Across North America, people in four different homes prepare for a special trip to China, while four baby girls in China await their new adoptive parents.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 3, Issue 1
The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption
United States
Materials from United States of America
A Step From Heaven
A young Korean girl and her family find it difficult to learn English and adjust to life in America.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 3, Issue 1
This book has been included in WOW’s Language and Learning: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction Booklist. For our current list, visit our Booklist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.
Nutik and Amaroq Play Ball
Amaroq is a lively Eskimo boy who fives at the top of the world with his best friend, Nutik, the wolf pup. Amaroq was named after a great wolf leader; Nutik is the wolf leader’s grandpup. The boy and the wolf pup are like brothers.One day Amaroq and Nutik want to play football, but their ball has disappeared. What shall they do? Listening to and observing Nutik’s wolf talk, Amaroq follows him outside. The two friends wander out onto the tundra, where there are no trees, no paths, and no landmarks to help them find their way home again. Amaroq is afraid they are lost, but then he remembers what the great wolf leader he was named after would do. By observing nature and following what it says, Amaroq and Nutik are safe again-but not before finding a surprise for both of them!Amaroq and Nutik’s adventure follows the first picture book about them, Nutik, the Wolf Pup, and continues the Arctic saga about these characters originally drawn from Julie’s Wolf Pack, sequel to the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves.
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
A Distant Enemy
Joseph, a fourteen-year-old boy struggling with the reality that his white father left him and his Yup’ik mother when he was born, lashes out at others in many ways, but when he is saved by one of his supposed “”enemies,”” he begins to view things differently.
Nanabosho and the Cranberries
Sometimes we can be fooled by what we want to see. That happens to a famished Nanabosho when he sees a bush of plump cranberries seemingly floating on the surface of the lake.
Whale Snow
Amiqquq is excited when his family catches a bowhead whale. As his family prepares to celebrate the traditional Inupiaq whaling feast, Amiqqaq learns about the spirit-of-the-whale.
Tundra Mouse: A Storyknife Book
Using a traditional technique called storyknifing, two Yupik Eskimo sisters share a story about the mice that made a nest out of tinsel from the Christmas tree.
A Distant Enemy
Joseph just wants to continue the traditions of the Yup’ik people. So when outside officials restrict fishing in his Alaskan village, he commits an anonymous act of vandalism in protest. But his new teacher finds out his secret. To make things worse, Joseph’s father, who left years ago, wants to see him again. Joseph isn’t sure who he can trust, but if he doesn’t trust someone, he’s headed for disaster. “Vanasse creates a vivid portrait of modern Eskimo lifestyles, conflicts and fears while rendering a sensitive account of one teenager’s coming of age.” — Publishers Weekly
Black Star, Bright Dawn
In this redesigned edition of Scott O’Dell’s classic novel, a young Eskimo girl encounters frightening obstacles when she takes her father’s place in the Iditarod, the annual 1,172-mile dogsled race in Alaska.