The Water Seeker

Author	Deborah Wiles
ISBN	0545106052

Franny Chapman just wants some peace. But that's hard to get when her best friend is feuding with her, her sister has disappeared, and her uncle is fighting an old war in his head. Her saintly younger brother is no help, and the cute boy across the street only complicates things. Worst of all, everyone is...

Author	Karen Cushman
ISBN	0547231849

Fans of Karen Cushman's witty, satisfying novels will welcome Meggy Swann,newly come to London with her only friend, a goose named Louise. Meggy's mother was glad to be rid of her; her father, who sent for her, doesn't want her after all. Meggy is appalled by London,dirty and noisy, full of rogues and...

Author	Margi Preus
ISBN	0810989816

A 2011 Newbery Honor BookIn 1841, a Japanese fishing vessel sinks. Its crew is forced to swim to a small, unknown island, where they are rescued by a passing American ship. Japan’s borders remain closed to all Western nations, so the crew sets off to America, learning English on the way.Manjiro, a fourteen-year-old...

Author	Polly Horvath
ISBN	0375861106

Reviewed by Rachel Seigel

Picking up one year after My One Hundred Adventures, author Polly Horvath revisits Jane Fielding and her family, now living in Saskatchewan, where her stepfather Ned is teaching French. When Ned gets fired from his job (for not actually knowing French), Jane’s...

Author	Victoria Bond
ISBN	0763643009

Winner of the 2011 John Steptoe New Talent (Author) Award!

Racial duplicity threatens an idyllic African American community in the turn-of-the-century South in a dazzling debut inspired by the early life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Whether she’s telling the truth or stretching it,...

Author	Rosemary Wells
ISBN	0670036382

Award-winning author Rosemary Wells lays bare the senseless devastation of war in this stunning novel. As the Civil War breaks out, India, a young Southern girl, summons her sharp intelligence and the courage she didn'tknow she had to survive the war that threatens to destroy her family, her Virginia...

Author	Mary Ann Rodman
ISBN	0374386617

Mississippi and integration in the 1960s

The year is 1964, and Alice Ann Moxley's FBI-agent father has been reassigned from Chicago to Jackson, Mississippi, to protect black people who are registering to vote. Alice finds herself thrust into the midst of the racial turmoil that dominates...

Author	Rosanne Parry
ISBN	0375848037

With his father shipped off to Iraq and his older brothers away, 11-year-old Ignatius "Brother" Alderman works with his grandparents to keep their Oregon ranch going, while coming to realize what he really wants to do with his life. Wonderfully moving story of a sensitive kid trying to do a man's job...

Author	Jennifer L. Holm
ISBN	1416913734

May Amelia Jackson captured readers' hearts in the Newbery Honor Book Our Only May Amelia. Now, after over ten years, Jennifer Holm is bringing this beloved character back in a beautiful way. The Trouble with May Amelia is a gorgeously written story that's as heartbreaking as it is funny. May Amelia...

Author	Gary Paulsen
ISBN	0385738846

Samuel, 13, spends his days in the forest, hunting for food for his family. He has grown up on the frontier of a British colony, America. Far from any town, or news of the war against the King that American patriots have begun near Boston.

But the war comes to them. British soldiers and Iroquois...

Author	Leslie Connor
ISBN	0061692336

Dewey Marriss is stuck in the middle of a crunch.

He never guessed that the gas pumps would run dry the same week he promised to manage the family's bicycle-repair business. Suddenly everyone needs a bike. And nobody wants to wait.

Meanwhile, the crunch has stranded Dewey's parents...

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	Jeannine Atkins
ISBN	0805089349

As a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled across the prairie in a covered wagon. Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series.

Sara Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own...

Author	Geraldine McCaughrean
ISBN	0061836656

Pepper's fourteenth birthday is a momentous one.

It's the day he's supposed to die.

Everyone seems resigned to it—even Pepper, although he would much prefer to live. But can you sidestep Fate? Jump sideways into a different life? Naïve and trusting, Pepper sets a course through...

Author	Jeannie Mobley
ISBN	1442433434

In this moving debut, an immigrant girl discovers that hard work and determination can make dreams come true.

Katerina has a dream. It's her papa's dream, too. Her family came to America to buy their own farm. But a year later, Papa is still working in the dangerous coal mine. Each day, the farm...

Author	Caroline Lawrence
ISBN	1444001698

The Case of the Deadly Desperado is a TERRIBLE book that Caroline Lawrence should be ashamed of. I am not sure what was added to the story by having the protagonist be half Sioux other than the excuse to include all sorts of offensive stereotypes and racial slurs. I do not care if the use of the word “squaw”...

Author	Victoria McKernan
ISBN	0375837507

When orphans Aiden and Maddy Lynch first meet trailrider Jefferson J. Jackson in the spring of 1865, they're struggling to survive on their family's drought-ravaged Kansas farm. So when Jackson offers an escape – a 2000-mile journey across the roughest country in the world – Aiden knows it's their...

Author	Ellen Wittlinger
ISBN	1416971017

October 1962. Juliet Klostermeyer's world is turning upside down. All she hears from her parents and teachers and on the news is the Russian threat and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And things aren't much better at home. Her best friend, Lowell, doesn't seem interested in being her friend anymore--he'd...

Author	Kimberly Newton Fusco
ISBN	0375861041

Charlie Anne is devastated when her father must go north to build roads after the Depression hits. She and her siblings are left with their rigid cousin, Mirabel, and a farm full of chores. The only solace Charlie Anne finds is by the river, where the memory of her mother is strongest.
 
Then her...

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	Lesley M.M. Blume
ISBN	0375847030

It’s 1932, the Depression. Things are evening out among people everywhere. Tennyson Fontaine and her sister Hattie live in a rickety shack of a house with their mother and father and their wild dog, Jos. There is no school, only a rope swing in the living room and endless games of hide-and-seek in the...

Author

Kristin Levine

Though he thinks of himself as a cowboy, Tommy is really a bully.  He's always playing cruel jokes on classmates or stealing from the store. But Tommy has a reason: life at home is tough. His abusive mother isn't well; in fact, she may be mentally ill, and his sister, Mary Lou, is in the hospital badly burned...

Author	Kathi Appelt
ISBN	1416950605

Keeper is a breathtaking, magical novel from National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honoree Kathi Appelt.

To ten-year-old Keeper the moon is her chance to fix all that has gone wrong ... and so much has gone wrong.

But she knows who can make things right again: Maggie Marie, her mermaid...