Materials from the Americas
Riley and his family fly north to Churchill, Canada, wo watch polar bear hunt deals from the ice of Hudson Bay. There’s just one problem: no ice! For Polar Bears, no ice means no seals, and without food, the bears can quickly become hungry, weak and dangerous! It’s a race against time as everyone searches for clues to this puzzling climate mystery. Will the ice freeze in time–or at all? And will the polar bears finally get to eat again? The answer is up to you!
Fourteen-year-old Emi-Lou Kaya feels like a nobody in her Hawaiian town. Abandoned by her mother at age three, Emi-Lou hasn’t a clue as to who her father might be, and on top of all this, she is overweight. Her only salvation is the strength of the hard-as-nails but loving grandmother who raised her, and the feisty spirit of her best friend Yvonne. It is Yvonne who renames the dynamic duo Von and Louie, and who puts Emi-Lou on a strict weight-loss regimen. But Emi-Lou starts to worry about losing her touchstone when Von begins spending a little too much time with Babes, an older girl from the softball team. Rumors abound that her soul sister is a “butchie,” and when Emi-Lou suspects it’s true, she becomes desperate to get Von back to “normal” and back to her role as best friend.
Will Ben ever escape the Landing? The hardscrabble farm on the shores of Lake Muskoka can’t generate a living, so Ben’s Uncle Henry sells goods and gas to cottagers from the dock known as Cooks Landing. It had never been much of a living and since the Depression hit, it’s even less. Ben’s thinking a lot these days, and it’s making him miserable. He’s thinking about how unfair it is that his uncle only cares about work. He’s thinking about what he really wants to do: play the violin. These days, he’s lucky to snatch the odd bit of practice between chores, playing to the chickens in the henhouse. A new job fixing up the grand old cottage on nearby Pine Island seems at first to be just one more thing to keep Ben away from his violin. After he meets the island’s owner, Ben changes his mind. Ruth Chapman is a cultured and wealthy woman from New York who introduces Ben to an unfamiliar, liberating world. After Ben plays violin for Ruth and her admiring friends, it only makes him more desperate to flee. Then, during a stormy night on Lake Muskoka, everything changes.
Seven high-school juniors think it will be fun to participate in the Argus program, a new computer program that lets them simulate their tenth high-school reunion, but they find that glimpses into the future can be devastatingly disturbing.
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.
In 1944, an Upstate New York teenager named Christine meets and falls in love with Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew living in a refugee camp, despite their parents’ conviction that they do not belong together.
Describes, in story form, an incident in 1839 when a boatload of African slaves seized control of the ship and finally gained legal freedom in the American courts.
Tells the story of a young girl’s dramatic escape from slavery via the Underground Railroad, from the perspective of her beloved rag doll.
(Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book)
Mina is the perfect daughter. Bound for Harvard, president of the honor society, straight A student, all while she works at her family’s dry cleaners and helps care for her hearing-impaired little sister. On the outside, Mina does everything right. On the inside, Mina knows the truth. Her life is a lie. At the height of a heat wave, the summer before her senior year, Mina meets the one person to whom she cannot lie. Ysrael, a young migrant worker who dreams of becoming a musician, comes to work at the dry cleaners and asks Mina the one question that scares her the most. What does she want? Mina finds herself torn between living her mother’s dreams, caring for her younger sister, grasping the love that Ysrael offers, and the most difficult of all, living a life that is true. With sensitivity and grace, An Na weaves an intriguing story of a young woman caught in the threads of secrets and lies, struggling for love and finding a voice of her own.
Two sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, tell their separate yet tightly interwoven stories in alternating narrative poems. Each sister–Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother–carries a length of the other’s hair braided with her own. The braid binds them together when they are worlds apart and reminds them of who they used to be before they were evicted from the Western Isles, where their family had lived for many generations.
An author’s note describes the poetic form in detail.
Featured in Vol. I, Issue 4 of WOW Review.