Lupita Mañana

Author	J.L. Powers
ISBN	1933693959

Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother Gogo, her little sister Zi, and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In that shantytown, it seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere warn of the disease of the day. Her Gogo goes to...

Author	Vivien Alcock
ISBN	0618003371

Frankie isn't exactly sure what her scientist dad does in his top-secret laboratory, but her neighbors tease her that it must be something awful -- like developing germ warfare. So when Frankie's older brother steals a bit of mysterious goo from their father's lab, she makes sure she gets some to conduct...

Author	Ann Rinaldi
ISBN	0152059474

Sis Goose is a beloved member of Luli's family, despite the fact that she was born a slave. But the family is harboring a terrible secret. And when Union soldiers arrive on their Texas plantation to announce that slaves have been declared free for nearly two years, Sis Goose is horrified to learn that the...

Author	Howard Pyle
ISBN	0486217841

A rich and engrossing thread of Romance runs through this tale of the motherless son of a valiant robber baron of Medieval Germany. Young Otto, born into a warring household in an age when lawless chiefs were constantly fighting each other or despoiling the caravans of the merchant burghers, is raised...

Author

Rhoda Blumberg

Any person who leaves the country to go to another and later returns will be put to death. This was the law in Japan in the early 1800s. When fourteen-year-old Manjiro, working on a fishing boat to help support his family, was shipwrecked three hundred miles away from his homeland, he was heartbroken to...

Author	Will Hobbs
ISBN	0380729148

"Gold!" Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. "Read all about it! Gold discovered in Alaska!"

Within hours of hearing the thrilling news, fifteen-year-old Jason Hawthorn jumps a train for Seattle, stow away on a ship bound for the goldfields, and joins thousands of fellow prospectors attempting...

Author	Robert Burch
ISBN	0140345345

This book is a re-read from my childhood. I actually understand the book much better about a quarter century later. I can see why Ida Early is the Mary Poppins of the mountains in Georgia during the Depression. Ida Early comes to the Sutton house the summer after the mother died to take care of the house and...

Author	Jackie French Koller
ISBN	0152575820

Thirteen-year-old Danny and his family are struggling to make ends meet in New York during the Great Depression. His father leaves to search for work, and Danny and his mother do what they can to survive. With his mother pregnant and unable to help, Danny is forced to beg for food. Through it all, they retain...

Author

Gary Soto

Ninth grader Rudy has a date with eleventh grader Patricia. Now he has to come up with the money, the poise, and the conversation to carry it off. This one-act play, by turns heartwarming and heart-wrenching, follows Rudy from his desperate search for guidance through the hilarious date itself--all...

Author

Alice McGill

On a cold gray morning in 1683, Molly Walsh sat on a stool tugging at the udder of an obstinate cow. When she spilled the milk, she was brought before the court for stealing. Because she could read, Molly escaped the typicalpunishment of death on the gallows. At the age of seventeen, the English dairymaid...

Author	James Rumford
ISBN	1596435429

What was made of rags and bones, soot and seeds? What took a mountain to make?
For the answer, travel back to the fifteenth century—to a time when books were made by hand and a man named Johannes Gutenberg invented a way to print books with movable type.
Written as a series of riddles and illustrated...

Author	Leon Walter Tillage
ISBN	0374443300

"Leon's Story is a powerful, wonderful thing!" -- Nikki Giovanni

I remember that as a young boy I used to look in the mirror and I would curse my color, my blackness. But in those days they didn't call you "black." They didnt say "minority." They called us "colored" or "nigger."

Leon Tillage...

Author	Betsy Byars
ISBN	0142400637

Amen McBee, the youngest of five sisters, gobbles up words the way other children gobble up sweets.  She couldn't be more different from her elder twin sisters Arabella and Annabella-called the Bellas.  The mischievous Bellas constantly frighten Amen with stories of Mr. Tominski-the old recluse...

Author	Alfred Slote
ISBN	0064404692

"Daydreamer Jason, 11, has just been [dropped] from his Little League team. Seeking solace at the baseball-card shop, he makes a startling hypothesis: 'Buck McHenry,' star pitcher [of the Negro Leagues], could be school custodian Mack Henry. Mr. Henry's identity, in doubt through much of the book,...

Author	Patrick F. McManus
ISBN	0805046623

America's best-selling outdoor humorist for adults has a secret following: middle-grade and young-adult readers.

Never Cry "Arp!" is a lively collection of twelve stories about young Pat's misadventures in the Great American Wilderness.

All the McManus regulars are here: Crazy...

Author	M.T. Anderson
ISBN	0763615862

From the celebrated picture-book team of M. T. Anderson and Kevin Hawkes comes a wistful, wondrous ode to the natural pleasures of peace and solitude.


The boy lives alone at the End of the World, hunting treasure with old maps, finding fossils, whistling tunes, playing ball by the drop....

Author

Sonia Levitin

"You are a criminal, Gemm 16884--aggressive, hostile, nonconforming. We have noted tendencies toward diversity in your gait, in your dreams, and most especially in your repeated persistence in"--the Elder cleared his throat--"making music."

Branded a deviant--and therefore a threat--to...

Author	Huynh Quang Nhuong
ISBN	0064401839

An ALA Notable Children’s Book and a Booklist Editors’ Choice, about one young man’s memories of the land he called home.

The land I love was lost to me forever.

Huynh Quang Nhuong grew up in the highlands of Vietnam, next to the jungle teeming with wildlife. Encounters with tigers,...

Author	Elvira Woodruff
ISBN	0590677179

In the story The Memory Coat by Elvira Woodruff,Elvia uses a different technique to express how Rachel acts like a sister to Grisha. When everyone wanted Grisha to get a new coat so, they had a better chance to enter America. Rachel sticks up for him. Rachel explains to the family why the coat was important...

Author	Felice Holman
ISBN	0689710666

An ALA Best Books for Young Adults
An ALA Notable Children's Book
An ALA Best of the Best Books for Young Adults
The Horn Book Fanfare List

Desperate, driven, harassed to the breaking point, Slake decides to go underground—into the sheltering depths of the New York City Subway...

Author	Willie Morris
ISBN	0916242684

GOOD OLD BOY: A DELTA BOYHOOD is a novel for young readers about a boy's adventures growing up in post-WWII Mississippi. Author Willie Morris, then editor of Harper's Magazine in New York, wrote GOOD OLD BOY when his son David, age ten, asked, "What was it like to grow up in Mississippi?" Morris's response...

Author	Roland Smith
ISBN	0786811595

At first I honestly wasn't sure what to make of this book. On one hand I was intrigued by it because I've read very few (if any!) books set in Kenya specifically, but on the other hand I'd heard from other readers that the story was very silly and lame. Luckily it was the exact opposite. The author clearly did...

Author	John Coy
ISBN	1467780545

I love a lot of things about this book. The big thing is how real and true it is -- the photographs and the simple text give it such wide appeal. I don't know what percentage of people are descendants of immigrants who moved to another country for a better life, but I'd guess it's high, especially in the United...