Need something to get your child interested in reading? Check out this book list...
1) "A World Away" by Nancy Grossman
This sensitive debut grabs hearts right away and doesn’t let go.
Eliza, a 16-year-old Amish girl, struggles against the restrictions of her culture. She loves her family and friends but yearns to see the modern world. She gets her chance when a visiting woman offers her a summertime nanny job, but she must convince her reluctant mother to agree. Amish teens are allowed a “rumspringa,” a time of some freedom before they decide to accept baptism and join the permanent community, but her mother's vision of this "running-wild" time is very different from Eliza’s. At last Eliza’s mother consents, and the girl moves with a modern wardrobe to Chicago, where she encounters the wonders of movies, computers and microwaves. Soon she meets Josh and begins dating, also entering the world of modern girl rivalries. Later, Eliza will meet someone from her past and learn more about her mother than she could have imagined. Throughout, Eliza faces a terrible choice: Which world will she join, and which will she leave forever? The author writes with simple sentences that fit Eliza’s simple way of life and convey her innocence. Readers experience their own world through the girl’s naïve eyes, marveling at technology, experiencing new relationships and worrying through her difficulties. Grossman’s love for her story seeps into every page, locking readers into the narrative. She produces a heartfelt tale that will be difficult for readers to resist.
Simply lovely. (Fiction. 12 & up)
2) "Double Dutch" by Sharon M. Draper
Delia is an intelligent, creative, eighth-grade student with a secret: she cannot read. No one has guessed because she memorizes material learned from discussion, watches videos instead of reading a book, and volunteers to do special projects like skits or posters instead of written reports. But she is faced with taking a major proficiency test that she knows she cannot pass. Her friend Randy also has a secret: he has not heard from his father for several weeks. A long-distance truck driver, who’s often away from home, he has always kept in constant touch with Randy. But now Randy is running out of money and food, and he’s afraid to tell anyone. Delia and Randy, along with several of their friends, are part of a Double Dutch team that will compete in a national tournament. The details and play-by-play of the Double Dutch practices and contests provide the core around which the rest of the story develops. Several other issues are addressed along the way, and are dealt with nicely by the cast of supporting characters. Delia’s friend Yolanda tells fantastic, outlandish stories about herself and her life so earnestly that even her friends are sometimes unable to know when she is telling the truth. The Tolliver twins’ threatening demeanor and attitude mask a fear of loss and separation that they manage to overcome heroically during a devastating tornado that hits their school. Even Delia and Randy’s more serious problems have happy, though not perfect, conclusions. Perhaps there are too many subplots, too many characters with too many problems, even too many happy endings, but Draper makes it work. Delia and her friends are delightful, and the reader is rooting for them all the way. A fast-paced, multi-layered story. (Fiction. 11-15)
3) "One Plus One Equals Blue" by Mary Jane Auch
Basil and Tenzie both have synesthesia, either a gift or a curse that can make a person into one of life’s rejects.
For Basil, new to public school from a lifetime of home schooling and previously unaware that not everyone sees numbers as colors, synesthesia just confirms him as a freak. He embraces that status, sitting alone and avoiding his classmates. Tenzie has just moved to town and started at the middle school as well. At first, she seems to have a peculiar and charming resilience that makes her impervious to others’ attitudes. Readers—and first-person narrator Basil—only gradually discover that she’s much more vulnerable than she first appears. After Carly, Basil’s feckless mother, returns from a five-year absence in Hollywood, Basil is appropriately wary. Tenzie, though, ignored by her parents, falls victim to Carly’s dysfunctional attention when the young woman takes over production of the school play. The two seventh-graders and Basil’s attentive, custodial grandmother are sensitively portrayed, but Basil’s voice leaves other characters, especially Carly, only broadly sketched. Her inner workings remain a mystery—just as they are to her bewildered and rejected son. Synesthesia provides an initial bond between Basil and Tenzie, offering a minor subplot, but is never the focus of the tale.
