 Sage and three other orphans are selected by the king's regent to vie for the role of the long lost prince of Carthya. The regent, Connor, is trying to avoid civil war but is devious and a rather suspicious character. He pits them against one another to select the strongest candidate. In two weeks time they must prove that they should be the chosen one. This book is the first in the mefantasy Ascendency trilogy. It is action-packed and filled with intrigue and surprises.
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 Imagine that you are 8 years old and out with your mom. Mom stops at 7-11 and just runs in leaving you in the backseat. Suddenly, you hear shots and a man jumps in the car and takes off. He does not know you are there so you hide. He drives to his house and parks in the garage. He has his own 8 year-old daughter who ends up realizing that you are in the car and must decide how to help you escape without her father getting in trouble. Now fast forward 6 years and you both meet again at a summer camp. What would you do? How would you feel? Wren and Darra must figure out how to deal with a very emotionally charged and awkward situation.
 Salva's life is changed forever in 1985 when his village in Sudan is attacked and he and other children are told to run away as fast as they can. He loses his family and all that he knows. He is alone even when he is with others on the long march to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. He spends 6 years in the camp. Somehow Salva survives and eventually he ends up in the United States in New York where he longs to go back Sudan and help his country and find his family.
We enter Nya's life in 2008 and it revolves around water. Everyday she walks all day long to a pond to fill the family's water jugs. No school. No playing with friends. All day every day she walks to and from the pond. During the dry season her family moves to a dry lake bed and digs in the mud to find water. Read the amazing true story of how Salva's and Nya's lives eventually intersect in a wonderful way.  This is a companion novel to The Wednesday Wars which won a Newbery Honor Award in 2008. It's the late 1960s and Doug Swieteck's dad has lost his job again so the family is moving to Marysville, NY in search of a new life. Doug is sad to be leaving his friend, Holling (from The Wednesday Wars) and Camillo Junior High. His oldest brother's in Vietnam, his middle brother is a delinquent and is extremely cruel to Doug, and his mom puts up with his dad's drinking and verbal abuse. Doug gets a job delivering groceries and makes friends with a librarian who realizes he has a love of drawing and is teaching him to draw by using birds from a prized volume of Audubon's Birds of America. Doug must keep this secret from his family as his brother and father would tease him for wasting his time. Doug's persistence in the face of serious family issues and be sad when the book ends
 Fred Bowen has written numerous sports-themed books for elementary and middle school readers and this is one more in a series called "Sports Story." If you like football you will love this book! Matt Monroe is in 8th grade and in his mind is a shoo-in to be the starting quarterback for his team, Then Devro, a new 7th grader shows up and Matt is not so sure any more. Matt tells this story through a series of essays he writes for a journal he is required to keep for English class. His writing goes from boring to detailed as the season goes on and he also realizes that football is a team sport and one player is not any more important than another when it comes to the success of the team.
 Thirteen year-old Chase knows how to survive in a disaster. He carries a bag with him that contains all the supplies needed to survive for three days in the event of a disaster. He knows how to look for high ground and the safest rooms in a house. He even carries a satellite phone. He does this because his father owns a disaster relief company that swoops in at the first hint of a disaster to help residents recover. His father is on his way to help residents in St. , FL and drops Chase off at his partner Tomas's family home.
Chase is at his new school when disaster strikes in the form of a storm that even his father had not predicted and he ends up on a school bus headed into the storm instead of staying in the safety of the school because of a poor decision the principal makes. Will Chase and his new friends all survive the storm? What happens to Chase's father? Read this action-packed adventure novel to find out.  In this novel, 13-year-old Birdie tells us about the year her widowed mother opened up The Cheese Shop. Birdie works there in the summer unpaid because her mom can't afford to pay her. She becomes friends with Nick who makes special pasta and Swoozie who helps sell the cheese. At the end of each day she takes the unsold bread, pasta, and cheese out by the dumpster to leave it for whoever might want it. One evening at the dumpster, she meets Emmet, a runaway who is in search of a magic Native American hot spring which when one jumps into it will help cure what ails you. He is hoping it will bring his father back to his family and cure his ill brother. Should Birdie go on this wild quest with Emmet or stay behind and continue her "normal" life?
 Auggie Pullman has a rare genetic disorder which caused his head to be malformed. He has had many corrective surgeries which have left him with multiple scars. He knows he looks different and has learned to cope with the stares and comments but now his parents want to send him to a regular school for 5th grade. Up until now he has always been homeschooled. Everyone thinks it's time for him to step out of the safety net and meet some new friends.
This story is told from the perspective of several characters including Auggie's high school age sister who has been his fierce protector, his sister's former best friend, two of his new school friends, and Auggie. One thing that is never clear is exactly what Auggie looks like. It is left entirely up to the imagination and by the end of the book you realize it really doesn't matter because who Auggie is is not what he looks like.  Wonderstruck uses the same format as Selznick's Caldecott Award-winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. In Wonderstruck the author tells two stories, one using illustrations and the other using words. Ben Wilson's story takes place in 1977 in Gunflint, MN and is told using words. His mother has just died leaving Ben parentless. He only has hearing in one ear and then disaster strikes and he loses his hearing in his good ear. He soon runs away from his aunt and uncle in search of his father.
Rose's story is told through illustrations. She is a deaf child living in Hoboken, NJ in 1927. Misunderstood Rose lives in a little room and keeps a scrapbook about her mother who is a silent film star. Both Ben and Rose escape their desperate lives and end up in New York City where their lives intersect in an improbable way in the Museum of Natural History.  Meggie Blue seems like your average 6th grader and her family seem pretty normal at first. Meggie becomes extremely frightened and has seizures when the residents of her small town in North Carolina decide that aliens are real and have invaded their town. She and her family are forced to flee when the residents decide that the Blue family are the aliens. The town they escape to, Fashion City, is anything but friendly with curfews, dull factory work, and the requirement that everyone take Lotus pills to calm them down. The Blues don't like it here and you probably wouldn't either. Read the book to find out how they cope with life in this strange town.
| Robin MathewsMrs. Mathews is the school librarian at Daniels Run ES in Fairfax City, VA ArchivesCategories |
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