A Swift Pure Cry

Ireland, 1984. After Shell’s mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning, and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister. Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with childhood friend, Declan, who is charming, eloquent and persuasive. But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and the center of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country. The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.

The Book Thief

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel — a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

Awards
USBBY Honor Book

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

By The River

A fourteen-year-old describes, through prose poems, his life in a small Australian town in 1962, where, since their mother’s death, he and his brother have been mainly on their own to learn about life, death, and love.

Second Fiddle, or, How to Tell a Blackbird From a Sausage

Outspoken Mags decides to help her new friend Gillian, a talented violin student, reconcile with her estranged father so that he will allow her to attend a prestigious music school in England.

Samsara Dog

Dog lived each life as it came, until he learned the most important lesson of all. Based on Buddhist concepts of Samsara and Nirvana, it tells a story about love, life, death and dying.

Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal

In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.

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

Joker

A modern retelling of Hamlet, in which seventeen-year-old Matt begins questioning everything he believes in after the death of his best friend and his parents’ divorce.

Kipling’s Choice

In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, 18-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.

Let’s Get Lost

As she acts out the role of ” Mean Girl”- at school, with her father and brother, and even with her new boyfriend-sixteen-year-old Isabel comes to a dead end and finally confronts issues related to her mother’s death.

Jacob’s Ladder

When Jacob wakes up in the middle of a field, he realizes that the only thing he remembers is his name, and when he arrives at a nearby town he becomes aware that everyone there is also suffering from amnesia.

Worlds of Words

International Collection of Children’s and Adolescent Literature

Death