Young Adult (ages 14-18)

Material appropriate for young adults

I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler’s List Survivor

In the spring of 1942 Hannelore received a letter from Mama at her school in Berlin, Germany–Papa had been arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Six weeks later he was sent home; ashes in an urn. Soon another letter arrived. “The Gestapo has notified your brothers and me that we are to be deported to the East–whatever that means.” Hannelore knew: labor camps, starvation, beatings. How could Mama and her two younger brothers bear that? She made a decision: She would go home and be deported with her family. Despite the horrors she faced in eight labor and concentration camps, Hannelore met and fell in love with a Polish POW named Dick Hillman. Oskar Schindler was their one hope to survive. Schindler had a plan to take eleven hundred Jews to the safety of his new factory in Czechoslovakia. Incredibly both she and Dick were added to his list. But survival was not that simple. Weeks later Hannelore found herself, alone, outside the gates of Auschwitz, pushed toward the smoking crematoria.

Blade Of Fire: The Icemark Chronicles

Many years have passed since Queen Thirrin and her allies defended the Icemark against a brutal invasion. But now General Bellorum is back, along with his bloodthirsty spawn, twin sons even more vicious than him. Thirrin and Oskan also have a family: two girls and three boys. But darkness lurks within the House of Lindenshield: Medea, the couple’s cold-hearted, fifteen-year-old daughter, who’s just coming into her magical powers, may be the downfall of the kingdom. It’s up to her brother, Charlemagne, crippled by polio as a child, to return from exile and rescue the land he loves.

Homeland: The Illustrated History Of The State Of Israel

 Depicting the history of Israel from biblical Abraham to the present, this sophisticated, four-color graphic adaptation is academically grounded, guiding readers through highlights both in historical detail and from Israel’s world view. History, religion, politics, and the current Middle East situation are all given comprehensive coverage in the text, which opens in a university setting with a professor teaching a series of sessions on Middle East/Near East modern history, beginning with Israel. With painted art that jumps right off the page, this crash course is an absorbing way for readers to absorb, understand, and retain key information about 4,000 years of complicated history.

Skin and Other Stories

This collection of short stories serves as an introduction to Roald Dahl‘s more mature work for a slightly older audience.

Skin — Lamb to the slaughter — The sound machine — An African story — Galloping Foxley — The wish — The surgeon — Dip in the pool — The champion of the world — Beware of the dog — My lady love, my dove.

Porcupine

War-torn Afghanistan could not seem farther from Newfoundland, but it is about to change twelve-year-old tomboy Jack Cooper (or Jacqueline, as her mother insists on calling her) forever. When her father is killed in the war, she watches helplessly as her mother crumbles under sorrow and depression. Jack and her younger sister and brother, Tessa and Simon, end up across the country, living on a run-down farm in a small town on the Prairies with a great-grandmother they didn’t know existed. Worried that they will be abandoned again if Gran moves into a retirement home, Jack puts on a brave face and encourages Tessa and Simon to take on the challenges of their new life. In the process, she learns that families come in many different forms and that love, trust, and faith can build a home anywhere.

Beyond Paradise

This unusual first novel is based on true accounts of the imprisonment of American citizens in Japanese detention camps in the Philippines during World War II. Louise Keller travels with her missionary family to the Philippines on the eve of Pearl Harbor. At first the country seems like paradise, but soon Louise and her family are captured by the Japanese and forced to live in internment camps. An exciting and thought-provoking novel about human strength and weakness in wartime Jane Hertenstein will donate a portion of her royalties for this book to help build houses for residents of Smokey Mountain, a large garbage dump in Manila where hundreds of people live under scraps of metal and cardboard.

Hush: An Irish Princess’ Tale

Melkorka is a princess, the first daughter of a magnificent kingdom in medieval Ireland, but all of this is lost the day she is kidnapped and taken aboard a marauding slave ship. Thrown into a world that she has never known, alongside people that her former country’s laws regarded as less than human, Melkorka is forced to learn quickly how to survive. Taking a vow of silence, however, she finds herself an object of fascination to her captors and masters, and soon realizes that any power, no matter how little, can make a difference. Based on an ancient Icelandic saga, award-winning author Donna Jo Napoli has crafted a heartbreaking story of a young girl who must learn to forget all that she knows and carve out a place for herself in a new world — all without speaking a word.

Hello, America

The year is 1951 and eighteen-year-old Elli and her mother arrive in New York City. Finally they can leave behind bitter Holocaust memories and become real Americans! From office filing all day, to the challenge of night school, to interpreting the intentions of Alex, a handsome and persistent doctor, Elli soon finds learning English is only half as hard as “making it” in this new world. Against a backdrop of soda shops, skyscrapers, and subways, acclaimed author Livia Bitton-Jackson fuses old-world tradition and modern dreams, in this vivid kaleidoscope of immigrant America.

Communism

Communism has had a dramatic rise and fall as a political system in the last century. Communism by Tom Lansford looks at the historic foots of this form of government, its political and economic components, how it compares with other types of government systems, and the likely reasons for its almost complete demise as a twenty-first century political system.