Wanted: One amazing forever home for one amazing sixth grader.”My name is Gaby, and I’m looking for a home where I can invite my best friend over and have a warm breakfast a couple of times a week. Having the newest cell phone or fancy clothes isn’t important, but I’d like to have a cat that I can talk to when I’m home alone.” Gaby Ramirez Howard loves volunteering at the local animal shelter. She plays with the kittens, helps to obedience train the dogs, and writes adoption advertisements so that the strays who live there can find their forever homes: places where they’ll be loved and cared for, no matter what. Gaby has been feeling like a bit of a stray herself, lately. Her mother has recently been deported to Honduras and Gaby is stuck living with her inattentive dad. She’s confident that her mom will come home soon so that they can adopt Gaby’s favorite shelter cat together. When the cat’s original owners turn up at the shelter, however, Gaby worries that her plans for the perfect family are about to fall apart.
Realistic Fiction
Realistic Fiction genre
Maximilian & the Bingo Rematch
Everybody is fighting in sixth-grader Maximilian’s world as his elderly aunts battle for the Queen Bingo trophy, his masked uncles wrestle for the tag-team title of the world, and his sweetheart and the “new girl” battle for Max’s heart.
Maximilian & the Bingo Rematch is the sequel to Maximilian & the Mystery of the Guardian Angel.
The Living
After an earthquake destroys California and a tsunami wrecks the luxury cruise ship where he is a summer employee, high schooler Shy confronts another deadly surprise.
Cuchilla
Guillermo Lafuente is the most feared teacher in school, so much so, he is called “Chuchilla” (The Knife) by his students. His life is about to change, though, as he receives a series of secret messages …
The Leopard
An Ethiopian boy finds his life endangered when he discovers that a disguised blacksmith, not a leopard, is responsible for a great many missing cattle in the area.
Buster’s World
Buster’s magic tricks get him in and out of trouble.
Splash! Anna Hibiscus
Anna Hibiscus goes to the beach with her family and has trouble finding someone to splash in the water with her.
My Name Is Blessing
Based on a true story about a young Kenyan boy whose mother left him but had named him Muthini which meant suffering because he was born with no fingers on his left hand and only two on his right. Many times he was made fun of or avoided which hurt him deeply. He lives with his very elderly grandmother, his Nyanya, along with many cousins whose parents had either died or left them. They are extremely poor and there is never enough money or food, but plenty of love. A difficult choice must be made and Muthini is the youngest child and needs to have a better chance in life, so his Nyanya takes him to an orphanage where he is blessed and his name is changed to Baraka which means blessing for he was a blessing just as his grandmother always knew.
Threatened
Luc is an orphan, living in debt slavery in Gabon, until he meets a Professor who claims to be studying chimpanzees, and they head off into the jungle–but when the Professor disappears, Luc has to fend for himself and join forces with the chimps to save their forest.
The Highest Number In The World
9-year-old Gabe (Gabriella) Murray lives and breathes hockey. She’s the youngest player on her new team, she has a nifty move that her teammates call “the Gabe,” and she shares a lucky number with her hero, Hayley Wickenheiser: number 22. But when her coach hands out the team jerseys, Gabe is stuck with number 9. Crushed, Gabe wants to give up hockey altogether. How can she play without her lucky number? Gabe’s grandmother soon sets her straight, though–from her own connection to the number 9 in her hockey-playing days to all the greats she cheered for who wore it, she soon convinces Gabe that this new number might not be so bad after all.