kingdom is outraged; the Jagged Edge Elite have taken control, placing the Princess and two members of the Royal Youth Alliance under arrest and ordering their execution; the King’s attempts to negotiate their release have failed; Color storms are rampant; and nobody has heard the Cello wind blowing in months.
I am Lou Brown: Social outcast, precocious failure, 5’10” and still growing. I was on the fast track to the Olympic superstardom. Now, I’m training boys too cool to talk to me. In a sport I just made up. In a fish tank. My life has quickly become very weird.
Somewhere in the Badlands, embedded deep in centuries-buried rock and sand, lies the skeleton of a massive dinosaur, larger than anything the late nineteenth century world has ever seen. Some legends call it the Black Beauty, with its bones as black as ebony, but to seventeen-year-old Samuel Bolt it’s the “rex”, the king dinosaur that could put him and his struggling, temperamental archaeologist father in the history books (and conveniently make his father forget he’s been kicked out of school), if they can just quarry it out.
Fanny is a girl who knows a lot about food and cooking since she’s grown up in and around the famous restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. When Fanny’s mother, Alice Waters, the chef and owner of Chez Panisse, starts to watch her favorite old French movies, Fanny knows soon they’ll be packing their bags and traveling to France for a visit.
Phoebe half Jamaican, half French-Canadian hates her school nickname of “French Toast.” So she is mortified when, out on a walk with her Jamaican grandmother, she hears a classmate shout it out at her. To make things worse, Nan-Ma, who is blind, wants an explanation of the name.
In 1943 Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, teenage Hanneke–a ‘finder’ of black market goods–is tasked with finding a Jewish girl a customer had been hiding, who has seemingly vanished into thin air, and is pulled into a web of resistance activities and secrets as she attempts to solve the mystery and save the missing girl.
Ninjas are stealthy. They are disciplined. Ninjas trust no-one, and do not let anything deter them from completion of their mission. Teenage Kata has trained since childhood to live up to the exacting standards that Madame Chiyome sets for her “deadly flowers” – the girls who live a harsh, hungry life at her school for ninjas, and she is determined to succeed in her first mission as an assassin for hire. When it all goes wrong, she finds herself on the run, guarding a powerful amulet as well as the children of one of Japans most powerful warlords. They meet bandits and monks, and are plagued by demons and ghosts. Feudal Japan is a fascinating backdrop for their journey – neither the wealthy children nor skilled Kata truly control their own fate in a country where might equals right. Genuinely thrilling, with surprises at every turn and a solid emotional core, give Deadly Flowers to your Percy Jackson fans and see what happens.