An engaging coming-of-age story marked by the somewhat predictable dysfunctional-parent problems that are so common in the type. (Fiction. 11-14)
4) "Walk Two Moons" by Sharon Creech
During the six days it takes Sal's paternal grandparents to drive her west to Idaho in time for her mother's birthday, she tells them about her friend Phoebe--a story that, the 13-year-old comes to realize, in many ways parallels her own: Each girl had a mother who left home without warning. The mystery of Phoebe's more conventional mother's disappearance and its effects on her family and eventual explanation unfold as the journey, with its own offbeat incidents, proceeds; meanwhile, in Sal's intricate narrative, the tragic events surrounding her mother's flight are also gradually revealed. After Sal fell from a tree, her mother carried her back to the house; soon after, she bore a stillborn child. Slowly, the love between Sal's parents, her mother's inconsolable grief, and Sal's life since her departure emerge; last to surface are the painful facts that Sal has been most reluctant to face. Creech, an American who has published novels in Britain, fashions characters with humor and sensitivity, but Sal's poignant story would have been stronger without quite so many remarkable coincidences or such a tidy sum of epiphanies at the end. Still, its revelations make a fine yarn. (Fiction. 10- 14)
5) "Stargirl" by Jerry Spinelli
Newbery-winning Spinelli spins a magical and heartbreaking tale from the stuff of high school. Eleventh-grader Leo Borlock cannot quite believe the new student who calls herself Stargirl. Formerly home-schooled, Stargirl comes to their Arizona high school with a pet rat and a ukulele, wild clothes and amazing habits. She sings “Happy Birthday” to classmates in the lunchroom, props a small glass vase with a daisy on her desk each class, and reenergizes the cheerleading squad with her boundless enthusiasm. But Stargirl even cheers for the opposing team. She’s so threatening to the regular ways of her fellows that she’s shunned. No one will touch her or speak to her—or applaud her success when she wins a state speech tournament. Leo’s in love with her, but finds that if he’s with her, he’s shunned, too. She loves him enough to try to fit in, but when that fails spectacularly, she illuminates the spring school dance like a Roman candle and disappears. The desert—old bones, flowering cactus, scented silence—is a living presence here. So is the demon of conformity, a teen monster of what’s normal, a demon no less hideous because it’s so well internalized in us all. Leo chooses normalcy over star stuff, but looking back as an adult he finds Stargirl’s presence in a hundred different ways in his own and in his former classmates’ lives. Once again Spinelli takes his readers on a journey where choices between the self and the group must be made, and he is wise enough to show how hard they are, even when sweet. (Fiction. 11-14)
6) "Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key" by Jack Gantos
If Rotten Ralph were a boy instead of a cat, he might be Joey, the hyperactive hero of Gantos's new book, except that Joey is never bad on purpose. In the first-person narration, it quickly becomes clear that he can't help himself; he's so wound up that he not only practically bounces off walls, he literally swallows his house key (which he wears on a string around his neck and which he pull back up, complete with souvenirs of the food he just ate). Gantos's straightforward view of what it's like to be Joey is so honest it hurts. Joey has been abandoned by his alcoholic father and, for a time, by his mother (who also drinks); his grandmother, just as hyperactive as he is, abuses Joey while he's in her care. One mishap after another leads Joey first from his regular classroom to special education classes and then to a special education school. With medication, counseling, and positive reinforcement, Joey calms down. Despite a lighthearted title and jacket painting, the story is simultaneously comic and horrific; Gantos takes readers right inside a human whirlwind where the ride is bumpy and often frightening, especially for Joey. But a river of compassion for the characters runs through the pages, not only for Joey but for his overextended mom and his usually patient, always worried (if only for their safety) teachers. Mature readers will find this harsh tale softened by unusual empathy and leavened by genuinely funny events. (Fiction. 11-13)
7) "The Wednesday Wars" by Gary D. Schmidt
It’s 1967, and on Wednesdays, every Jewish kid in Holling Hoodhood’s class goes to Hebrew School, and every Catholic kid goes to Catechism. Holling is Presbyterian, which means that he and Mrs. Baker are alone together every Wednesday—and she hates it just as much as he does. What unfolds is a year of Wednesday Shakespeare study, which, says Mrs. Baker, “is never boring to the true soul.” Holling is dubious, but trapped. Schmidt plaits world events into the drama being played out at Camillo Junior High School, as well as plenty of comedy, as Holling and Mrs. Baker work their way from open hostility to a sweetly realized friendship. Holling navigates the multitudinous snares set for seventh-graders—parental expectations, sisters, bullies, girls—with wry wit and the knowledge that the world will always be a step or two ahead of him. Schmidt has a way of getting to the emotional heart of every scene without overstatement, allowing the reader and Holling to understand the great truths swirling around them on their own terms. It’s another virtuoso turn by the author of
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (2005). (Fiction. 10-14)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.