Twelve-year-old Andrej, nine-year-old Tomas, and their baby sister Wilma flee their Romany encampment when it is attacked by Germans during World War II, and in an abandoned town they find a zoo where the animals tell their stories, helping the children understand what has become of their lives and what it means to be free.
Intermediate (ages 9-14)
Material appropriate for intermediate age groups
War Games
Newbery Honor winner Audrey Couloumbis (“Getting Near to Baby”) and her husband, Akila, deliver this gripping novel based on Akila’s boyhood experiences during World War II, after the Germans invaded Greece. What were once just boys’ games soon become matters of life and death for 12-year-old Petros and his older brother, Zola.
Dogtag Summer
Twelve-year-old Tracy–or Tuyet–has always felt different. The villagers in Vietnam called her con-lai, or “half-breed,” because her father was an American GI. And she doesn’t fit in with her adoptive family in California, either. But when Tracy and a friend discover a soldier’s dogtag hidden among her father’s things, it sets her past and her present on a collision course. Where should her broken heart come to rest? In a time and place she remembers only in her dreams? Or among the people she now calls family?
Dragons of Silk
Four generations of Chinese and Chinese-American girls, beginning in 1835, are tied together by the tradition of raising silkworms and the legacy of the legendary Weaving Maid.
Ancient Egypt: Tales of Gods and Pharaohs
Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert
In early August 2010, the unthinkable happened when a mine collapsed in CopiapÓ, Chile, and 33 miners were trapped 2,000 feet below the surface. For sixty-nine days they lived on meager resources and increasingly poor air quality. When they were finally rescued, the world watched with rapt attention and rejoiced in the amazing spirit and determination of the miners. What could have been a terrible tragedy became an amazing story of survival.
Tales from India: Stories of Creation and the Cosmos
Starfields
While big changes are coming to her Mexican village, nine-year-old Rosalba hears that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012 and she dreams of an ancient Mayan boy, eyes bound in a shamanistic ritual, who hints at what Rosalba can do.
La Llorona: The Crying Woman
In ancient Mexico, beautiful Maya’s children are endangered by the threat of Senor Tiempo who, jealous of their immortality, plots to destroy them.
Between Shades of Gray
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia. Her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family in a labor camp.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 2