Petar has a happy and loving family, but they are forced to evacuate and leave his father behind during a war, and only the thought of peace can bring back his love of music and inspire him to play the violin again.
Petar’s Song
War
Children Of War: Voices Of Iraqi Refugees
Provides interviews with twenty young Iraqi children who have moved away from their homeland and tells of their fears, challenges, and struggles to rebuild their lives in foreign lands as refugees of war.
Christophe’s Story
Life has been very lonely for Christopher. The young Rwandan refugee is having trouble getting used to his new school, new language, and new life. Worst of all, he misses his grandfather who had to be left behind. His teacher persuades Christophe to share his story with his classmates — so he tells them of the terrifying day the soldiers came to his house and killed his baby brother. The spoken story fills the air and his classmates are spellbound. But when his teacher asks him to write it down and read it out at an assembly, Christophe is horrified. In his culture, it is believed that once a story is written down, it loses its potency. Will Christophe find a way to break through the barriers and share his story?
Anna’s Goat
A moving statement about the refugee experience, told from a child’s unique point of view.
The Unbreakable Code
John’s mother is geting married and he has to leave the reservation. John’s grandfather tells him he has the special unbreakable code to take with him. This story portrays the quiet pride of a Navajo code talker as he explains to his grandson how the Navajo language, faith and ingenuity helped win World War II.
The Lost Crown
Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia–like the fingers on a hand, Tatiana the tallest, Anastasia the smallest, Maria the one most desperate for a ring. These are the daughters of the Tsar, the daughters of the last royal Russian family. The book tracks this loving cluster of sisters from the decks of their yacht to the prison walls of their final home. What do abdication and revolution mean to these young women? Told through each of their voices in alternating chapters, we see their day-to-day lives, in many ways, remain the same; they dote on their dogs, flirt with the soldiers, and are followed constantly by guards. But their desires for the future have all but disappeared. As conditions worsen and the provisional government loses power to the Bolsheviks, the girls huddle together to make sense of what is happening. At the same time hopeful and hopeless, naÏve and wise, their voices become a chorus singing the final song of Imperial Russia.
Eona
Facing the ultimate battle for control of the land she calls home, Eona finds herself waging an internal battle every bit as devastating as the war threatening to break out across the kingdom.
The Midnight Zoo
Twelve-year-old Andrej, nine-year-old Tomas, and their baby sister Wilma flee their Romany encampment when it is attacked by Germans during World War II, and in an abandoned town they find a zoo where the animals tell their stories, helping the children understand what has become of their lives and what it means to be free.
War Games
Newbery Honor winner Audrey Couloumbis (“Getting Near to Baby”) and her husband, Akila, deliver this gripping novel based on Akila’s boyhood experiences during World War II, after the Germans invaded Greece. What were once just boys’ games soon become matters of life and death for 12-year-old Petros and his older brother, Zola.
Dogtag Summer
Twelve-year-old Tracy–or Tuyet–has always felt different. The villagers in Vietnam called her con-lai, or “half-breed,” because her father was an American GI. And she doesn’t fit in with her adoptive family in California, either. But when Tracy and a friend discover a soldier’s dogtag hidden among her father’s things, it sets her past and her present on a collision course. Where should her broken heart come to rest? In a time and place she remembers only in her dreams? Or among the people she now calls family?