Intermediate (ages 9-14)

Material appropriate for intermediate age groups

Anansi

Two Jamaican folk tales in which Anansi the spider practices his trickery on others. Includes an audio cassette featuring narration and music.

Caring for Cheetahs

Author Rosanna Hansen travels to Namibia, Africa, to help cheetahs, one of the worlds endangered species. She helps save a cheetah cub from a life-threatening injury. She pets a thoroughly tame cheetah. She sets up a cheetah race. (Cheetahs love to run.) And she meets many cheetahs that are not so tame. Humans are taking over cheetah habitat, so the world’s fastest runners are running out of space and hanging on in low numbers. People are working to save them one by one through organizations like the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), which runs the reserve the author visits. Young readers will revel in this up-close perspective on the magnificent cheetah.

African Beginnings

From the ancient kingdom of Kush, whose black pharaohs ruled Egypt for nearly a century, to the sixteenth-century empire of the Kongo, whose emperor was so powerful he was able to halt the trade in slaves for a number of years, the African continent rang with a series of glorious civilizations that have had a lasting impact on the world’s history, and on American culture. James Haskins and Floyd Cooper have won numerous awards for their books for young people, including several Coretta Scott King Honor awards.

The Importance of Wings

Although she longs to be an all-American girl, Roxanne, a timid, Israeli-born thirteen-year-old who idolizes Wonder Woman, begins to see things differently when the supremely confident Liat, also from Israel, moves into the “cursed house” next door and they become friends.

Extra Credit

It isn’t that Abby Carson can’t do her schoolwork, it’s just that she doesn’t like doing it. And that means she’s pretty much failing sixth grade. When a warning letter is sent home, Abby realizes that all her slacking off could cause her to be held back — for real! Unless she wants to repeat the sixth grade, she’ll have to meet some specific conditions, including taking on an extra-credit project: find a pen pal in a foreign country. Simple enough (even for a girl who hates homework).Abby’s first letter arrives at a small school in Afghanistan, and Sadeed Bayat is chosen to be her pen pal…. Well, kind of. He is the best writer, but he is also a boy, and in his village it is not appropriate for a boy to correspond with a girl. So his younger sister dictates and signs the letter. Until Sadeed decides what his sister is telling Abby isn’t what he’d like Abby to know.As letters flow back and forth between Illinois and Afghanistan, Abby and Sadeed discover that their letters are crossing more than an ocean. They are crossing a huge cultural divide and a minefield of different lifestyles and traditions. Their growing friendship is also becoming a growing problem for both communities, and some people are not happy. Suddenly things are not so simple.

Shooting Kabul

Escaping from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, eleven-year-old Fadi and his family immigrate to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Fadi schemes to return to the Pakistani refugee camp where his little sister was accidentally left behind.

The Song Of The Whales

Michael’s grandfather has a secret—a secret that’s almost too strange to share . . . When Michael moves to Israel, he leaves loneliness behind and steps into the light of his grandfather’s magic. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, Michael learns how to blur the lines between dreams and reality when his grandfather hands down the most precious of gifts—a gift that allows Michael passage into his grandfather’s dreams. Written with a quiet simplicity that wins the reader over at once Uri Orlev writes in a style so sure and yet so unassuming that it is certain to linger in reader’s minds long after turning the last page.