Princess Juniper of the Hourglass
By Ammi-Joan Paquette Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group Pages: 288 Lexile: 850L Age Range: 8 – 12 Years ABOUT In this royal adventure, Princess Juniper learns what it means to rule a kingdom—the perfect story for girls who love princesses AND adventure! For her thirteenth nameday all Princess Juniper wants is a country of her own. So when rumblings of unrest start in his kingdom, Juniper’s father decides to grant his daughter’s wish and sends her to a small, idyllic corner of the Hourglass Mountains until trouble blows over. Once there, Juniper discovers that ruling a...
Read MoreKeepers of the Labyrinth
By Erin E. Moulton Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group Pages: 304 Lexile: HL700L Age Range: 12 Years ABOUT Courage is tested, myths come to life, and long-held secrets are revealed. Lilith Bennette runs at midnight. She scales walls in the dark and climbs without a harness. She hopes that if she follows exactly in the steps of her strong air force pilot mother, she’ll somehow figure out the mystery of her mother’s death—and the reason why her necklace of Greek symbols has been missing ever since. So when Lil is invited to Crete for a Future Leaders International conference, the same...
Read MoreWe’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March
By Cynthia Levinson Publisher: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd. Pages: 180 Age Range: 13 – 17 Years ABOUT We’ve Got a Job tells the little-known story of the 4,000 black elementary-, middle-, and high school students who voluntarily went to jail in Birmingham, Alabama, between May 2 and May 11, 1963. Fulfilling Mahatma Gandhi’s and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s precept to “fill the jails,” they succeeded—where adults had failed—in desegregating one of the most racially violent cities in America. Focusing on four of the original participants who have participated...
Read MoreWatch Out for Flying Kids! How Two Circuses, Two Countries, and Nine Kids Confront Conflict and Build Community
By Cynthia Levinson Publisher: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd. Pages: 224 Lexile: 930L Age Range: 10 – 13 Years ABOUT The author of We’ve Got a Job explores the world of social circus—a movement that brings kids from different worlds together to perform remarkable acts on a professional level. Levinson follows the participants of two specific circuses that also work together periodically: Circus Harmony, in St. Louis, whose participants are inner-city and suburban kids, and Circus Galilee in Israel, whose participants and Jews and Arabs. As the kids’ relationships evolve over...
Read MoreRed Moon Rising
By K. A. Holt Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books Pages: 336 Lexile: 760L Age Range: 10 – 14 Years ABOUT Space-farmer Rae Darling is kidnapped and trained to become a warrior against her own people in this adventurous middle grade space western. Rae Darling and her family are colonists on a moon so obscure it doesn’t merit a name. Life is hard, water is scarce, and the farm work she does is grueling. But Rae and her sister Temple are faced with an added complication—being girls is a serious liability in their strict society. Even worse, the Cheese—the colonists’ name for the native...
Read MoreFinding Wild
By Megan Wagner Lloyd Illustrated by Abigail Halpin Publisher: Random House Children’s Books Pages: 32 Age Range: 3 – 7 Years ABOUT A lovely, lyrical picture book with gorgeous illustrations that explores the ways the wild makes itself known to us and how much closer it is than we think. There are so many places that wild can exist, if only you know where to look! Can you find it? Two kids set off on an adventure away from their urban home and discover all the beauty of the natural world. From the bark on the trees to the sudden storm that moves across the sky to fire and...
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