In a country governed by isolation, fear, and a tyrannical dictator, seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer, but he decides to use his position to try to outwit his handler, undermine the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country.
A powerful middle grade debut that weaves together folklore and history to tell the story of a girl finding her voice and the strength to use it during the final months of the Communist regime in Romania in 1989.
A Traveller girl creates her own musical instrument from a willow branch and lots of recycled objects. She plays it enthusiastically, but it sounds terrible! Ignoring warnings not to awaken the ogre in the hills, Ossiri goes there to practice playing her instrument.
When a Traveller family experiences a run of bad luck, an imaginative boy called Yokki lifts their spirits with tales of a magical white horse.
One morning, Little Mouse spots something red and shiny hanging from a branch. It must be a marble! Too short to reach it alone, she enlists her friends Mole (who thinks it’s a balloon) and Rabbit (who’s sure it’s a ball) to help out.
In 1897, 17-year-olds Dacia and Lou, New York socialites and cousins, visit their maternal homeland of Romania and learn the family secret–that they are shapeshifters, expected to take their rightful places and marry proper husbands, and serve the Dracula family.
Thirteen-year-old Reveka, an herbalist’s apprentice in the Middle Ages, attempts to break the mysterious curse on the princesses of Sylvania and instead discovers a door to the Underworld.
Before she knows it, everything in thirteen-year-old Flora Popescu’s life has changed. Her parents, her best friend Alys, and the restricted life she has always known in their Bucharest tower block are distanced from her – and Daniel, the mysterious new boy at school, seems to be the cause. Flora likes him, but why can’t everybody else trust him too? She thinks of her father’s words: “People like us can’t afford the luxury of new friends.” Then, just as she is making sense of her divided loyalties, Flora discovers that only she alone can save her father’s life.
Eva Zimmermann is eight years old, and she has just discovered she is Jewish. Such is the life of an only child living in postwar Bucharest, a city that is changing in ever more frightening ways. Eva’s family, full of eccentric and opinionated adults, will do absolutely anything to keep her safe—even if it means hiding her identity from her. With razor-sharp depictions of her animated relatives, Haya Leah Molnar’s memoir of her childhood captures with touching precocity the very adult realities of living behind the iron curtain.
Using his amazing swallowing ability, a rooster foils the evil plans of a greedy nobleman and brings back riches to his poor master.