France

Materials from France

Rita and Whatsit

Rita is a little girl with a big personality. Whatsit is a dog without a name. Rita enjoys dressing up running around and being in charge. Whatsit enjoys chewing on things sleeping and cheating at checkers. Together they are perfect friends. In the first book of a series, Rita is not pleased with any of her birthday presents until one of them starts running away. Rita is surprised to receive a dog for her birthday, and she is even more shocked when she discovers that the dog can talk.

The Second Life Of Linus Hoppe

After intentionally getting himself expelled from Realm One, Linus Hoppe believed he would experience more of real life. But life in inferior Realm Two is a nightmare. For months Linus has been imprisoned in a factory, where he toils on an assembly line. At night, he’s so tired that he no longer dreams of a future, of the destiny he wanted to create for himself. As for his family and friends, he fears he’ll never see them again. He especially misses Chem and Yosh, his co-conspirators in fooling the Great Processor. What made them think they could change society’s rigid hierarchy? Ready to give up, Linus must somehow regain hope and the will to fight for his freedom.

The Fighter

Fighting is a way of life for Moshe Wisniak. As a boy from a very poor neighborhood in Warsaw, he can’t run away when Polish kids attack the Jews, because his legs are weak. So he learns to use his fists, his head and other weapons to defend himself and his brothers. When the family moves to Paris in 1929, everyone finds work and life improves slowly. Moshe, now Maurice, is a leather worker and a young husband. At a Jewish sports club, he takes up boxing, and becomes an amateur flyweight. But the war comes to Paris, and by 1942, the French police round up foreign Jews and the Germans deport them by the hundreds every day. They send Maurice to the death camp at Auschwitz. In the camp, SS officers sense Maurice’s strength. They command him to box against a dying prisoner. Now Maurice is faced with an impossible moral dilemma: kill the prisoner or be killed by the SS for refusing to obey them. Translated from French by award-winning author Jean-Jacques Greif, The Fighter isn’t simply another book about the Holocaust. It is a book about a hero who discovers the death-defying power of his own humanity.

Take a closer look at The Fighter as examined in WOW Review.

365 Penguins

On the first day of the new year, the mailman brings a surprise—a penguin! One by one, day by day, penguins fill the house. At first they are cute, but with every passing day, the penguins pile up—along with the family’s problems. Feeding, cleaning, and housing the penguins becomes a monumental task.

Max’s Dragon

Max is looking for words that rhyme. His dragon is in his wagon – or was, for now its tail has left a trail, which Max follows. He finds an umbrella on the ground— “Found, ground,” he says, while his older brothers mock him for believing in dragons and sitting under an umbrella when it isn’t even raining. But Max believes in possibilities—and when he can show his brothers not only a dragon in the stormy clouds but also a dinosaur, they begin to come round. When Max demonstrates the power of his rhyming words to tame the dinosaur and the dragon and make the rain come, he wins them over completely.

Life As It Comes

Sisters with nothing in common? That’s Mado and Patty.

Studious and responsible, 15-year-old Mado is the family brain. Patty, on the other hand, is a carefree 20-year-old party girl who lives on her own and has plenty of boyfriends. The two are following divergent paths . . . until their parents die in a car accident and a family court judge reluctantly appoints Patty as her sister’s guardian.

Now these two improbable siblings face the challenges of growing up together—but it’s Mado who quickly assumes the big sister’s role. And it’s not a role she particularly wants—especially after Patty announces that she’s several months pregnant. . . .

Anne-Laure Bondoux writes with insight, humor, and poignancy about the bonds between sisters—and the challenges of everyday life.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 3, Issue 2

Gate Of Days (The Book Of Time)

Sam Faulkner now knows his father is trapped in Vlad Tepes’s castle, but he can’t save him without the seven coins that will allow him to direct his travel to the right year in Time. So he sets off on a desperate journey through the ages to collect the coins — to the oracle at Delphi, Pompeii before Mt. Vesuvius — even Chicago in 1932, where he meets his seven-year-old grandfather. But things get wilder still when he finally finds his father, who is sick, dying, raving . . . and who insists they must rescue Sam’s dead mother from Time!

Babylonne

Exotic and exciting, this unflinching coming-of-age tale featuring a headstrong heroine weaves a vivid tapestry of life in the Middle Ages.Early thirteenth-century Languedoc is a place of valor, violence, and persecution. At age sixteen, Babylonne has survived six bloody sieges. She’s tough, resourceful, and — now that her strict aunt and abusive grandmother intend to marry her off to a senile old man —desperate. Disguised as a boy, Babylonne embarks on an action-packed adventure that amounts to a choice: trust the mysterious Catholic priest — a sworn enemy to her Cathar faith — who says he’s a friend of her dead father, Pagan. Or pursue a fairy-tale version of her future, one in which she’ll fight and likely die in a vicious war with the French. Though Babylonne never knew her irreverent father, fans of Catherine Jinks’s novels about Pagan Kidrouk will be sure to see the resemblance in his feisty daughter.

Cinderella

Cinderella’s evil stepmother makes her cook and clean and dust and sweep until her arms ache and her head spins. But with a tap of her fairy godmother’s wand, the kind, mistreated beauty becomes a shimmering vision worthy of a prince.