Friendship

Drita, My Homegirl

A poignant story about the difficulties of leaving everything behind and the friendships that help you get through it. Fleeing war-torn Kosovo, ten-year-old Drita and her family move to America with the dream of living a typical American life. But with this hope comes the struggle to adapt and fit in. How can Drita find her place at school and in her new neighborhood when she doesn’t speak any English? Meanwhile, Maxie and her group of fourth-grade friends are popular in their class, and make an effort to ignore Drita. So when their teacher puts Maxie and Drita together for a class project, things get off to a rocky start. But sometimes, when you least expect it, friendship can bloom and overcome even a vast cultural divide.

This book has been included in WOW’s Language and Learning: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction Booklist. For our current list, visit our Booklist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.

H.I.V.E.: The Overlord Protocol

Otto Malpense and his friends thought their first year at the Higher Institute of Villainous Education was the most adventurous and exciting that they would ever encounter. They were dead wrong. When Otto and Wing are allowed off campus to attend Wing’s father’s funeral in Japan, they have no idea it’s a trap, all part of a lethal plan organized by Cypher, the most ruthless supervillain any of them have ever known. He intends to use them to retrieve the Overlord Protocol, a device that has the capacity to help him take over the world. But when things go terribly wrong, Otto will stop at nothing to hunt him down and make him pay. With the help of Laura, Shelby, Raven, and his former nemesis, Dr. Nero, Otto must find a way to defeat an enemy that has overcome some of the planet’s most infamous villains without even breaking a sweat. Because if he doesn’t, the world as they know it will be changed forever.

Hannah Duck

Most days, Hannah Duck is peaceful and content. Most days, but not Sundays. Sundays are the days that Hannah Duck goes for a walk. And outside, alone, is a very scary place to be. But when Hannah confides in her friends and faces her fears, she discovers that being brave can open new worlds of friendship and beauty.

H.I.V.E.: The Higher Institute of Villainous Education

Otto Malpense may only be thirteen years old, but so far he has managed to run the orphanage where he lives, and he has come up with a plan clever enough to trick the most powerful man in the country. He is the perfect candidate to become the world’s next supervillain.That is why he ends up at H.I.V.E., handpicked to become a member of the incoming class. The students have been kidnapped and brought to a secluded island inside a seemingly active volcano, where the school has resided for decades. All the kids are elite; they are the most athletic,the most technically advanced, and the smartest in the country. Inside the cavernous marble rooms, floodlit hangars, and steel doors, the students are enrolled in Villainy Studies and Stealth and Evasion 101.But what Otto soon comes to realize is that this is a six-year program,and leaving is not an option.With the help of his new friends: an athletic martial-arts expert; a world-famous, beautiful diamond thief; and a spunky computer genius — the only other people who seem to want to leave — Otto plot to escape the prison known as H.I.V.E.?

Crazy Diamond

That’s Mira M. And this is the story of her unforgettable life — as a kid alone in a junkyard tire swing, to her escape from Croatia at age 9 in a Marshall amp road case in the rear of her uncle Lou’s van. A musician, he hands her the key to her future: a guitar. When she’s 14, Mira meets Melody, Rosa and Jackson, three teens who stow away from Ghana in a ship-ping container and end up — to their surprise — in Hamburg, Germany. What stories they have! And what a story the four of them, plus Kralle (a little older and wiser) and Zucka (the record producer’s son), share on the way to the fame that all of them covet — except Mira, even after the MTV Awards show in Barcelona. Her song lyrics tell her truth. But are they her lyrics? Her music? She swears so. But who listens, now that she’s 18 — and dead?

You & You & You

Anon is a twelve-year-old loner. Zarah is a beautiful seventeen-year-old caught up in a sexual relationship. Nils is a twenty-year-old college student searching for the meaning of life and death. Each character’s obsessive fantasy overwhelms their everyday lives.These three are catalysts in each others’ lives and when they finally meet, each begins to draw the others into the real world, but things are still left uncertain at the end of the novel.

I Was A Rat!: Or, The Scarlet Slippers

“I was a rat!”

So insists a scruffy boy named Roger. Maybe it’s true. But what is he now? A terrifying monster running wild in the sewers? The Daily Scourge newspaper is sure of it. A lucrative fairground freak? He is to Mr. Tapscrew. A championship wriggler and a budding thief? That’s the hope of Billy and his gang. A victim of “Rodent Delusion”? So says the hospital doctor.

Or just an ordinary small boy, though a little ratty in his habits? Only three people believe this version of the story. And it may take a royal intervention–and a bit of magic–to convince the rest of the world. . . .

Child of Dandelions

The river of jubilant people alarmed Sabine as they bobbed along Allidina Visram Street in Kampala….The dark faces drew closer. Women in bright gomesi and headscarves danced, and bare-chested men punched their fists into the air, chanting, “Muhindi, nenda nyumbani! Indian go home.”Sabine felt she was drowning in their cries.In August 1972, President Idi Amin declares that a message from God has come to him in a dream: all foreign Indians must be “weeded out” of Uganda in the next ninety days. Fifteen-year-old Sabine and her father, a successful businessman, are confident that their family will not be affected, since they are Ugandan citizens, but Sabine’s fearful mother is certain that they will have to leave.As the ninety days tick by, the President’s message – the “countdown monster,” as Sabine calls it – is broadcast every day on the radio, and life becomes more difficult for her family and other Indians in Uganda. Sabine tries to hold on to her optimism, counting on her best friend, Zena, and her grandfather, Bapa, to keep her spirits up, but after her beloved uncle Zulfiqar disappears and Zena turns against her, Sabine begins to share her mother’s fears. When a new law is declared on the radio – all Indians must leave – Sabine and her family have a hard decision to make. Should they stay and defend their rights, or should they go? And how will they begin a new life in a different land?

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 2

Rex Zero and the End of the World

Why does everyone seem so scared? That’s what the new boy in town, Rex Norton-Norton, aka Rex Zero, wonders as he rides his bike through Ottawa’s streets. Is it spies? Kidnappers? Or is it because of the shadowy creature some say is stalking Adams Park? One thing is certain in this summer of 1962 as the Cold War heats up: nothing is quite what it seems. What’s a boy to do? If his name is Rex Zero and he has a bike he calls “Diablo,” five wild and funny siblings, an alpha dog named Kincho, a basement bomb shelter built of old Punch magazines, and a mind that turns everything inside out, he’s bound to come up with an amazing idea.

A Company of Fools

Before Micah came to St. Luc’s, he knew how to beg, how to steal, and how to run from a beating. He did not know how to comb his hair, walk in line when he felt like running, or obey anyone’s whim but his own. He was a stranger in a strange land. Henri has been living within abbey walls all his life, first in the care of nuns, then as a choirboy at St. Luc’s, not far from Paris. He expects to spend the rest of his life there, copying books in the Scriptorium with the other brothers, and singing Mass in the great cathedral. Then Micah arrives, a streetwise ragamuffin with the voice of an angel, saved from certain hanging to sing for God instead of coins. Micah comes like a fresh breeze into dead places, bringing exuberant joy at a time when Henri most needs it. For the plague is coming, the grim reaper that will slash at the very roots of Henri’s security. And neither Henri nor Micah nor anyone else in their world will ever be the same.