Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

It begins, as the best superhero stories do, with a tragic accident that has unexpected consequences. The squirrel never saw the vacuum cleaner coming, but self-described cynic Flora Belle Buckman, who has read every issue of the comic book Terrible Things Can Happen to You!, is the just the right person to step in and save him. What neither can predict is that Ulysses (the squirrel) has been born anew, with powers of strength, flight, and misspelled poetry — and that Flora will be changed too, as she discovers the possibility of hope and the promise of a capacious heart. From #1 New York Times best-selling author Kate DiCamillo comes a laugh-out-loud story filled with eccentric, endearing characters and featuring an exciting new format — a novel interspersed with comic-style graphic sequences and full-page illustrations, all rendered in black-and-white by up-and-coming artist K. G. Campbell.

Haiti My Country: Poems by Haitian Schoolchildren

For several months, Quebec illustrator Roge prepared a series of portraits of Haitian children. Students of Camp Perrin wrote that accompanying poems, which create, with flowing consistency, Haiti My Country. These teenaged poets use the Haitian landscape as their easel. The nature that envelops them is quite clearly their main subject. While misery often storms through Haiti in the form of earthquakes, cyclones, or floods, these young men and women see their surrounding nature as assurance for a joyful, confident future.

Serafina’s Promise

In a poor village outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Serafina works hard to help her family, but dreams of going to school and becoming a doctor–then the earthquake hits and Serafina must summon all her courage to find her father and still get medicine for her sick baby brother as she promised.

Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection

All cultures have tales of the trickster—a crafty creature or being who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. He disrupts the order of things, often humiliating others and sometimes himself. In Native American traditions, the trickster takes many forms, from coyote or rabbit to raccoon or raven. The first graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales, Trickster brings together Native American folklore and the world of comics.

Calling The Gods

Thrown hard on the bottom boards, I stared up at distorted mouths, faces so red I could feel their heat. They stank of rage and of something else; several frothed at the mouth; their howls drowned the clatter and shriek of gulls swerving and tilting above the mast. Banishment is the cruellest punishment, and Selene is being driven out unjustly by her own people. Set in a New Zealand both recognisable and strangely different, CALLING THE GODS is a novel for older readers, a story of violence, love, and courage, of leadership and betrayal, of the extraordinary human ability to adapt and survive, a tale of a young woman’s heroic persistence against impossible odds.

Featured in Volume VI, Issue 2 of WOW Review.

Liar And Spy

Seventh grader Georges moves into a Brooklyn apartment building and meets Safer, a twelve-year-old self-appointed spy. Georges becomes Safer’s first spy recruit. His assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer becomes more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: what is a lie, and what is a game? How far is too far to go for your only friend?

Featured in Volume VI, Issue 2 of WOW Review.

Mister Whistler

A hilarious, lively picture book. Mister Whistler always has a song in his head and a dance in his legs. But when he has to catch the train, he is so distracted he loses his ticket and has to dance his way out of his clothes to find it!

Featured in Volume VI, Issue 2 of WOW Review.

My Brother’s War

It’s New Zealand, 1914, and the biggest war has just broken out in Europe. William eagerly enlists for the army but his younger brother, Edmund, is a conscientious objector and refuses to fight. While William trains to be a soldier, Edmund is arrested. Both brothers will end up on the bloody battlefields of France, but their journeys there are very different. And what they experience at the front line will challenge the beliefs that led them there.