Diamonds in the Shadow

Author	Laura Resau
ISBN	0385734662

ONE NIGHT SOPHIE and her parents are called to a hospital where Pedro, 6-year-old Mexican boy, is recovering from dehydration. Crossing the border into Arizona with a group of Mexicans and a coyote, or guide, Pedro and his parents faced such harsh conditions that the boy is the only survivor. Pedro comes...

Author	Amy Kathleen Ryan
ISBN	0547062486

Zen and Xander are sisters—truly, madly, deeply sisters, and this is their last summer together.

Zen is the "good" girl with a black belt in karate and a newfound penchant for kicking heads. Xander is a wild scientific genius with a self-destructive streak a light-year long. They have three...

Author	Elizabeth Fama
ISBN	0553494368

One moment of rashness, and fourteen-year-old Emily Slake finds herself amid hundreds of panicked and drowning people in the dark ocean waters off Sumatra. Miles from shore without a life vest, she resolves to survive. But in facing the dangers of the ocean, the desperation of her fellow survivors,...

Author

Tracey Porter

Folks say I'm bound to be unlucky in life, for I was born at midnight on a Friday, the thirteenth of December, and Peggy says it's certain I can commune with spirits. But I ain't never seen any ghosts, not even my own mother, and wouldn't that be the ghost I'd see if I could?

So begins the tale of Billy...

Author	Caroline Stevermer
ISBN	0152055541

A paddle wheeler cruises up the Mississippi, delivering mail and hosting an occasional concert. A scene straight out of the nineteenth century? Not quite. This Mississippi is a toxic brown river. And the paddle wheeler is run by the River Rats, a troop of orphans who survived the Flash, a nuclear holocaust....

Author	Carol Gorman
ISBN	1561454125

Twelve-year-old Charlie Nebraska wants two things he can't get: to make the local baseball team and to have life to return to the way it was before his father died two years earlier in the Korean War.
When Charlie meets Luther Peale, a stranger who quietly and mysteriously arrives in Charlie's small...

Author	Avi
ISBN	0020415133

On an ordinary evening, just as he's about to leave for a party, 15-year-old Andy Zadinski receives a phone call from a stranger that changes his life. The caller, Zeke, confesses to the murder of a young woman named Nina Klemmer. Andy immediately calls the police, who shrug it off as a gag or a crank call....

Author

Julia Platt Leonard

When 13-year-old Oz Keillor finds a dead body in his family restaurant, he is soon caught up in a mystery where the stakes are high. His older brother is the prime suspect, and Oz quickly finds out that the murder may be tied to the death of their father years earlier, who was accused of selling nuclear...

Author	Pete Hautman
ISBN	0399243771

Roni Delicata is the pushy crime reporter for the school newspaper The Bloodwater Pump. Brian Bain is a quiet science geek who has a tendency to blow things up. Ordinarily, they would have nothing to do with each other. But today isn’t an ordinary day: their snobby classmate Alicia Camden has been snatched.Soon...

Author	Phillip Margolin
ISBN	0061885568

From tracking down her best friend, who’s nowhere to be found, to secretly helping her attorney father solve a missing-person case, Madison Kincaid is a busy seventh-grade sleuth. Teaming up with new classmate Jake, she hits the sidewalks of Portland, Oregon, determined to find out what’s behind...

Author	Frances O'Roark Dowell
ISBN	1416934820

Meet Tobin McCauley. He's got a near-certifiable grandmother, a pack of juvenile-delinquent siblings, and a dad who's not going to win father of the year any time soon. To top it off, Tobin's only friend truly believes that the study of chickens will reveal...the meaning of life? Getting through seventh...

Author	Richard Uhlig
ISBN	0375839674

On the dock of a lake in a tiny town at the corner of Nowhere & Nowhere, he sits counting the seconds until his high school graduation—at which point Arthur M. Flood intends to leave his hick life far behind in the brown Kansas dust. That's the plan. Until . . . up from the lake's muddy depths swims a girl....

