“Didn’t the gas ovens finish you all off?” is the response that meets Ruth Mendenberg when she returns to her village in Poland after the liberation of Buchenwald at the end of World War II. Her entire family wiped out in the Holocaust, the fifteen-year-old girl has nowhere to go. Members of the underground organization Brichah find her, and she joins them in their dangerous quest to smuggle illegal immigrants to Palestine. Ruth risks her life to help lead a group of children on a daring journey over half a continent and across the sea to Eretz Israel, using secret routes and forged documents — and sheer force of will.
Age
Catalog sorted by age group
Martyn Pig
The Odd Egg
Each of the birds has an egg except for Duck. So when Duck finds a beautiful egg of his own he’s delighted — even though the other birds make fun of it. But everyone’s in for a BIG surprise when his egg finally hatches!
A K
The Dark Light
When it was discovered that thirteen-year-old Tora has leprosy, she is sent from her family’s remote mountain farm to the leprosy hospital in the bustling port of Bergen. In early-nineteenth-century Norway, lepers are quarantined in this hospital and no longer considered among the living. But even as her body gradually fails her, Tora’s new life blossoms. She finds strength through helping her fellow patients, both young and old, and she decides to see for herself what the Bible says about leprosy. To do so, she must make friends with the young and angry Mistress Dybendal, the only person at the hospital who can teach her to read.As she did in The Abduction (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year), Mette Newth brings another era vividly to life and demonstrates the timeless nature of the search for identity and tolerance.
Worry Warts
Low Tide
Fishing along Jade Bay, part of an island off the coast of New Zealand, Charlie, Wiremu, and Charlie’s sister, Elizabeth, discover a long-lost ship–which takes them to a far-off land. By the Carnegie Medal-winning author of Drift.
Weirdo’s War
While trapped in a cave with one of his fellow students, a longtime enemy, Daniel relives his troubled relationship with his schoolmates.
Escape from Shangri-La
When the strange man who has been watching their house turns out to be the grandfather she has never seen, eleven-year-old Cessie couldn’t be happier — at first sight. But then he has a stroke and actually has to come live with them. Popsicle, as she calls him, is impossible to live with: moody, forgetful, clumsy. Only Cessie loves him and believes in him. So when he is sent off to a home for the elderly, she helps him escape. And plays first mate to him on a dramatic nighttime boat trip across the English channel to unravel a secret only the two of them know. This Morpurgo story makes the reader want to cheer — young people, the elderly, and courage at any age.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher is 15 and has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he finds a dead dog on a neighbour’s lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it.