Hold Tight, Don't Let Go
10 best books like Hold Tight, Don't Let Go (Laura Rose Wagner): The Bitter Side of Sweet, Fifteen Lanes, The Milk of Birds, Lost Girl Found, Dogtag Summer, Eden West, The Turtle of Oman, Jasmine Skies, La Linea, Hurricane Dancers: The First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck
| Author | Tara Sullivan |
| ISBN | 0399173072 |
Two young boys must escape a life of slavery in modern-day Ivory Coast
Fifteen-year-old Amadou counts the things that matter. For two years what has mattered are the number of cacao pods he and his younger brother, Seydou, can chop down in a day. This number is very important. The higher the number...
| Author | S.J. Laidlaw |
| ISBN | 1101917806 |
Noor has lived all of her fourteen years in the fifteen lanes of Mumbai’s red light district. Born into a brothel, she is destined for the same fate as her mother: a desperate life trapped in the city’s sex trade. She must act soon to have any chance of escaping this grim future.
Across the sprawling...
This timely, heartrending novel tells the moving story of a friendship between two girls: one an American teen, one a victim of the crisis in Darfur.
Know that there are many words behind the few on this paper...
Fifteen-year-old Nawra lives in Darfur, Sudan, in a camp for refugees...
| Author | Leah Bassoff |
| ISBN | 1554984165 |
For Poni, life in her small village in southern Sudan is simple and complicated at the same time. Stay in school. Beat up any boy who tries to show attention. Watch out for the dangers in the river. But then the war comes. When soldiers arrive in her village, and bombs begin to rain from the sky, there is only...
| Author | Elizabeth Partridge |
| ISBN | 1599901838 |
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...
| Author | Pete Hautman |
| ISBN | 0763674184 |
A world within a world…
Twelve square miles of paradise, surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence: this is Nodd, the land of the Grace. It is all Jacob knows. Beyond the fence lies the World, a wicked, terrible place, doomed to destruction. Only the Grace will be spared.
But...
| Author | Naomi Shihab Nye |
| ISBN | 0062019724 |
Aref Al-Amri does not want to leave Oman. He does not want to leave his elementary school, his friends, or his beloved grandfather, Siddi. He does not want to live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents will go to graduate school. His mother is desperate for him to pack his suitcase—but he refuses....
| Author | Sita Brahmachari |
| ISBN | 1447205189 |
4.5 stars. But so close to 5 you could almost taste it. :-D
The number of British YA books I read last year was shocking and this made me sad because when I grow up [I’ll get there…eventually] I want to be an author.
And I’m, well, I’m British.
So why wasn’t I making more of an effort...
| Author | Ann Jaramillo |
| ISBN | 1596431547 |
Miguel's life is just beginning. Or so he thinks. Fifteen-year-old Miguel leaves his rancho deep in Mexico to migrate to California across la linea, the border, in a debut novel of life-changing, cliff-hanging moments.
But Miguel's carefully laid plans change suddenly when his younger sister...
| Author | Margarita Engle |
| ISBN | 0805092404 |
Quebrado has been traded from pirate ship to ship in the Caribbean Sea for as long as he can remember. The sailors he toils under call him el quebrado--half islander, half outsider, a broken one. Now the pirate captain Bernardino de Talavera uses Quebrado as a translator to help navigate the worlds and...
| Author | Gigi Amateau |
| ISBN | 0763647926 |
An 1800 insurrection planned by a literate slave known as "Prosser’s Gabriel" inspires a historical novel following one extraordinary man’s life.
In a time of post-Revolutionary fervor in Richmond, Virginia, an imposing twenty-four-year-old slave named Gabriel, known for his courage...
| Author | Marilyn Nelson |
| ISBN | 0803733054 |
It’s funny to think about identity. I wonder how much of us we inherit, and how much we create.
Connor’s grandmother leaves his dad a letter when she dies, and the letter’s confession shakes their tight-knit Italian American family: The man who raised Dad is not his birth father.
But...
Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices
| Author | Lisa Charleyboy |
| ISBN | 1554516870 |
A powerful and visually stunning anthology from some of the most groundbreaking Native artists working in North America today. Truly universal in its themes, Dreaming In Indian will shatter commonly held stereotypes and challenge readers to rethink their own place in the world. Divided into four...
It’s 1968, and war is not foreign to seventeen-year-old Ashe. His dogmatic, racist father married his passionate peace-activist mother when she became pregnant with him, and ever since, the couple—like the situation in Vietnam—has been engaged in a senseless war that could have been prevented.
With...
| Author | Jairo Buitrago |
| ISBN | 1554987415 |
In this moving and timely story, a young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the US border.
They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn’t know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road,...
An Uninterrupted View of the Sky
| Author | Melanie Crowder |
| ISBN | 0399169008 |
Modern history unearthed as a boy becomes an innocent victim of corruption in the underbelly of Bolivia's crime world, where the power of family is both a prison and the only means of survival.
It's 1999 in Bolivia and Francisco's life consists of school, soccer, and trying to find space for...
The realities of teen prostitution are revealed in this eye-opening, heartbreaking story from the author of America, which Booklist called "a piercing, unforgettable novel" and Kirkus Reviews deemed "a work of sublime humanity."
As a teen girl in Newark, New Jersey, lost in the foster care...
| Author | Shannon Gibney |
| ISBN | 1467776823 |
For as long as she can remember, sixteen-year-old Alex Kirtridge has known two things:
1. She has always been Little Kirtridge, a stellar baseball player, just like her father.
2. She’s adopted.
These facts have always been part of Alex’s life. Despite some teasing,...
The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond
| Author | Brenda Woods |
| ISBN | 0399257144 |
Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods’ moving, uplifting story of a girl finally meeting the African American side of her family explores racism and how it feels to be biracial, and celebrates families of all kinds.
Violet is a smart, funny, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family...
| Author | David Almond |
| ISBN | 0763673102 |
International award winner David Almond draws on memories of his early years in Tyneside, England, for a moving coming-of-age novel, masterfully told.
A gentle visionary coming of age in the shadow of the shipyards of northern England, Dominic Hall is torn between extremes. On the one hand,...
| Author | Tim Wynne-Jones |
| ISBN | 0763669733 |
The ghosts of war reverberate across the generations in a riveting, time-shifting story within a story from acclaimed thriller writer Tim Wynne-Jones.
When Evan's father dies suddenly, Evan finds a hand-bound yellow book on his desk - a book his dad had been reading when he passed away. The...
| Author | Walter Dean Myers |
| ISBN | 0385387539 |
Young heroes decide that they are not too young or too powerless to change their world in this gripping, futuristic young adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author of the Printz Award–winning Monster.
It is 2035. Teens, armed only with their ideals, must wage war on the power...
| Author | Denise Lewis Patrick |
| ISBN | 0805047166 |
Reesie Boone just knows that thirteen is going to be her best year yet—this will be the year she makes her very first fashion design on her Ma Maw's sewing machine. She'll skip down the streets of New Orleans with her best friends, Ayanna and Orlando, and everyone will look at her in admiration.
But...
Like a River: A Civil War Novel
| Author | Kathy Cannon Wiechman |
Leander and Polly are two teenage Union soldiers who carry deep, dangerous secrets. Leander is underage when he enlists and Polly follows her father into war disguised as his son. The war proves life changing for both as they survive
incredible odds. Leander struggles to be accepted as a man and...