Author

Terry Trueman

The powerful story of a boy's fear and courage in the face of a force of nature too huge to even imagine.

Based on Hurricane Mitch's devastation of Honduras in 1998, Terry Trueman's acclaimed Hurricane is a gripping, realistic story told from the perspective of a hurricane survivor.

After...

Author	Richard Lewis
ISBN	1416911650

Ruslan slipped away from the café and the curious onlookers. He began to run, not knowing exactly why, but instinct making him head away from the sea....

And in the distance, along the seafront of Ujung Karang, screams rose from a hundred, a thousand, mouths.

Aceh, Indonesia. December...

Author	Ron Koertge
ISBN	0763627054

Sixteen-year-old Ted O’Connor’s parents just died in a fiery car crash, and now he’s stuck with a set of semi-psycho foster parents, two foster brothers — Astin, the cocky gearhead, and C.W., the sometimes gangsta — and an inner-city high school full of delinquents. He’s having pretty...

Author	Margaret McMullan
ISBN	0618717153

Life as an O’Donnell is all twelve-year-old Addy knows, and life as an O’Donnell means trouble.
Tucked away in a gray patch of woods called No-Bob, the O’Donnell clan has nothing but a bad reputation. So when Addy’s mama abandons her on the afternoon of Mr. Frank Russell’s wedding celebration,...

Author	Katherine Sturtevant
ISBN	0374378096

In Restoration London, sixteen-year-old Meg Moore is something of an anomaly. Unlike other girls her age, Meg pores over books. She spends long hours conversing with the famous authors and poets who visit her father's bookstore, and even writes her own stories, laboring over every word until her hand...

Author	Monika Schröder
ISBN	0374364117

Initial reaction: Very unexpected surprise. I didn't expect to enjoy this novel as much as I did, particularly with it being a random read that I picked up from my local library. I thought the environment and details with respect to India were a nice touch, and I really liked following Akash's journey...

Author	Michael Ferrari
ISBN	0385737157

Born to Fly tells the story of eleven-year-old tomboy Bird McGill. Ever since she can remember, Bird has loved flying in small propeller airplanes with her mechanic dad. When the local airstrip is turned into a military flight school, Bird is in heaven. But when a young Japanese American student named...

Author	Lynne Rae Perkins
ISBN	0061870900

The Newbery Group has been referencing this book for a couple of months now, so I thought I should read it. Since it is a road trip book about a teenage boy I was thinking it would have some Kerouac inspiration/feel to it. To the author's credit, she does know how to create characters that are warm, interesting,...

Author	Kirkpatrick Hill
ISBN	1416914005

Deet's world turns upside down when his father is arrested for drug use. It doesn't seem possible that kind, caring Dad could be a criminal! After all, he only took the pills to stay awake so he could work two jobs. Now what will happen? How will Deet be able to face his classmates? Where will they get money?...

Author	John Claude Bemis
ISBN	0375855653

What if John Henry had a son?

Twelve-year-old Ray is haunted by the strangest memories of his father, whom Ray swears could speak to animals. Now an orphan, Ray jumps from a train going through the American South and falls in with a medicine show train and its stable of sideshow performers. The...

Author	Sue Corbett
ISBN	0525471200

Felix knows his dad was a famous baseball player in Cuba—and that his father risked everything to send Felix to America. But his mom won’t reveal anything else. When a team with Cuban players comes into town, Felix wonders if they knew his dad, and sneaks into their locker room to ask. That’s when...

Author	Audrey Shafer
ISBN	0385733445

Vernon Culligan had been dead to the town of Draydon, Virginia, so long that when the crusty Vietnam vet finally died, only one person noticed. Twelve-year-old Gabe grew up in the foster care system until a social worker located his Uncle Vernon two years before. When he comes home to discover that his...

Author

Edward Bloor

By 2035 the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and kidnapping has become a major growth industry in the United States. The children of privilege live in secure, gated communities and are escorted to and from school by armed guards. But the security around Charity Meyers has broken...