Materials from the Americas
Mexican-American Stef Soto is hoping to break free from her overprotective parents and embarrassing reputation from her family’s taco truck business, but she soon learns that family, friendship, and the taco truck are important and wonderful parts of her life.
Evelyn is both aghast and fascinated when a new boy comes to grade five and tells everyone his name is Queen. Queen wears shiny gym shorts and wants to organize a chess/environment club. His father plays weird loud music and has tattoos.
A lyrical lullaby imbued with traditional Inuit beliefs, this bedtime poem written by internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer Celina Kalluk describes the gifts bestowed upon a newborn baby by all the animals of the Arctic.
Anne has spent most of her thirteen years dreaming of the day she and her best friend Penelope will finally leave Saint Lupin’s Institute for Perpetually Wicked and Hideously Unattractive Children.
Having arrived in Candeia, Brazil, starving and footsore, after walking sixteen days to fulfill his dying mother’s last wishes, young Samuel takes up residence in an enormous, broken statue of Saint Anthony and finds that he can hear the prayers of the townspeople, despite his lack of faith.
Featured in WOW Review Volume IX, Issue 3.
Boo’s favorite chair is little and blue. He sits in it, reads in it and makes a tent around it until the day he grows too big for it. His mother puts the little blue chair out on the lawn where a truck driver picks it up. The truck driver sells it to a lady in a junk store where it sits for many years until it’s sold and put to use as a plant stand. In the years that follow, the little blue chair is used in many other ways until the day it flies away, borne aloft by balloons, and lands in a garden of daffodils where a familiar face finds it.
Lou Lou Bombay and Peacock Pearl have been best friends since first grade. Every Friday afternoon, they get together in Lou Lou’s backyard garden for their PSPP (Post-School Pre-Parents) tea party. They chat about school, discuss Pea’s latest fashions, and plot the weekend’s activities. But all plans go out the window when a series of small crimes crop up around El Corazón, their quaint and quirky neighborhood, right before the Día de Los Muertos procession
It’s the first day of the summer holidays and Pistachio Shoelace has big plans. Plans that involve a compass, a cave, and a buried treasure. Plans that do not involve a troublemaking little sister wearing bunny ears and a Superman cape.
Ixchel, a young Mayan girl who is not allowed to use her mother’s thread to weave, exercises her ingenuity and repurposes plastic bags to create colorful weavings. Includes glossary and author’s note.
This book has been included in WOW’s Kids Taking Action Booklist. For our current list, visit our Boolist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.
Seventh-grader Joe López, a promising artist, stands up to a bully and survives, thanks to his Grandpa Jesse’s advice about “la lucha.” A bilingual flip book with Garza’s black and white sketches depicting bullies, heroes, and the roosters that Joe loves to draw.