Orchards

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	Mariko Nagai
ISBN	0807517399

"We lived under a sky so blue in Idaho right near the towns of Hunt and Eden but we were not welcomed there." In December 1941, thirteen year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. What do you do when your home country treats...

Author	Ashley Hope Pérez
ISBN	0761361553

Marissa has smarts and plenty of promise, but she's marooned in a broken-down Houston neighborhood--and in a Mexican immigrant family where making ends meet matters much more than making it to college. When her home life becomes unbearable, Marissa seeks comfort elsewhere--and suddenly neither...

Author	Lisa Ann Sandell
ISBN	0670060283

Sarah, like every college-bound junior, deals with constant pressure from teachers, friends, and parents. Besides that, she’s a marching band geek and the only Jew in her class. So when she gets a chance to spend the summer on a kibbutz in Israel, Sarah jumps at the opportunity to escape her world....

Author	Guadalupe Garcia McCall
ISBN	1600604293

Lupita, a budding actor and poet in a close-knit Mexican American immigrant family, comes of age as she struggles with adult responsibilities during her mother's battle with cancer in this young adult novel in verse.

When Lupita learns Mami has cancer, she is terrified by the possibility...

Author	Cathy Ostlere
ISBN	1595143386

On October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi is gunned down by two Sikh bodyguards. The murder sparks riots in Delhi and for three days Sikh families are targeted and killed in retribution for the Prime Minister’s death. It is into this chaos that sixteen-year-old Maya and her Sikh father, Amar, arrive from...

Author	Thalia Chaltas
ISBN	0670011991

Home is supposed to be a place you belong. It's supposed to be parents who are there and siblings who bug you and a life that feels comfortable. It's not supposed to be an absentee mother or a drowned sister. But that's Vera's reality, and she can't stand it anymore. So she runs. She ends up in an old mining...

Author	Ching Yeung Russell
ISBN	1600604234

Growing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s, Yeung Ying is tired of hearing how important boys are. After all, she can write letters and recite poems as well as even better than her boy cousins.

Luckily, Yeung Ying's mother thinks "girls and boys are just the same." Despite protests from her husband s...

Author	Ron Koertge
ISBN	0763629391

"This funny and poignant novel celebrates the power of writing to help young people make sense of their lives and unlock and confront their problems." - SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

When MVP Kevin Boland gets the news that he has mono and won't be seeing a baseball field for a while,...

Author	Helen Frost
ISBN	0374309620

Two sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, tell their separate yet tightly interwoven stories in alternating narrative poems. Each sister - Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother...

Author	Susan Taylor Brown
ISBN	1582461805

When her mom runs away from home, Rachel is left behind with her emotionally distant father and many questions she cannot answer. Over time, she learns the truth about her mom. But it's only when she learns the truth about her dad, the rock- immoveable and always there for her to lean on-that Rachel can...

Author	Ann Turner
ISBN	0439296803

As she did in her groundbreaking memoir, Learning to Swim, Turner takes on a tough subject through luminous poetry. The result is a shattering and healing journey through one boy's loss of a parent.

As the pitcher on his HS team, Mark lives and breathes baseball. Sure, there's pressure from...

Author

Andrea Cheng

Sometime around 1815, an enslaved young man named Dave was brought to Edgefield, South Carolina, the center of a pottery-producing area known for the alkaline glazes used on the stoneware. Dave was taught how to turn pots and jars on a pottery wheel by one of his first owners. As Dave's talent flourished,...

Author	Jame Richards
ISBN	0375858857

Sixteen-Year-Old Celstia spends every summer with her family at the elite resort at Lake Conemaugh, a shimmering Allegheny Mountain reservoir held in place by an earthen dam. Tired of the society crowd, Celestia prefers to swim and fish with Peter, the hotel’s hired boy. It’s a friendship she...

Author

James Howe

The Gang of Five is back in this much-anticipated follow-up to The Misfits and Totally Joe . Addie Carle, the only girl in the group of friends, is outspoken, opinionated, and sometimes…just a bit obnoxious. But as seventh grade progresses, Addie’s not so sure anymore about who she is. It seems her...

Author	Sally Murphy
ISBN	0763648213

At school, Pearl is a group of one, and at home her beloved granny is fading. A poignant gem of a tale about independence, grief, and finding your place.

Pearl likes to write poems, but despite the insistence of her teacher, Ms. Bruff, Pearl's poems don't rhyme, and neither does she. She wishes...

Author	Jen Bryant
ISBN	0375832599

Like her mother, Georgia McCoy is an artist, but her dad looks away whenever he sees her with a sketchbook. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it was like when her mother was still alive . . . when they were a family . . . when they were happy. But then a few days after her 13th birthday, Georgia receives...

Author	Paul B. Janeczko
ISBN	0763647276

Paul B. Janeczko's stirring collection of poems goes inside the walls of the notorious camp to portray the indomitable spirit of those incarcerated there.

Hitler hailed Terez�n (Theresienstadt) as a haven for artistic Jews, when in reality the Czech concentration camp was little more...

Author	Terry Farish
ISBN	0761462678

In spare free verse laced with unforgettable images, Viola’s strikingly original voice sings out the story of her family's journey from war-torn Sudan, to Cairo, and finally to Portland, Maine. Here, in the sometimes too close embrace of the local Southern Sudanese Community, she dreams of South...

Author	Jason Wallace
ISBN	1849390487

Set in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, just after the war for independence, a young English boy, Jacklin, is torn between his black friends at school and his sympathy for the colonial whites after witnessing the compulsory land seizures by Robert Mugabe's government.

But with an imminent visit by Robert...

Author	Margarita Engle
ISBN	0544109414

One hundred years ago, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled America’s emergence as a global superpower. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood—and creating a miracle is no easy thing. Thousands...