Reaching for Sun
10 best books like Reaching for Sun (Tracie Vaughn Zimmer): The Deaf Musicians, Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems, Ringside, 1925: Views from the Scopes Trial, Worlds Afire, Tofu Quilt, Dark Sons, Sweetgrass Basket, Almost Forever, Birmingham, 1963, Keeping the Night Watch
Poor Lee! He used to be a jazzman who could make the piano go yimbatimba- TANG—zang-zang. But now he's lost his hearing, and the bandleader had to let him go. So Lee goes to a school for the deaf to learn sign language. There, he meets Max, who used to play the sax. Riding the subway to class, they start signing...
| Author | Georgia Heard |
| ISBN | 1596432209 |
TRY THIS AT HOME. Poems to inspire young readers.
From Eileen Spinelli's many goodbyes to summer at the shore, to Avis Harley's catalog of ways to say hello across the globe, to a close look at the birds and animals outside Valiska Gregory's window in winter…Georgia Heard has collected list...
| Author | Jen Bryant |
| ISBN | 0375840478 |
The year is 1925, and the students of Dayton, Tennessee, are ready for a summer of fishing, swimming, some working, and drinking root beer floats at Robinson’s Drugstore. But when their science teacher, J. T. Scopes, is arrested for having taught Darwin’s theory of evolution in class, it seems...
| Author | Paul B. Janeczko |
| ISBN | 0763622354 |
In his first full-length poetic work, celebrated poetry anthologist Paul B. Janeczko creates a stirring fictional account of the 1944 Hartford circus fire.
One summer afternoon in 1944, hundreds of circus lovers crowded under the big top in Hartford, Connecticut, breathlessly waiting...
| 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 | Nikki Grimes |
| ISBN | 1423102517 |
Sam can't believe it when his father leaves the family to marry another woman--and a white woman, at that. The betrayal cuts deep--Sam had been so close to his dad, he idolized him. Now who can he turn to, who can he trust? Even God seems to have ditched him.
Ishmael is his father's first son, the...
| Author | Marlene Carvell |
| ISBN | 0525475478 |
In prose poetry and alternating voices, Marlene Carvell weaves a heartbreakingly beautiful story based on the real-life experiences of Native American children. Mattie and Sarah are two Mohawk sisters who are sent to an off-reservation school after the death of their mother. Subject to intimidation...
| Author | Maria Testa |
| ISBN | 0763633666 |
"Rapt readers don’t need to know anything about Vietnam to understand love, loss, fear, and waiting. A tour de force." — KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
When the six-year-old narrator of this lyric novel watches her father march off to serve a year in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, a year...
| Author | Carole Boston Weatherford |
| ISBN | 1590784405 |
A poetic tribute to the victims of the racially motivated church bombing that served as a seminal event in the struggle for civil rights. In 1963, the eyes of the world were on Birmingham, Alabama, a flashpoint for the civil rights movement. Birmingham was one of the most segregated cities in the United...
| Author | Hope Anita Smith |
| ISBN | 0805072020 |
So many unanswered questions weigh down thirteen-year-old C.J. as he struggles to understand why his father walked out. His father is back now, though C.J. is not as quick to forgive as the other members of his family. He still feels the weight of responsibility that fell on his shoulders when Daddy was...
| Author | Joyce Sidman |
| ISBN | 0618616802 |
When Mrs. Merz asks her sixth grade class to write poems of apology, they end up liking their poems so much that they decide to put them together into a book. Not only that, but they get the people to whom they apologized to write poems back.
In haiku, pantoums, two-part poems, snippets, and rhymes,...
| 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 | Ron Koertge |
| ISBN | 0763617423 |
In a startling, often poignant student journal, acclaimed poet and novelist Ron Koertge creates a suburban high school both familiar and terrifying.
The Branston High School Class of 2001 seems familiar enough on the surface: there’s the Smart One, the Fat Kid, Social Conscience, Bad...
| Author | Eileen Spinelli |
| ISBN | 0803731221 |
Diana loves where she lives. She loves the astronomy charts on her walls and the fact that she can wave to her best friend, Rose, from her very own window. And best of all, a wren has recently made its home right by her front door! When her family is forced to move, Diana wonders if she'll ever find that same...
| Author | John Grandits |
| ISBN | 0618568603 |
A 15-year-old girl named Jessie voices typical—and not so typical—teenage concerns in this unique, hilarious collection of poems. Her musings about trying out new makeup and hairstyles, playing volleyball and cello, and dealing with her annoying younger brother are never boring or predictable....
| Author | Margarita Engle |
| ISBN | 0805086749 |
It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.
Black,...
| Author | Linda Sue Park |
| ISBN | 0618234837 |
A sijo, a traditional Korean verse form, has a fixed number of stressed syllables and a humorous or ironic twist at the end. Like haiku, sijo are brief and accessible, and the witty last line winds up each poem with a surprise. The verses in this book illuminate funny, unexpected, amazing aspects of the...
| Author | Kimberly Newton Fusco |
| ISBN | 0553494236 |
Lenore is Cornelia’s mother and Cornelia’s fix-up project. What does it matter that Cornelia won’t talk to anyone and is always stuck in the easiest English class at school, even though she’s read more books than anyone else? She feels strong in the fixing. She cooks vegetable soup so Lenore...
| Author | Frances Temple |
| ISBN | 0064471365 |
Every Life
Makes a Story
Djo has a story: Once he was one of "Titid's boys," a vital member of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide's election team, fighting to overthrow military dictatorship in Haiti. Now he is barely alive, the victim of a political firebombing.
Jeremie has a story:...
| Author | Douglas Florian |
| ISBN | 0152053727 |
Now perhaps I am missing something with regard to Douglas Florian's illustrations because I have been reading Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings as a Kindle download. For although I do kind of and to a certain small extent appreciate the work that must have gone into the pictures...
