Americas

Materials from the Americas

What My Father Gave Me

Passionate, compelling essays reveal how daughters see their fathers. Editor Melanie Little brings together seven outstanding women — including Susan Olding, Jessica Raya and Saleema Nawaz — to write brilliant, powerful accounts of father-daughter relationships during their teen years. These deeply personal narratives draw readers into raw, real-life experiences. One girl recalls the parade of men in her mother’s life until a man named Al unexpectedly becomes the father she never had. Another father’s abandonment leads his teen daughter to enter a string of doomed relationships with older men, fueled by her “pilot light of pure hatred.” Another reveals the harrowing secret she guarded as a teen: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. One girl watches as the father she loves and respects struggles on the picket lines during a lockout at work and through an ensuing depression. Another daughter charts her own reckless behavior against that of her father’s, in search of a way to break the cycle. Gutsy and honest, these true stories invite readers behind secret doors as they celebrate the power of words to connect to the teen experience.

Grandma’s Gift

The author describes Christmas at his grandmother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem the year she introduced him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja, which has had a profound and lasting effect on him.

Too Late/Train Wreck

Some mistakes can never be repaired. The narrator of Train Wreck is looking back at the year she was 15 and in love with a bad boy named Johnny. Johnny’s friends play a cruel trick on a misfit named Suzy by convincing her that Johnny is attracted to her. When the prank goes too far, the narrator wants something big to happen to prove Johnny still loves her. The prank goes tragically wrong when Suzy is gang-raped. The narrator, now married to Johnny, reflects on the day she watched the horrific attack and did nothing.

In Too Late, 15-year-old Greg is in a teen sex offenders’ facility because of an assault on his stepsister. He hates the professionals who try to help him and can’t wait to go home. When he enters a room for a meeting, his mother is there crying. Her partner, whom Greg calls Step Dude, sits at her side. They have come to tell Greg they don’t want him back. It’s too late to be good, they say. Greg comes to the crippling realization of what he has become: the father he has both hated and feared.

Each book in the Single Voice series consists of two separate but thematically connected stories with distinct inverted covers in an alluring “flip-book” format. Exploding with the urgency, drama and confusion of adolescence, these books will appeal to both avid and less experienced readers.

Ole Flamenco!

“Photo-essay about Flamenco, a southern Spanish art form that incorporates song, dance, and music, tracing its cultural history and focusing on a contemporary young girl and her brother as they learn the traditional style of movement and instrument playing. Includes a glossary/pronunciation guide and author’s sources”–Provided by publisher.

The Trouble With Marlene/Film Studies

Parents have a lingering impact on their teen children. If you act like Marlene, you end up like Marlene — messed up, lonely and broke. No wonder Samantha rejects her mother’s lifestyle. In The Trouble with Marlene, mother and daughter share one thing — thoughts of suicide. Marlene never stops talking about it, but for Samantha, it’s a private affair. There’s one other private thought for Samantha: putting a pillow over her mother’s face and bringing the madness to an end. How far is she prepared to take her fantasy?

The Dark Deeps: The Hunchback Assignments 2

A fantastic Steampunk adventure in the deeps. Transforming his appearance and stealing secret documents from the French is all in a day’s work for fourteen-year-old Modo, a British secret agent. But his latest mission—to uncover the underwater mystery of something called the Ictneo—seems impossible. There are rumors of a sea monster and a fish as big as a ship. French spies are after it, and Mr. Socrates, Modo’s master, wants to find it first. Modo and his fellow secret agent, Octavia, begin their mission in New York City, then take a steamship across the North Atlantic. During the voyage, Modo uncovers an astounding secret. The Dark Deeps, the second book in Arthur Slade’s Hunchback Assignments series, is set in a fascinating Steampunk Victorian world. Modo’s underwater adventures and his encounters with the young French spy Colette Brunet, the fearless Captain Monturiol, and the dreaded Clockwork Guild guarantee a gripping read filled with danger, suspense, and brilliant inventions.

Sacred Leaf: The Cocalero Novels

The people of Bolivia have grown coca for legitimate purposes for hundreds of years, but the demands of America’s War on Drugs now threaten this way of life. Deborah Ellis’s searing follow-up to the highly praised “I Am a Taxi” deals with this frank reality. After he manages to escape from virtual enslavement in an illegal cocaine operation, Diego is taken in by the Ricardo family. These poor coca farmers give Diego a safe haven where he recovers from his ordeal in the jungle. But the army soon moves in and destroys the family’s coca crop — their livelihood. So Diego joins their protest of the destruction of their crops and confront the army head-on by barricading the roads. While tension between the cocaleros and the army builds to a dramatic climax, Diego wonders whether he will ever find a way to return to his family. This compelling novel defies conventional wisdom on an important issue, and shows how people in one part of the world unknowingly create hardship for people in another.

Half Brother

For thirteen years, Ben Tomlin was an only child. But all that changes when his mother brings home Zan — an eight-day-old chimpanzee. Ben’s father, a renowned behavioral scientist, has uprooted the family to pursue his latest research project: a high-profile experiment to determine whether chimpanzees can acquire advanced language skills. Ben’s parents tell him to treat Zan like a little brother. Ben reluctantly agrees. At least now he’s not the only one his father’s going to scrutinize. It isn’t long before Ben is Zan’s favorite, and Ben starts to see Zan as more than just an experiment. His father disagrees. To him, Zan is only a specimen, no more, no less. And this is going to have consequences. Soon Ben is forced to make a critical choice between what he is told to believe and what he knows to be true — between obeying his father or protecting his brother from an unimaginable fate. Half Brother isn’t just a story about a boy and a chimp. It’s about the way families are made, the way humanity is judged, the way easy choices become hard ones, and how you can’t always do right by the people and animals you love. In the hands of master storyteller Kenneth Oppel, it’s a novel you won’t soon forget.