Plain Girl
10 best books like Plain Girl (Virginia Sorensen): In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, Snow Treasure, A Single Shard, Turn Homeward, Hannalee, The Good Master, Rascal, How Reading Changed My Life, Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze, Finding Zasha, Iron Thunder: The Battle Between the Monitor & the Merrimac
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
| Author | Bette Bao Lord |
| ISBN | 0064401758 |
Shirley Temple Wong sails from China to America with a heart full of dreams. Her new home is Brooklyn, New York. America is indeed a land full of wonders, but Shirley doesn't know any English, so it's hard to make friends. Then a miracle-baseball-happens. It is 1947, and Jackie Robinson, star of the Brooklyn...
| Author | Marie McSwigan |
| ISBN | 0142402249 |
In the bleak winter of 1940, Nazi troops parachuted into Peter Lundstrom's tiny Norwegian village and held it captive. Nobody thought the Nazis could be defeated--until Uncle Victor told Peter how the children could fool the enemy. It was a dangerous plan. They had to slip past Nazi guards with nine...
| Author | Linda Sue Park |
| ISBN | 0440418518 |
Tree-ear, an orphan, lives under a bridge in Ch’ulp’o, a potters’ village famed for delicate celadon ware. He has become fascinated with the potter’s craft; he wants nothing more than to watch master potter Min at work, and he dreams of making a pot of his own someday. When Min takes Tree-ear...
| Author | Patricia Beatty |
| ISBN | 0688166768 |
During the closing days of the Civil War, plucky 12-year-old Hannalee Reed, sent north to work in a Yankee mill, struggles to return to the family she left behind in war-torn Georgia. "A fast-moving novel based upon an actual historical incident with a spunky heroine and fine historical detail."--School...
Jancsi is overjoyed to hear that his cousin from Budapest is coming to spend the summer on his father's ranch on the Hungarian plains. But their summer proves more adventurous than he had hoped when headstrong Kate arrives, as together they share horseback races across the plains, country fairs and...
| Author | Sterling North |
| ISBN | 0140344454 |
Nothing's surprising in the North household, not even Sterling's new pet raccoon. Rascal is only a baby when Sterling brings him home, but soon the two are best friends, doing everything together--until the spring day when everything suddenly changes.
Rascal is a heartwarming boyhood...
How Reading Changed My Life
| Author | Anna Quindlen |
| ISBN | 0345422783 |
A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe...
| Author | Elizabeth Foreman Lewis |
| ISBN | 0805081135 |
A classic Newbery Award winner, with an introduction by Katherine Paterson and new illustrations
When Young Fu arrives with his mother in bustling 1920s Chungking, all he has seen of the world is the rural farming village where he has grown up. He knows nothing of city life. But the city, with...
Randi Barrow is back with another gripping heroic World War II story about a boy and his best friend, a German shepherd!
In 1941, the Germans began the long, bloody siege on Leningrad. During the chaos, twelve-year-old Ivan is sent to live with relatives when his mother's job is moved to the mountains....
Iron Thunder: The Battle Between the Monitor & the Merrimac
When his father is killed fighting for the Union in the War Between the States, thirteen-year-old Tom Carroll must take a job to help support his family. He manages to find work at a bustling ironworks in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where dozens of men are frantically pounding together the strangest...
| Author | Elizabeth Enright |
| ISBN | 0152022724 |
Summer has a magic all its own.
When Portia sets out for a visit with her cousin Julian, she expects fun and adventure, but of the usual kind: exploring in the woods near Julian's house, collecting stones and bugs, playing games throughout the long, lazy days.
But this summer is different.
