Materials from United States of America
Serving a sentence in a prison in Mexico, Libertad González finds a clever way to pass the time with the weekly Library Club, reading to her fellow inmates from whatever books she can find in the prison’s meager supply. The story that emerges, though, has nothing to do with the words printed on the pages. She tells of a former literature professor and fugitive of the Mexican government who reinvents himself as a trucker in the United States.
Out of the fog billowing from the regions of the Netherworld steps a gigantic, ominous figure dressed in black. A white, skeleton face peers from the long, hooded cloak draping his massive frame, and in one hand, he clutches a wood-handled scythe with a razor-sharp blade. It’s the Angel of Death, the American Championship Wrestling Heavyweight Champion! But one of the most popular wrestlers on Monday Night Mayhem is also Mark Baron, Jesse Baron’s father. Jesse has just started at yet another new school, this time in San Antonio, and he dreads the moment when the other kids in his seventh-grade class learn who his father is.
A prophecy and a broken cane given to him in his childhood help a simple peasant and his children, who have power over wind, fire, and water, to defeat a wicked emperor who was once the peasant’s friend.
Would you eat a wormy, squirmy mud taco? Marissa loves her big brother, Mario. He always comes up with fun ideas. When playing in their nanas backyard, they decide to make some wormy, squirmy mud tacos. That gives Mario an idea how about some real tacos for lunch. Before long it is off to the store with Nana, but first they must pick up their cousins Rosie and Chico. When Chico starts acting like a hotshot to prove that he is a big kid, can his cousins, with the help of a few mud tacos, show him how to have some real fun?
Unable to find anyone to play with, Mario agrees to help his Nana by watching cousin Gia, but caring for the toddler is challenging and Mario is near the end of his rope when he gets a reminder that spending time with family is a gift.
Nikko’s mother wants him to stop jumping on his bed, but he’s not jumping on his bed, as he tried to convince her. Instead there are luchadors, masked wrestlers, trying to fight him one at a time. In the end, of course, Nikko is the winner: the great and mightly Nikko!
Just as sixteen-year-old Andreo, skilled in death-defying ironman events in wilderness regions, is about to compete in rugged Bolivia, he and his friend Raul (another Bolivian adoptee) begin to suspect that their adoptive parents have unwittingly acquired them illegally. Plotting to use the upcoming race to pursue the truth, they veer on an epic journey to locate Andreo’s birth parents, only to find themselves hazardously entangled with a gang of baby traffickers. Never suspecting that attempting to bring down the ring would endanger their very lives, the boys plunge ahead.
A hurricane is brewing in the jungles of the Maya, and the ancient Death Lords are on the warpath. Across the world in Venice, Italy, hanging out with his blogger friend Nasty (Anastasia) Smith-Jones and eating Pizza Gelato, Max Murphy thinks he is safe from their clutches. But when a rogue octopus pulls him off his gondola and tries to drag him down to the underworld, Max realizes that the Death Lords have not finished with him yet.
While awaiting his parents’ release from jail, fourteen-year-old Max Murphy is sucked into yet another scheme of the Maya Death Lords that sends him on a quest to the United States. Failure could mean the end of the world again.
A young Latina girl accidentally breaks her grandfather’s vihuela and searches for someone in the community to fix the instrument, which leads her to discover her grandfather’s legacy as a mariachi. Includes an author’s note and glossary.