Twelve year-old Stephen Majok lives with his sixteen year-old sister, Naomi, and their mother in a small village in southern Sudan. Though civil war rages around them, the villagers are more preoccupied with looking for the first clouds that will herald the rainy season, desperately needed after three years of drought. The village’s [...]
Marjane Satrapi is a young girl when revolution comes to Iran in the late 1970s. Living with her parents in Tehran where she attends a private school and enjoys all the normal activities of children, she listens as her parents, both socialist intellectuals with communist leanings, discuss 2500 of tyranny and submission beginning with [...]
Thirteen year-old Maleeka Madison is laughed at and called names by her classmates. Tall and reed-thin and black, she is called beanpole and taunted because of her skin colour. To make matters worse, she wears clothes made by her mother, which often don’t fit properly, and she’s been a straight A student, a [...]
Living with her family in Gaza City, eleven year-old Malaak knows the family stories about their lives in Jerusalem and in Palestine before 1948. Loss of their lands following the creation of the state of Israel and the presence of ever more numerous Jewish settlers in Gaza leaves a bitter taste in the mouths [...]
Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the [...]
The first thing Tom remembers is walking, his back and backside screaming in pain. He has forgotten everything that came before, family, friends, school, his last name. In his backpack he finds a notebook with notes about Mozart and a candy heart imprinted with the words You are nice, so he concludes that [...]
Fourteen year-old Dana is a runaway, living on the streets of Toronto. Begging for spare change to buy coffee and a doughnut, and protecting her rapidly dwindling possessions from thieves is a far cry from her comfortable life in the suburbs, but she cannot go home.
Fortunately, Dana is adopted into a street family. [...]
Newly escaped from the coca pits and mourning the death of his best friend Mando, twelve year-old Diego has found refuge with the Ricardos, a family of poor coca farmers. In return for their shelter, Diego tries his best to help the Ricardos, looking after two year-old Santo and helping with the garden while [...]
It’s snowing and Christmas is just around the corner, but eleven year-old Min Randall is not looking forward to the celebration. She hates Christmas because it only serves to remind her that she doesn’t have a family of her own. When her foster mother abruptly packs up her things and delivers her back [...]
When a little girl chooses to climb a tree to its highest bough, she comes up against the formidable Miss Nettie, who first warns of physical injury, and then accuses her of rude behaviour, before threatening dire consequences in the form of a reputation as a tomboy and the scars to go with it. [...]
