In 1883 thirteen-year-old Katrien Courtlandt is more interested in science and exploring the Javanese jungle for beetles with her native friend, than in becoming a young lady like her despised cousin Brigitta–but when Krakatoa erupts, the tsunami hits, and their families are swept away the two cousins must struggle to survive together.
This children’s picture book tells the story of one multigenerational Navajo family that works, plays, eats, sleeps and shares their lives together in around their family hogan. It is a charming story of how the youngest children’s lives are intrinsically linked to their home and family.
Pura Belpre Honor winner for The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano and one of America’s most influential Hispanics–‘Maria’ on Sesame Street–delivers a beautifully wrought coming-of-age memoir. Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges us into the daily lives of a Latino family that is loving–and troubled. This is Sonia’s own story rendered with an unforgettable narrative power. When readers meet young Sonia, she is a child living amidst the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy relatives and nosy neighbors. Each day she is glued to the TV screen that blots out the painful realities of her existence and also illuminates the possibilities that lie ahead. But–click!–when the TV goes off, Sonia is taken back to real-life–the cramped, colorful world of her neighborhood and an alcoholic father. But it is Sonia’s dream of becoming an actress that keeps her afloat among the turbulence of her life and times. Spiced with culture, heartache, and humor, this memoir paints a lasting portrait of a girl’s resilience as she grows up to become an inspiration to millions.
When twelve-year-old Maya and big sister Zara set off on their own from Delhi to their grandmother’s home of Aminpur, a small town in Northern India, they become separated and Maya decides to continue their quest to find a chest of family treasures that their grandmother’s family left behind when they fled from India to Pakistan during the Great Partition.
When the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in 1941, twelve-year-old Michael and his family are deported from Prague to the Terezin concentration camp, where his mother’s will and ingenuity keep them from being transported to Auschwitz and certain death.
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.
For some kids summer is a sun-soaked season of fun. But for Steve, it’s just another season of worries. Worries about his sick newborn baby brother who is fighting to survive, worries about his parents who are struggling to cope, even worries about the wasp’s nest looming ominously from the eaves. So when a mysterious wasp queen invades his dreams, offering to “fix” the baby, Steve thinks his prayers have been answered.
Giselle Boyer and her identical twin, Isabelle, are as close as sisters can be, even as their family seems to be unraveling. Then the Boyers have a tragic encounter that will shatter everyone’s world forever.
Giselle wakes up in the hospital, injured and unable to speak or move. Trapped in the prison of her own body, Giselle must revisit her past in order to understand how the people closest to her — her friends, her parents, and above all, Isabelle, her twin — have shaped and defined her.
A bitterly jealous brother, a cold-hearted husband, a monk who mistakes desire for piety, a fraudulent merchant who meets his match in a supernatural river otter, a samurai who makes the ultimate sacrifice — the motives and pathologies underlying these traditional Japanese folktale characters are explored with haunting results.
Rendered a foreigner among her own people when her mother sends her to school in their native Ghana, a young woman learns about the painful economic circumstances affecting the region, which sharply contrasts with her divorced parents’ homes in England and America.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 2