Monster

Monster (Coretta Scott King Honor Book)

by Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Myers

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
"Monster" is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. But was Steve really the lookout who gave the "all clear" to the murderer, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? In this innovative novel by Walter Dean Myers, the reader becomes both juror and witness during the trial of Steve's life. To calm his nerves as he sits in the courtroom, aspiring filmmaker Steve chronicles the proceedings in movie script format. Interspersed throughout his screenplay are journal writings that provide insight into Steve's life before the murder and his feelings about being held in prison during the trial. "They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can't kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment."

Myers, known for the inner-city classic Motown and Didi (first published in 1984), proves with Monster that he has kept up with both the struggles and the lingo of today's teens. Steve is an adolescent caught up in the violent circumstances of an adult world--a situation most teens can relate to on some level. Readers will no doubt be attracted to the novel's handwriting-style typeface, emphasis on dialogue, and fast-paced courtroom action. By weaving together Steve's journal entries and his script, Myers has given the first-person voice a new twist and added yet another worthy volume to his already admirable body of work. (Ages 12 and older)

About the Author
Walter Dean Myers is the New York Times bestselling author of Monster, winner of the first Michael L. Printz award, and Harlem, a Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor Book. The inaugural recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, he is considered one of the preeminent writers for children. He lives in New Jersey with his family.

My Name Was Keoko

“This powerful and riveting tale of one close-knit, proud Korean family movingly addresses life-and-death issues of courage and collaboration, injustice, and death-defying determination in the face of totalitarian oppression.”

When My Name Was Keoko

by Linda Sue Park

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
Sun-hee and her older brother Tae-yul are proud of their Korean heritage. Yet they live their lives under Japanese occupation. All students must read and write in Japanese and no one can fly the Korean flag. Hardest of all is when the Japanese Emperor forces all Koreans to take Japanese names. Sun-hee and Tae-yul become Keoko and Nobuo. Korea is torn apart by their Japanese invaders during World War II. Everyone must help with war preparations, but it doesn’t mean they are willing to defend Japan. Tae-yul is about to risk his life to help his family, while Sun-hee stays home guarding life-and-death secrets.

From School Library Journal
Grades 6-9. Living in Korea in the 1940s was difficult because the Japanese, who occupied the country, seemed determined to obliterate Korean culture and to impose their own on its residents.

Sun-hee and her older brother, Tae-yul, still go to school every day, but lessons now consist of lectures and recitations designed to glorify Japan. To add to their unhappiness, everyone, adults and children alike, must give up their Korean names and take new Japanese ones. Sun-hee, now called Keoko, and Tae-yul, newly named Nobuo, tell the story in alternating narrative voices. They describe the hardships their family is forced to face as Japan becomes enmeshed in World War II and detail their individual struggles to understand what is happening. Tension mounts as Uncle, working with the Korean resistance movement, goes into hiding, and Tae-yul takes a drastic step that he feels is necessary to protect the family.

What is outstanding is the insight Park gives into the complex minds of these young people. Each of them reacts to the events in different ways-Sun-hee takes refuge in writing while Tae-yul throws his energies into physical work. Yet in both cases they develop subtle plans to resist the enemy. Like the Rose of Sharon tree, symbol of Korea, which the family pots and hides in their shed until their country is free, Sun-hee and Tae-yul endure and grow. This beautifully crafted and moving novel joins a small but growing body of literature, such as Haemi Balgassi's Peacebound Trains (Clarion, 1996) and Sook Nyul Choi's The Year of Impossible Goodbyes (Houghton, 1991), that expands readers' understanding of this period.

About the Author
Linda Sue Park is the author of the Newbery Medal book A Single Shard, many other novels, several picture books, and most recently a book of poetry: Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo (Poems). She lives in Rochester, New York, with her family, and is now a devoted fan of the New York Mets.

The Hunger Games

This book is both first person, and present tense. It has a very unique story line and is almost impossible to put down. It is very well written and very well laid out.

