Fiction genre
When Olamaiileoti Monroe takes her seventy-five-year-old father, Finau, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, both are caught up in a search for udnerstanding of each other and the ties that bind them. Their story unfolds on an international stage, in Samoa, New Zealand, New York, and Israel–and opposes the modern selfishness of Ola to the moral complexity of Finau.
No longer content to lay eggs on command only to have them carted off to the market, a hen glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild–and to hatch an egg of her own.
The future is often foretold in stories of the past. As families flee the Debaltseve in Eastern Ukraine in 2015, Ken Goodman’s The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale takes us back to families fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is a compelling story of Jewish migration to America, which begins in Smorgon, now in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic, but at the time Smorgon was in Vilnius, a district of Lithuania, and a part of the Russian Empire.
They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn’t know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road, the clouds in the sky, the stars. Sometimes she sees soldiers. She sleeps, dreaming that she is always on the move, although sometimes they are forced to stop and her father has to earn more money before they can continue their journey.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 3
After twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell suddenly starts seeing and talking to ghosts, he and his friends become involved in a battle to save the local cemetery.
A special horse named Hosanna changes the lives of two English brothers and those around them as they fight with King Richard I against Saladin’s armies during the Third Crusades.
Sandmare is a horse drawn in the sand on a beach by a girl named Polly and her father. Pleased with their creation, Polly laments the inevitability of the Sandmare’s being washed away by the tide. But Polly makes a wish that the Sandmare could run free – and at the same time the Sandmare wishes herself, so the wish is very strong. After Polly has left, the Sandmare is able to stand up and run free. Now she must reach the stars, or at sunrise she will turn back into sand.
While spending the summer with elderly relatives at Clawstone Castle in northern England, Madlyn and her brother Rollo, with the help of several ghosts, attempt to save the rare cattle that live on the castle grounds.
Twelve-year-old Johnny endures tensions between his parents, watches television coverage of the Gulf War, and plays a computer game called Only You Can Save Mankind, in which he is increasingly drawn into the reality of the alien ScreeWee.
A young witch-to-be named Tiffany teams up with the Wee Free Men, a clan of six-inch-high blue men, to rescue her baby brother and ward off a sinister invasion from Fairyland.