Watch Out for Flying Kids! How Two Circuses, Two Countries, and Nine Kids Confront Conflict and Build Community
By Cynthia Levinson Publisher: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd. Pages: 224 Lexile: 930L Age Range: 10 – 13 Years ABOUT The author of We’ve Got a Job explores the world of social circus—a movement that brings kids from different worlds together to perform remarkable acts on a professional level. Levinson follows the participants of two specific circuses that also work together periodically: Circus Harmony, in St. Louis, whose participants are inner-city and suburban kids, and Circus Galilee in Israel, whose participants and Jews and...
read moreRed Moon Rising
By K. A. Holt Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books Pages: 336 Lexile: 760L Age Range: 10 – 14 Years ABOUT Space-farmer Rae Darling is kidnapped and trained to become a warrior against her own people in this adventurous middle grade space western. Rae Darling and her family are colonists on a moon so obscure it doesn’t merit a name. Life is hard, water is scarce, and the farm work she does is grueling. But Rae and her sister Temple are faced with an added complication—being girls is a serious liability in their strict society. Even...
read moreFinding Wild
By Megan Wagner Lloyd Illustrated by Abigail Halpin Publisher: Random House Children’s Books Pages: 32 Age Range: 3 – 7 Years ABOUT A lovely, lyrical picture book with gorgeous illustrations that explores the ways the wild makes itself known to us and how much closer it is than we think. There are so many places that wild can exist, if only you know where to look! Can you find it? Two kids set off on an adventure away from their urban home and discover all the beauty of the natural world. From the bark on the trees to the sudden...
read moreAdios, Nirvana
By Conrad Wesselhoeft Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 240 Lexile: HL550L Age Range: 14 Years ABOUT When you piss off a bridge into a snowstorm, it feels like you’re connecting with eternal things. Paying homage to something or someone. But who? The Druids? Walt Whitman? No, I pay homage to one person only, my brother, my twin. In life. In death. Telemachus. Since the death of his brother, Jonathan’s been losing his grip on reality. Last year’s Best Young Poet and gifted guitarist is now Taft High School’s resident tortured artist,...
read moreTyger Tyger: A Goblin Wars Book
By Kersten Hamilton Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 336 Lexile: HL590L Age Range: 12 – 17 Years ABOUT What would you do if the stories of your childhood suddenly began coming to life? Teagan Wylltson’s best friend, Abby, dreams that horrifying creatures—goblins, shapeshifters, and beings of unearthly beauty but terrible cruelty—are hunting Teagan. Abby is always coming up with crazy stuff, though, so Teagan isn’t worried. Until Finn Mac Cumhaill arrives, with his killer accent and a knee-weakening smile. Either he’s crazy or...
read moreTheodosia and the Serpents of Chaos
By R. L. LaFevers Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 352 Lexile: 780L Age Range: 9 – 12 Years ABOUT Theodosia Throckmorton has her hands full at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London. Her father may be head curator, but it is Theo—and only Theo—who is able to see all the black magic and ancient curses that still cling to the artifacts in the museum. Sneaking behind her father’s back, Theo uses old, nearly forgotten Egyptian magic to remove the curses and protect her father and the rest of...
read moreScreaming at the Ump
By Audrey Vernick Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 272 Age Range: 10 – 14 Years ABOUT Twelve-year-old Casey Snowden knows everything about being an umpire. His dad and grandfather run a New Jersey umpire school, Behind the Plate, and Casey lives and breathes baseball. Casey’s dream, however, is to be a reporter—objective, impartial, and fair, just like an ump. But when he stumbles upon a sensational story involving a former major league player in exile, he finds that the ethics of publishing it are cloudy at best. This...
read moreFlight of the Phoenix (Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist, Book I)
By R. LaFevers Illustrated by Kelly Murphy Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 137 Lexile: 640L Age Range: 6 – 9 Years ABOUT Ten-year-old Nathaniel Fludd is the reluctant hero of Flight of the Phoenix (2009), the madcap debut of the American author R. L. LaFevers’s Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist series and a Junior Library Guild selection. The year is 1928, the setting England, and Nate’s wayward parents have just been reported lost at sea. Nate is sent that very day to his Aunt Phil’s house in Batting-at-the-Flies, but not for...
read moreDragon’s Keep
By Janet Lee Carey Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 302 Age Range: 12 – 17 Years ABOUT By learning to accept the dragon claw that mars her hand, a princess fulfills her destiny and saves her country from war. REVIEWS *”Stunning, lyrical prose . . . Carey smoothly blends many traditional fantasy tropes here, but her telling is fresh as well as thoroughly compelling.” —Booklist, starred review “Carey (Wenny Has Wings) has written a romantic fantasy steeped in the Arthurian tradition of knights, dragons and...
read moreDirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly
By Conrad Wesselhoeft Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pages: 352 Age Range: 12 – 17 Years ABOUT Seventeen year-old dirt-bike-riding daredevil Arlo Santiago catches the eye of the U.S. military with his first-place ranking on a video game featuring drone warfare, and must reconcile the work they want him to do with the emotional scars he has suffered following a violent death in his family. Adios, Nirvana author Conrad Wesselhoeft, takes readers from the skies over war-torn Pakistan to the dusty arroyos of New Mexico’s outback...
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