One Whole and Perfect Day

As her irritating family prepares to celebrate her grandfather’s eightieth birthday, sixteen-year-old Lily yearns for just one whole perfect day together.

Mixing It

Steve, a British high school student, and Fatimah, a devout Muslim and daughter of immigrants, must learn to overcome their community’s prejudices after a picture of Fatimah nursing Steven after a terrorist attack is featured in a national newspaper.

The Wolf

Sixteen-year-old Lucy, living in the shadow of her violent father, experiences a night of tenderness, danger, and revelation as she and Jake, her fifteen-year-old neighbor, search for a legendary wolf in the Australian outback.

Wildwood Dancing

Five sisters who live with their merchant father in Transylvania use a hidden portal in their home to cross over into a magical world, the Wildwood.

Feminist and Abolitionist

When asked to deliver contraband papers to her native island home of Cuba in 1852, twenty-year-old Emilia Casanova gulped audibly in a most unladylike manner. This was her chance to be in the thick of the rebellion against Spanish authority something she had always dreamed of instead of on the sidelines more befitting someone of her station. Even though she would be branded a traitor and endanger her family if she was caught, she pushed her fear aside and accepted the mission.

Back in Cuba following her first summer abroad, distributing seditious propaganda isn’t as easy as it had seemed while in New York. But she honors her commitment to the Junta Cubana, a group of Cuban revolutionaries living in exile in the U.S., and begins her efforts to convert compatriots to the cause of independence from Spain. She begins planting the seeds of insubordination in her social circle and enlists two of her brothers in the cause. Things become more dangerous when she targets soldiers in the garrison close to the family’s home, and it doesn’t take long for one of her brothers to be exposed. Soon Emilia’s father is forced to lead his entire family away from their home and into exile in the U.S.

Raised in an elite, slave-holding Cuban family, Emilia Casanova spent most of her adult life in New York City, where she worked passionately for Cuba’s freedom from Spain and the black man’s freedom from servitude. A wife and mother, she created the first women’s political organization dedicated to supporting the rebel cause during Cuba’s Ten Years’ War. Puerto Rican and Latino Studies professor Virginia Sanchez-Korrol introduces the fascinating but little-known story of a Latin American activist to an English-speaking audience.

Romeo and Juliet

She’s a Capulet. He’s a Montague. But when Romeo and Juliet first meet, they don’t know they’re from rival families– and when they find out, they don’t care. Their love is honest and raw and all consuming. But it’s also dangerous. How much will they have to sacrifice before they can be together? In a masterful adaptation faithful to Shakespeare’s original text, Gareth Hinds transports readers to the sun-washed streets and market squares of Shakespeare’s Verona.

Seventeen

While Jonatan lies comatose in the emergency room, his father tells him stories of his meeting with Jonatan’s mother, their life as a family, and the events that caused them to be separated for more than a decade.

Ice

When Cassie was a little girl, her grandmother told her a fairy tale about her mother, who made a deal with the Polar Bear King and was swept away to the ends of the earth. Now that Cassie is older, she knows the story was a nice way of saying her mother had died. Cassie lives with her father at an Arctic research station, is determined to become a scientist, and has no time for make-believe.Then, on her eighteenth birthday, Cassie comes face-to-face with a polar bear who speaks to her. He tells her that her mother is alive, imprisoned at the ends of the earth. And he can bring her back — if Cassie will agree to be his bride.That is the beginning of Cassie’s own real-life fairy tale, one that sends her on an unbelievable journey across the brutal Arctic, through the Canadian boreal forest, and on the back of the North Wind to the land east of the sun and west of the moon. Before it is over, the world she knows will be swept away, and everything she holds dear will be taken from her — until she discovers the true meaning of love and family in the magical realm of Ice.

Dear Vincent

17 year old, Tara McClusky’s life is hard. She shares the care of her paralysed father with her domineering, difficult mother, forced to cut down on her hours at school to help support the family with a part-time rest home job. She’s very much alone, still grieving the loss of her older sister Van, who died five years before. Her only source of consolation is her obsession with art and painting in particular. Most especially she is enamoured with Vincent Van Gogh: she has read all his letters and finds many parallels between the tragic story of his life and her own. Luckily she meets the intelligent, kindly Professor Max Stockhamer (a Jewish refugee and philosopher) and his grandson Johannes, and their support is crucial to her ability to survive this turbulent time. The book tackles the difficult topic of suicide fearlessly, with a novel that’s not afraid to go to the dark places but which resolves its story beautifully.

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

More Than This

A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this.