Intermediate (ages 9-14)

Material appropriate for intermediate age groups

Biggest Bugs Life-Size

Life-sized photos of the world’s biggest bugs in full color.Biggest Bugs Life-size is a veritable jump-off-the-page spectacle for bug enthusiasts. It is the first book to include color photographs of 38 of the world’s biggest, heaviest, longest and mightiest bugs reproduced at their actual size. Concise text gives all of the essential facts, including the bug’s size, what it eats and who discovered it. Maps show where the bugs live.The book’s dramatic gatefold shows the world’s longest bug — at 22-inches, the Chan’s megastick is almost as long as an adult’s arm. There is also the gargantuan cockroach, with the longest wingspan in the world, and the potentially pesky gigantea beefly, which is as big as a human eyeball. Even the names are big: giant hawker dragonfly, colossus earwig, giant tarantula hawk wasp, goliath bird-eating spider, Amazonian giant centipede, titan longhorn beetle.Biggest Bugs Life-size shows the bugs as they are in real life, in brilliant color and in enormous photographs that readers won’t soon forget.

Half Brother

For thirteen years, Ben Tomlin was an only child. But all that changes when his mother brings home Zan — an eight-day-old chimpanzee. Ben’s father, a renowned behavioral scientist, has uprooted the family to pursue his latest research project: a high-profile experiment to determine whether chimpanzees can acquire advanced language skills. Ben’s parents tell him to treat Zan like a little brother. Ben reluctantly agrees. At least now he’s not the only one his father’s going to scrutinize. It isn’t long before Ben is Zan’s favorite, and Ben starts to see Zan as more than just an experiment. His father disagrees. To him, Zan is only a specimen, no more, no less. And this is going to have consequences. Soon Ben is forced to make a critical choice between what he is told to believe and what he knows to be true — between obeying his father or protecting his brother from an unimaginable fate. Half Brother isn’t just a story about a boy and a chimp. It’s about the way families are made, the way humanity is judged, the way easy choices become hard ones, and how you can’t always do right by the people and animals you love. In the hands of master storyteller Kenneth Oppel, it’s a novel you won’t soon forget.

A Bottle In The Gaza Sea

Seventeen-year-old Tal Levine of Jerusalem, despondent over the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, puts her hopes for peace in a bottle and asks her brother, a military nurse in the Gaza Strip, to toss it into the sea, leading ultimately to friendship and understanding.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 5, Issue 3

The Zabime Sisters

On the first day of summer vacation, teenaged sisters M’Rose, Elle, and Célina step out into the tropical heat of their island home and continue their headlong tumble toward adulthood. Boys, schoolyard fights, petty thievery, and even illicit alcohol make for a heady mix, as The Zabime Sisters indulge in a little summertime freedom. The dramatic backdrop of a Caribbean island provides a study of contrasts—a world that is both lush and wild, yet strangely small and intimate—which echoes the contrasts of the sisters themselves, who are at once worldly and wonderfully naïve.Master storyteller Aristophane’s The Zabime Sisters takes a keen look at some of the universal experiences of children on the cusp of growing up, in the fascinating setting of Guadeloupe. Aristophane’s bold, graphic brushwork weaves a wild texture through this gentle, clear-eyed tale.

Super Chicken Nugget Boy Vs. Dr. Ned-Grant And His Eggplant Army

The nugget is back! After his tasty alter-ego felled the Furious Fry, Fern Goldberg went back to being a normal fourth grader. But not for long. Bert Lahr Elementary is about to be thrown into chaos by a mad food scientist and an army of evil eggplants bent on world domination!Villainous vegetables beware! Here comes the most formidable food fighter in history!

Thunder Over Kandahar

A powerful novel of enduring friendship set amid the terror and chaos of present-day Afghanistan.Best friends Tamanna and Yasmine cannot believe their good fortune when a school is set up in their Afghan village; however, their dreams for the future are shattered when the Taliban burns down the school and threatens the teacher and students with death.As Tamanna faces an arranged marriage to an older man and the Taliban targets Yasmine’s western-educated family, the girls realize they must flee. Traveling through the heart of Taliban territory, the two unaccompanied young women find themselves in mortal danger. After suffering grave injuries, Tamanna from a fall and Yasmine from a suicide bombing, the girls are left without the one thing that has helped them survive — each other.Reunited years later in England, Tamanna and Yasmine discover that, despite the horrific events of the past, they are both driven to return home by memories of their families and a longing for their country.The book features stunning photographs by award-winning photojournalist Rafal Gerszak (The New York Times, BBC World News) that bring readers an immediate sense of the faces and landscape of Afghanistan.Filled with tension and drama, Thunder Over Kandahar paints a vivid portrait of the perils of contemporary Afghanistan.

Bolitas De Oro

The author of Tiempos Lejanos: Poetic Images from the Past returns to his roots in a new and exciting book of poetry about his childhood in Guadalupe, New Mexcio, originally called Ojo del Padre, presumably in honor of a priest who discovered a still-bubbling spring in the area. The village of Guadalupe is no more, but Garciacute;a’s vibrant word pictures transport us to a time and place of true community and existence. Written first in Spanish, then translated to English, these poems paint his young life and the lives of his family members and neighbors in west central New Mexico in the mid-twentieth century. Garcia’s perceptions of a wider world and all it includes, but still anchored in the routines of home and play and work, were imparted by his mother, who never attended a day of school in her life.