Realistic Fiction

Realistic Fiction genre

Hate You

A young adult novel explores the path from hatred of an abusive father to healing as Alice learns to sing with her own true voice. Alice Silvers writes songs she can never sing, because she has a broken, “Frankenstein” voice. Her father choked her years before when she got in his way while he was fighting with her mother. After that night, her mother threw him out. Alice has never seen him again. Now she’s 17. Alice has her songs, her words, her mother, her boyfriend, her life. Everything but her voice. Years have passed since that terrifying night, but Alice burns with a hate stronger than anything she’s ever known.

I Need You More Than I Love You And I Love You To Bits

When Morris meets Betty, love is unavoidable. In short prose
passages, we follow the course of their passionate first love. A
confident debut written in a surprising form, which gives the story intelligence and depth.

Morris feels like Betty can see everything he’s thinking. Betty
believes Morris understands her like no one ever before. She tells him everything, even about the dried-up worm that she saw on the sidewalk on the way to school. But sometimes the darkness closes in on Morris. His father is manic-depressive and his mother is always talking about dreams and poetry and her new boyfriend. Morris begins to wonder if crazy people are drawn to each other. Betty points out that he is like his father. As their love grows, it almost consumes them. Soon it’s as if they are always trying to escape
themselves until they ask, “How do you know when it’s over?”

Ten Things I Hate About Me

“At school I’m Aussie-blonde Jamie — one of the crowd. At home I’m Muslim Jamilah — driven mad by my Stone Age dad. I should win an Oscar for my acting skills. But I can’t keep it up for much longer…” Jamie just wants to fit in. She doesn’t want to be seen as a stereotypical Muslim girl, so she does everything possible to hide that part of herself. Even if it means pushing her friends away because she’s afraid to let them know her dad forbids her from hanging out with boys or that she secretly loves to play the darabuka (Arabic drums). But when the cutest boy in school asks her out and her friends start to wonder about Jamie’s life outside of school, her secrets threaten to explode. Can Jamie figure out how to be both Jamie and Jamilah before she loses everything?

City Boy

Set in contemporary Malawi, a poignant account of an orphaned boy’s transition from city life to village life. Sam’s widowed mother has died from “the Disease,” and Sam is claimed by his aunt Mercy, who lives in the small African village where Sam’s mother was born and raised. The gap between Sam’s life in the city, where he had his own room, attended private school, and used a computer, and his new life in the dirt-floored one-room hut, which he is to share with his aunt and cousins, is vast beyond imagining. Grief, loneliness, and the absence of everything familiar make for a rocky transition to a traditional culture where possessions count for little and everyone is expected to do his or her share.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 5, Issue 2

Thank You, World

Eight very different kids, from eight different continents, all go about their day and experience the same moments of happiness: greeting the sun in the morning, swinging on a swing, flying a kite, being tucked in by Mommy at bedtime.

Panorama: A Foldout Book

Illustrations and simple text invite the reader to visit different places around the world, then to view the same scenes at night on the reverse of the fanfolded page.

Finn’s Search

Although he is afraid of Andrew Aldie, twelve-year-old Chris Cooper agrees to help his friend Finn Lochlan look for a way to stop Andrew’s father from opening a gravel pit near their Scottish village.