Grace “Sprig” Ewing ought to be having the best year of her life. She is ten, her favourite number, she has terrific parents, a wonderful older sister, and Bliss, her faithful and supportive best friend. But somehow nothing seems to quite right anymore in Sprig’s life.
Her father, an architectural engineer, has left on an extended [...]
In the spring of 1939, a nine-year old girl named Liesel Meminger comes to live with Rosa and Hans Hubermann in their tiny house in Himmel Street, in Molching, a small town near Munich. Having recently survived the death of her younger brother, and separation from her sickly mother, Liesel is angry, defensive, and driven [...]
Escalating hostilities between Tories, loyal to the British Crown, and Whigs, who demand independence for Britain’s Thirteen American Colonies, have exacted a heavy price on fifteen-year old Charlotte Hooper. Her three older brothers have all ‘accepted the King’s shilling,’ and two have been killed in fighting. The third is missing and feared dead. She has [...]
When her small village in Mozambique is attacked by bandits and her father is killed, Sofia Alface, her sister, Maria, brother, Alfredo, and mother, Lydia, flee, walking for days in search of somewhere safe. They finally find and are welcomed into a second village, where Mother Lydia builds a hut and joins the village [...]
After her mother’s death from AIDS, sixteen year-old Chanda Kabelo struggles to bring up her six year-old sister, Iris, and her five year-old brother, Solly. Though her former high school teacher, Mr. Selalame, has helped her get a supply teaching job at the local elementary school, her neighbours, the gossipy and overly intrusive yet [...]
Fifteen year-old Ian needs 40 hours of community service if he wants to pass Grade 10 Civics. Since he’s left it so long, he ends up in one of the most demanding volunteer placements available, serving food to homeless men at The Club, a soup kitchen on the wrong side of town. Though [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
When traitors to the Two Lands kill his master, the Kushite spy Setka, and track him into the desert, fourteen year-old Nebi knows he must overcome the pain of his injuries, and get to Thebes. Charged by Setka to reveal to the Princess Amonirdis what they have learned about a plot by many Egyptian [...]
