The Sweet Smell of Home is an autobiographical work, written in Chana’s own voice that unfolds through oral history interviews with anthropologist Susan Lobo.
Intermediate (ages 9-14)
Material appropriate for intermediate age groups
Apollo
Mighty Apollo is known by all as the god of the sun, but there’s more to this Olympian than a bright smile and a shining chariot. In the latest volume of Olympians, New York Times bestselling author George O’Connor continues to turn his extensive knowledge of the original Greek myths into rip-roaring graphic novel storytelling. This title has Common Core connections.
Beowulf
Graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. Now it is reinvented for a new generation with Gareth Hinds’s masterful illustrations. Grendel’s black blood runs thick as Beowulf defeats the monster and his hideous mother, while somber hues overcast the hero’s final, fatal battle against a raging dragon. Speeches filled with courage and sadness, lightning-paced contests of muscle and will, and funeral boats burning on the fjords are all rendered in glorious and gruesome detail. Told for more than a thousand years, Beowulf’s heroic saga finds a true home in this graphic-novel edition.
Timeline
From the Big Bang to the present day, illustrated scenes tell the history of our planet in one continuous story in a beautiful large-format hardback for young and old.
Trouble The Water
In the segregated south of Kentucky in 1953, twelve-year-olds Callie, who is black, and Wendell, who is white, are brought together by an old dog that is clearly seeking something or someone, but they not only face prejudice, they find trouble at a haunted cabin in the woods.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 4
Boys without Names
For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over: We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. With the darkness of night as cover, they flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Gopal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factory job, he jumps at the offer. But Gopal has been deceived. There is no factory, just a small, stuffy sweatshop where he and five other boys are forced to make beaded frames for no money and little food. The boys are forbidden to talk or even to call one another by their real names. In this atmosphere of distrust and isolation, locked in a rundown building in an unknown part of the city, Gopal despairs of ever seeing his family again. But late one night, when Gopal decides to share kahanis, or stories, he realizes that storytelling might be the boys’ key to holding on to their sense of self and their hope for any kind of future. If he can make them feel more like brothers than enemies, their lives will be more bearable in the shop—and they might even find a way to escape.
Lizzie And The Lost Baby
Evacuated to a remote Yorkshire valley during World War II, a homesick ten-year-old English girl discovers an abandoned baby and befriends a gypsy boy, despite local prejudice.
Falling Into The Dragon’s Mouth
“In this novel in verse, a resilient American boy deals with bullying and the challenges of being an outsider that come with living in a Japanese fishing village”–
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 3
Reunion de Monstruas (Meeting of Monsters)
Goth Girl And The Ghost Of A Mouse
A brand new offering from the award-winning author-illustrator of the OTTOLINE books Ada Goth is the only child of Lord Goth. The two of them live together in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall, which is so big that they hardly ever see each other. Lord Goth believes that children should be heard and not seen, so Ada has to wear large clumpy boots around the house so that he can hear her coming. This makes it hard for her to make friends and if she’s honest, she’s rather lonely. Then one day William and Emily Cabbage come to stay at the house, and together with a ghostly mouse called Ishmael, they begin to unravel a dastardly plot that Maltravers, the mysterious indoor gamekeeper, is hatching. Ada and her friends must work together to foil Maltravers before it’s too late!