Celebrating the Hero

Camilia Draper, an American teenager still feeling guilt and loss about her mother’s death, travels to her mother’s birthplace in Colombia for a ceremony celebrating her famous grandfather, about whom she will learn some disquieting and revelatory facts.

Against the Storm

When Mehmet and his family leave their small Turkish village to seek a better life in Ankara, they find themselves living in poverty, but an encounter with a streetwise orphan and his own determination give Mehmet the courage to find a way out.

Ways to Live Forever

1. My name is Sam. 2. I am eleven years old. 3. I collect stories and fantastic facts. 4. I have leukemia. 5. By the time you read this, I will probably be dead. Living through the final stages of leukemia, Sam collects stories, questions, lists, and pictures that create a profoundly moving portrait of how a boy lives when he knows his time is almost up.

Dolphin Song

Martine is just getting used to her new life on the game reserve with her grandmother and the white giraffe, Jemmy, when she must go away. Her class is going on a trip—an ocean voyage to watch the sardine run, a spectacular natural phenomenon off the coast of South Africa. But the exciting adventure takes a dramatic turn when Martine and several of her classmates are thrown overboard into shark-infested waters! They are saved by a pod of dolphins and end up marooned on a deserted island. Now the castaways must learn to work together, not only to survive but to help the dolphins who are now in peril.

Getting The Girl

Cameron Wolfe is a loser. He knows it. He’s the quiet one, not a soccer star like his brother Steve or a charming fighter with a new girl every week like his brother Rube. Cam would give anything to be near one of those girls, to love her and treat her right. He especially likes Rube’s latest, Octavia, with her brilliant ideas and bright green eyes. But what woman like that would want a loser like him? Maybe Octavia would, Cam discovers. Maybe he’d even have something to say. And those maybes change everything: winning, loving, losing, the Wolfe brothers, and Cameron himself.

Heart’s Delight

As a teenage boy goes through the mementos of his ended relationship with his first true love, he recalls all the good and bad they shared, the events that brought them together and tore them apart, and the life he lives now without her, in a touching tale of romance, heartbreak, and the struggle to cope through it all.

Flight to Freedom

In Flight to Freedom, Anna Veciana-Suarez brings us Yara, an eighth-grader who lives in a middle-class neighborhood of 1967 Havana, Cuba. Her parents, who do not share the political beliefs of the Communist party, finally are forces to flee Cuba with their children to Miami, Florida. There, Yara records in her diary the difficulties she encounters in a strange land with foreign customs. She must learn English and go to school with new children. Her parents also adjust to the new country differently, and Yara’s father grows frustrated with her mother when she becomes more independent.