On...
| Author | Keith Robertson |
| ISBN | 0140341447 |
Henry Reed has arrived in Grover's Corner--and the town will never be the same. While spending the summer with his aunt and uncle, Henry comes up with a sure-fire money-making project: Henry Reed, Inc., Research. Henry's neighbor, Midge Glass, has an even more sure-fire hit: Reed and Glass, Inc. Now...
| Author | Patricia Beatty |
| ISBN | 0688122809 |
Mama is widowed, with two children and no job prospects. She decides to start a school out in the gold fields but is shortly and firmly disabused of all her city slicker notions. The story is narrated by Ann Katherine, who is a nicely written young teen. Her younger brother is the bane of her existence, naturally....
| Author | Caroline Dale Snedeker |
| ISBN | 0966706722 |
Young Theras, born an Athenian, is taken to Sparta by a relative when his father is lost at war. He is forced to live like a Spartan, a brutal life with no pity for those who are not physically perfect and totally obedient to Spartan control. After enduring rigorous training and repeated cruel incidents,...
| Author | Louise S. Rankin |
| ISBN | 0140363351 |
Momo has always wanted a Lhasa terrier--a dog like the ones the Buddhist priests hold sacred in their temples. And her dream is realized when a trader brings Pempa to her parents' tea house. But after a band of robbers steals the valuable dog and quickly escapes with him into the mountains, Momo is determined...
| Author | Carolyn Treffinger |
| ISBN | 0802774687 |
While I do in some if not actually in many ways consider Carolyn Treffinger's Li Lun: Lad of Courage both readable and inspiring (that is to say I find the main protagonist's, I find Li Lun's courage, his inventiveness and his skills at solving the multitude of problems that his being sent to plant and grow...
| Author | Kathleen Karr |
| ISBN | 0374427984 |
Yeeeeeee-haw! Git along, little . . . turkeys?
Big, brawny Simon Green, who's just completed third grade (for the fourth time), may not be book smart, but he's nobody's fool. When it's time to be done with school and make his way in the world, Simon hatches a plan that could earn him a bundle. He...
| Author | Neil T. Anderson |
| ISBN | 0880704977 |
Up to his chest in the black current of an underground river, Neil Anderson was just hitting his stride.In the eerie light of flickering torches, the wild hunting party was bringing down giant fruit bats with blow darts and killing them with their bare hands. The cave was full of yelling, splashing men,,...
| Author | Eloise Jarvis McGraw |
| ISBN | 0816710503 |
I read this book I-don't-know-how-many times as a kid, and loved it every time. For this year's reading challenge, I wanted to see if this simple 150-page story held up as well as I remembered, and guess what? It did!
This book is just so . . . satisfying. I love watching all the little pieces of the...
| Author | Mitali Perkins |
| ISBN | 1580893082 |
The Rickshaw Girl is a fictional story about a young girl growing up in Bangladesh named Naima. In order to make ends meet, her father had to borrow money to buy a rickshaw and must make payments. Naima wants desperately to help her family, but girls are not allowed to work, and she has no brothers to take...
King of the Mound: My Summer with Satchel Paige
| Author | Wes Tooke |
| ISBN | 1442433469 |
Baseball legend Satchel Paige changes a boy's life in this coming-of-age tale from the author of Lucky.
Nick was going to be a star baseball player, no doubt about it. People for miles around talked about the twelve-year-old boy with the golden arm. And then Nick is diagnosed with polio - a life-threatening...
| Author | Eugene Yelchin |
| ISBN | 0805092161 |
One of Horn Book's Best Fiction Books of 2011
Sasha Zaichik has known the laws of the Soviet Young Pioneers since the age of six:
The Young Pioneer is devoted to Comrade Stalin, the Communist Party, and Communism.
A Young Pioneer is a reliable comrade and always acts according to conscience.
A...
Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life
| Author | Sarah Clarkson |
| ISBN | 1496425804 |
When you hear a riveting story, does it thrill your heart and stir your soul? Do you hunger for truth and goodness? Do you secretly relate to Belle's delight in the library in Beauty and the Beast?
If so, you may be on your way to being a book girl.
Books were always Sarah Clarkson's delight....
| Author | Michael Morpurgo |
| ISBN | 0007591993 |
The stunning new novel of World War One from Michael Morpurgo, the nation’s favourite storyteller and multi-million copy bestseller. May, 1915. Alfie and his fisherman father find a girl on an uninhabited island in the Scillies - injured, thirsty, lost…and with absolutely no memory of who she...
| Author | Elizabeth Enright |
| ISBN | 0440486815 |
Ten year old Garnet lives on a farm in the the 1930s. We loved the start of this book, instantly both wanting to live there in Garnet's house and go swimming in water that was too warm! That never happens in England! We enjoyed the characters and the tale of the coral bracelet and the library incident, the...
