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Staying determined, disciplined, and driven, Harper Scott and her best friend, Kate Grey have been working since before preschool on their goal—to dance with the San Francisco Ballet Company. Thinking that motivation, sacrifices, dedication, passion, and effort will ensure success, Harper doesn’t believe in luck.  Full of love and hard work, she is chasing fulfillment. Because Harper is also a descendant of Robert Falcon Scott, the Englishman who is best known for his legendary and fatal attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole, she has adopted a motto: “Succeed, or die in the attempt” (13).  With Scott in her blood, Roald AmundsenRead More →

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I recall growing up and jumping rope to the rhyme:  “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks.  When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”  I never questioned the veracity of the rhyme, and after reading the narrative nonfiction account, The Borden Murders by Sarah Miller, I am intrigued anew by the susceptibility of public opinion to be shaped by sensationalized media messages and swayed by rumors. While Miller’s book serves mostly to recount a series of suppositions and scandal-mongering newspaper accounts of the unsolved mystery of Abby Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, onRead More →

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Written by daughter of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, The Hero Two Doors Down by Sharon Robinson, recounts the historical fiction tale of tumultuous times of global, racial, cultural, and religious unrest in the late 1940s.  Because of its inspirational message about the need to depend on faith, family, and friends during the worst of times, contemporary readers will find this story of friendship and unity especially relevant as Martin Luther King, Junior’s 87th birthday approaches. In 1948, Steven Satlow is eight years old, and a train ride to Ebbets Field costs five cents each way.  Because Steve is the shortest kid in his class andRead More →

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We humans are all broken, broken by life’s trials and tribulations, undone by love, fragmented by bullies who shoot holes in our confidence, or traumatized by loss—whether a consequence of death, divorce, or some other life-altering trauma.  These truths unfold  from the beginning line—“Life is bullshit”—of We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson, a novel that explores both the absurdity of and the grand scheme of the cosmos and of human existence. Ever since he was 13 years old, Henry Jerome Denton has been abducted by aliens, whom he calls sluggers.  The abductions always begin with shadows and end with his being deposited—often naked—far fromRead More →

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Not only unaware of the meaning of the word decorum but also oblivious as to how to show it, Angelo Fabrizzi detests the formal education his mother, Julietta, wishes upon him in Paris.  Uninspired in the classroom, Angelo feels most alive when he’s working in his father’s workshop where he doodles car designs and fires up the welding torch to work and rework metal scraps into fantastical creations.  Like his Italian father, Luca Fabrizzi, Angelo is a passionate and creative car-lover with a sweet tooth, who believes that magical ideas take shape under the influence of sugar. After the front wheel drive sensation of 1934,Read More →

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The embodiment of athletic purpose, graceful and resolute, Elijah Thomas is 6’4” and carved out of steel, according to his best friend, Dylan Buchanan.  With his rhythmic dribbling skills, Dylan is no slouch on the court either.  The two juniors, teammates on Maryland Public Secondary School’s basketball team who have been playing together since boyhood, help their high school team win the state championship.  Now, they’re ready to play in the adult tournament, Hoops, on the Battlegrounds, an asphalt court in the neighborhood where practice and pickup games take place.  Despite their talent, can the boys “compete in the adult division, against college guys, hard-core streetRead More →

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Living on the Northern Tier of Montana called the Hi-Line, I’ve seen the aurora borealis break dance with a rhythm similar to that described by Rodman Philbrick in his book The Big Dark: “Imagine a lightning bolt hitting a box of crayons and turning it into a colored steam.  Like that.  Electric colors rippling and pulsing as if they were alive” (3). In The Big Dark, Philbrick, an award-winning author of the classic Freak the Mighty and numerous other books for young adults, not only writes in richly descriptive prose but posits a possible answer to the question: How would human kind respond to a massive solarRead More →

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Set in 1939-1943 in occupied Poland, Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit tells the difficult story of growing up during the Second World War, a time rife with barking dogs, tank invasions, bullying soldiers, fiery sacrifices, and other acts of hate and genocide.  In 1939, Germans occupied Kraków with the sole purpose of purging the city of its intellectuals and its academics.  As Germany pushed in from the west, the Soviets closed in on the east.  The occupation of Poland has been called one of the darkest chapters in the history of World War II since it marked the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust when almostRead More →

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The somewhat clichéd stereotypes and the questionable caricatures in Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics by Chris Grabenstein are offset by creative riddles, rebus puzzles, word scrambles, challenging vocabulary (think Lemony Snicket), and rich allusions to everything from famous aviators and legendary librarians to the Beatles and NASCAR.  The book also ignites the imagination and invites critical thinking about the issue of banned and challenged books and about the purpose of libraries. Because this book is a sequel to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, it features some of the same characters, including Kyle Keeley, an ordinary twelve-year-old with a passion for video games, the longest to-be-read list,Read More →