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the other districts in line by forcing them to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight-to-the-death on live TV.

One boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and sixteen are selected by lottery to play. The winner brings riches and favor tohis or her district. But that is nothing compared to what the Capitol wins: one more year of fearful compliance with its rule. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her impoverished district in the Games.

But Katniss has been close to dead before — and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Acclaimed writer Suzanne Collins, author of the New York Times bestselling Underland Chronicles, delivers equal parts suspense and philosophy, adventure and romance, in this stunning novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present.

About the Author
Suzanne Collins is the author of the New York Times bestselling Underland Chronicles series, which has more than one million books in print and is available in seven foreign editions. In the award-winning The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. Also a successful writer for children's television, Collins lives with her family in Connecticut.

My Name Is Sangoel

This simple story puts a child-friendly spin on a common immigrant experience as the child's classmates respond with similar puzzle pictures of their own names.

My Name Is Sangoel

by Karen Lynn Williams

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

When Sangoel and his mother and sister arrive in the United States, everything seems very strange and unlike home. In this busy, noisy place, with its escalators and television sets and traffic and snow, Sangoel quietly endures the fact that no one can pronounce his name. Lonely and homesick, he finally comes up with an ingenious solution to this problem, and in the process he at last begins to feel at home.

Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries

Voices from Another Place is a wonderful book for all international adoptive families to read. The feelings expressed by the adult adoptees are genuine and extremely sensitive.

Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries

by Susan Soon-Keum Cox

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
The marvelous collection of autobiographical stories, poems and artwork by adult Korena adoptees about their adoption experience. These articulate men and women share their feelings and their journeys as transracial and transcultural adoptees in their writings and art - from childhood to the present. This is the best book on the experiences of Asian American adoptees available, and I recommend it to anyone interested in transcultural or transracial adoption and families.

The mesh of individuality and creativity of the human spirit shown in this book will catch you by surprise and admiration. Most of the writers and artists who contributed to Voices were adopted from Korea in the 70's and 80's, and are now in their 20's and 30's. Many of the were adopted as infants, however a surprising number were older and retain intriguing memories of their childhood in Korea.

Important themes resonate through the book - the duality of the being Asian American, growing up as one of the few Asians in the area, revisiting Korea, feelings about birthparents, love and respect for family, life as a journey of exploration, and an general attitude of success. Attitudes toward Asian culture and adoption ranging from ambivalence to acceptance to rejection (often depending on lifestage and personality). This book will leave you feeling thougthful and optimistic about the adoption experience and about the incredible value that these "children" offer to the world.

Adoption agencies and adoptive parents should place this remarkable book in their recommended reading lists. Read it for pleasure and to broaden your own depth of understanding of the adoption experience.

Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom

The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom

by Margarita Engle

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
Grade 9 Up—Often, popular knowledge of Cuba begins and ends with late-20th-century textbook fare: the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Fidel Castro. The Surrender Tree, however, transports readers to another, though no less tumultuous, era. Spanning the years 1850–1899, Engle's poems construct a narrative woven around the nation's Wars for Independence. The poems are told in alternating voices, though predominantly by Rosa, a "freed" slave and natural healer destined to a life on the lam in the island' s wild interior.

Other narrators include Teniente Muerte, or Lieutenant Death, the son of a slave hunter turned ruthless soldier; José, Rosa's husband and partner in healing; and Silvia, an escapee from one of Cuba's reconcentration camps. The Surrender Tree is hauntingly beautiful, revealing pieces of Cuba's troubled past through the poetry of hidden moments such as the glimpse of a woman shuttling children through a cave roof for Rosa's care or the snapshot of runaway Chinese slaves catching a crocodile to eat. Though the narrative feels somewhat repetitive in its first third, one comes to realize it is merely symbolic of the unending cycle of war and the necessity for Rosa and other freed slaves to flee domesticity each time a new conflict begins.

