Paul, who lives in a trailer, and Sebastian, who lives in an apartment, are discouraged from playing with each other, until they get lost together during a class outing.
Paul and Sebastian
Realistic Fiction
Realistic Fiction genre
Mama’s Saris
When a young girl eyes her mother’s suitcase full of silk, cotton and embroidered saris, she decides that she, too, should wear one, even though she is too young for such clothing. When the mother finally realizes how important it is for her little girl to feel like a big girl on her seventh birthday, she dresses up her daughter in the folds of a blue sari. The daughter is thrilled to look just like her mother, even if only for a day.
Holly’s Red Boots
A little girl, a snowy day, and a pair of red boots add up to a cozy story with interactive art that is certain to charm the lap-sit crowd. It’s finally snowing! Holly wants to play outside, but Mom says Holly must wear her red boots. Holly and her cat, Jasper, decide to search for everything red. They find a red car, a red hat, and a red bathrobe, but no red boots. When Holly finally finds them, the snow has melted; but her boots are still perfect for splashing in the puddles left behind.
Spirit of the Maya: A Boy Explores His People’s Mysterious Past
Kin, a 12-year-old Lacando boy living in a Mexican town, is descended from the ancient Maya. Wearing contemporary clothing yet sporting the style of long hair traditional to his people, he is clearly rooted in both the past and the present. After his grandfather shows him a book about Pacal, a Maya who became king in 615 A.D. when he was 12, Kin eagerly accompanies his father to the site of Pacal’s tomb. The boy “feels a twinge of sadness” watching his father sell his handmade replicas of Maya hunting arrows to tourists “at the gates of the great city that his ancestors once ruled.” Kin explores the Maya ruins and locates Pacal’s tomb, but afterwards he feels lonely and distant from his ancestors. Then, on the ride home, he has an improbably sudden change of attitude when he spies a statue of the king. All at once Kin realizes that he and Pacal are “brothers” and, for the first time in his life, Kin “knows how it feels to be a king.”
The Face at the Window
Dora learns to overcome her fears of a mentally ill woman who lives in her community in this gentle and compassionate story set in contemporary Jamaica, West Indies.
Paul Needs Specs
This colorful, funny and empathetic story will capture children’s imaginations and make them laugh out loud. The eye-chart endpapers Find Twenty-Two Frogs in this Book will have children searching high and low.
Junk Collector School
Junk is the world’s best free stuff. Anybody who’s part detective and part collector can put together a collection in no time. Jake really knows his junk. His house is filled with the most amazing collections of it. Andy wants a collection of his own, which is why he goes to Jake’s Junk Collector School.
Time to Say I Love You
In this sweet, touching story, a mother tries to choose a time to tell her little girl how much she loves her. Over the course of a beautiful day at the seaside, the two roam over sandy beaches and grassy hills as the mother searches for just the right time and spot.
Yoruba Girl Dancing
For Remi, growing up in Nigeria is a celebration of love and family, eccentricity and old ritual. She feels confident in her privilege and grounded in the heart of her culture. But when she turns six, she is sent to faraway England, to a posh all-girls’ boarding school where she will stay for what seems like a desolate, lonely eternity. There she’s left to find her own way – the only black in a school full of upper-class English girls whose rituals are as foreign to Remi as her’s are to them. Through sheer inner exuberance, Remi triumphs over the dismal climate, social anomalies, and glaring affronts that are her English experience. She endures foreign holidays celebrated with strangers, and navigates the labyrinth of race, caste, and culture, taking nothing lying down, and emerges victorious – if changed forever.
Yoruba Girl Dancing is the story of a girl’s exile from her homeland and her metamorphosis into someone that even she at times hardly recognizes.
Captives
Martin and his family are enjoying a sun-filled vacation on a beautiful Caribbean island–until they are stopped at gunpoint, blindfolded, and bundled into a truck that heads for the dense forest of the island’s interior. Pushed to their physical and emotional limits as they are forced deeper into the wild terrain, the hostages come to understand something of the harsh political backdrop of life on sunny Santa Clara, and the events that have shaped the lives of their captors and fueled their actions.