The Fighter

Fighting is a way of life for Moshe Wisniak. As a boy from a very poor neighborhood in Warsaw, he can’t run away when Polish kids attack the Jews, because his legs are weak. So he learns to use his fists, his head and other weapons to defend himself and his brothers. When the family moves to Paris in 1929, everyone finds work and life improves slowly. Moshe, now Maurice, is a leather worker and a young husband. At a Jewish sports club, he takes up boxing, and becomes an amateur flyweight. But the war comes to Paris, and by 1942, the French police round up foreign Jews and the Germans deport them by the hundreds every day. They send Maurice to the death camp at Auschwitz. In the camp, SS officers sense Maurice’s strength. They command him to box against a dying prisoner. Now Maurice is faced with an impossible moral dilemma: kill the prisoner or be killed by the SS for refusing to obey them. Translated from French by award-winning author Jean-Jacques Greif, The Fighter isn’t simply another book about the Holocaust. It is a book about a hero who discovers the death-defying power of his own humanity.

Take a closer look at The Fighter as examined in WOW Review.

La Línea

When fifteen-year-old Miguel’s time finally comes to leave his poor Mexican village, cross the border without getting caught, and join his parents in California, his younger sister’s determination to join him imperils them both.

Take a closer look at La Línea as examined in WOW Review.

The White Darkness

I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I’ll be dead, too, and the age difference won’t matter.

Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.

But Sym’s uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.

In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.

Featured in Volume I, Issue 2 of WOW Review.

The Circuit

“‘La frontera’…I heard it for the first time back in the late 1940s when Papa and Mama told me and Roberto, my older brother, that someday we would take a long trip north, cross la frontera, enter California, and leave our poverty behind.” So begins this honest and powerful account of a family’s journey to the fields of California — to a life of constant moving, from strawberry fields to cotton fields, from tent cities to one-room shacks, from picking grapes to topping carrots and thinning lettuce. Seen through the eyes of a boy who longs for an education and the right to call one palce home, this is a story of survival, faith, and hope. It is a journey that will open readers’ hearts and minds.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author’s own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character’s art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

Featured in Volume I, Issue 2 of WOW Review.

The Tide Knot

In a seaside town of sandy beaches and ocean breezes, Sapphy has never felt so far from the sea. The crowded shore at St. Pirans is nothing like the cove at Sapphy’s old home, where she first found her way into the underwater world of Ingo. But Ingo’s pull is strong, and it always finds a way. Soon Sapphy and her brother, Conor, are swimming beneath the waves again, riding the currents and teasing their Mer friend Faro. As Sapphy goes deeper into Ingo, she learns to feel more at home in the sea – even as she begins to be aware of its dangers. There’s the danger of going in too deep, and breaking the delicate balance between Sapphy’s life on land and her life in Ingo. There’s the mysterious disappearance of Sapphy’s father, an experienced sailor who should never have drowned. And then there’s Ingo itself – a restless power as old as the world, as strong as the tides, and more dangerous than anything Sapphy has ever known.

A Darkling Plain (The Hungry City Chronicles)

The once-great traction city of London is now just a radioactive wreck, a ruin haunted by electrical discharges and the dashed hopes of the people who once called it home – people like Tom Natsworthy. Twenty years after he fled, intending never to return, he discovers that something stirs in the remains of the old city.

Tom and his daughter, Wren, aren’t the only people interested in London. The desperate armies of the Traction Cities and the Green Storm are also closing in, certain that whatever is taking shape within the city holds the key to victory in their never-ending war.

But it may be too late. Even as Tom and Wren hurry to uncover the mystery of London, Hester Shaw – estranged from her husband and her daughter – tracks the resurrected Stalker Fang, who has found another way to end the war and all life on the planet once and for all.

Skulduggery Pleasant

When 12-year-old Stephanie inherits her weird uncle’s estate, she must join forces with Skulduggery Pleasant, a skeleton mage, to save the world from the Faceless Ones.

Worlds of Words

International Collection of Children’s and Adolescent Literature

Young Adult (ages 14-18)