Aside from its considerable stand-alone merit, this book, when paired with Engle's The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (Holt, 2006), delivers endless possibilities for discussion about poetry, colonialism, slavery, and American foreign policy.

Review
“Engle writes her new book in clear, short lines of stirring free verse. Caught by the compelling narrative voices, many readers will want to find out more.”—Booklist, starred review

“A powerful narrative in free verse . . . haunting." — Horn Book

“Hauntingly beautiful, revealing pieces of Cuba’s troubled past through the poetry of hidden moments.” — School Library Journal

“Young readers will come away inspired by these portraits of courageous ordinary people.”  — Kirkus Reviews

“The poems are short but incredibly evocative.”  — VOYA

About the Author
MARGARITA ENGLE is a Cuban American poet, novelist, and journalist whose work has been published in many countries. She lives with her husband in northern California.

The Giver

The Giver

by Lois Lowry

Buy from Amazon

Book Review
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-9 -- In a complete departure from her other novels, Lowry has written an intriguing story set in a society that is uniformly run by a Committee of Elders. Twelve-year-old Jonas's confidence in his comfortable "normal" existence as a member of this well-ordered community is shaken when he is assigned his life's work as the Receiver. The Giver, who passes on to Jonas the burden of being the holder for the community of all memory "back and back and back," teaches him the cost of living in an environment that is "without color, pain, or past." The tension leading up to the Ceremony, in which children are promoted not to another grade but to another stage in their life, and the drama and responsibility of the sessions with The Giver are gripping. The final flight for survival is as riveting as it is inevitable. The author makes real abstract concepts, such as the meaning of a life in which there are virtually no choices to be made and no experiences with deep feelings. This tightly plotted story and its believable characters will stay with readers for a long time. -- Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

From Publishers Weekly
In the "ideal" world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are "released"--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also "released," but with no fanfare. Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers. Ages 12-14.

About the Author
Lois Lowry is a multi-award-winning author who has written many popular books. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of the popular Anastasia Krupnik books and was the recipient of the Newbery Medal for Number the Stars and for The Giver.

Claudette Colvin, Jane Addams Honor Book

“When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’” – Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards))
by Phillip M Hoose

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South.

Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.

Review
“Phil Hoose’s profile of the remarkable Claudette Colvin is MUST reading for anyone still imbued with hope. She is a lighthouse in a stormy sea.”  — Studs Terkel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War

“Today, thanks to Hoose, a new generation of girls and boys can add Claudette Colvin to their list of heroines.”  — Christian Science Monitor

“This inspiring title shows the incredible difference that a single young person can make.”  — Starred, Booklist

“Smoothly weaves excerpts from Hoose’s extensive interviews with Colvin and his own supplementary commentary.” —Starred, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“Hoose makes the moments in Montgomery come alive, whether it’s about Claudette’s neighborhood, her attorneys, her pastor or all the different individuals in the civil rights movement who paths she crossed . . . . An engrossing read.” —Chicago Tribune

About the Author
PHILLIP HOOSE’s distinguished nonfiction includes the National Book Award Finalist We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History and The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

The Warlock asks more of its readers, promises more and delivers more than anyone might reasonably have expected.

The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)
by Michael Scott

Buy from Amazon

Book Description
In the fifth installment of this bestselling series, the twins of prophesy have been divided, and the end is finally beginning.

With Scatty, Joan of Arc, Saint Germain, Palamedes, and Shakespeare all in Danu Talis, Sophie is on her own with the ever-weakening Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel. She must depend on Niten to help her find an immortal to teach her Earth Magic. The surprise is that she will find her teacher in the most ordinary of places.

About the Author
An authority on mythology and folklore, MICHAEL SCOTT is one of Ireland's most successful authors. A master of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and folklore, he has been hailed by the Irish Times as "the King of Fantasy in these isles." Visit him at DillonScott.com.