You know those days you forget to eat because you're running around here and there, and your belly LOUDLY (usually at inopportune moments) reminds you to "FEEEEEED MEEEE!!!"? Those grumbles and rumbles DO sound just like a hidden beast! If you're an inquisitive kid who hasn't...
Dasha is 12. She lives in a four-room apartment in Moscow with her mother and her grandparents. Her father lives in Los Angeles. She would like a cat, but she's too allergic. One night, she overhears her grandmother assuring her mother: "She will be fine. We...
Adolescence is difficult enough to navigate, but throw in a few gender-bender issues and you've got multiple challenges earlier generations probably didn't (wouldn't? couldn't?) openly face. With all manner of identity awareness growing worldwide, Shimura Takako’s award-winning, internationally lauded manga series gently and insightfully reflects the gender spectrum on...
The year is 1913. Zeynep and Ali are teenage lovers in Anatolia (once Asia Minor, now modern Turkey) who part with a lingering sense of bitterness: Ali's impending departure breaks their promise of escaping their village together. Feeling betrayed, Zeynep turns away: "I refuse to be your...
Allow me to dispel any notions that the dragons within are why I'm insisting this is one of my Absolute Favorites ever. Plenty of other reasons make Nimona an irresistible delight: allow me to count at least the top-10 ways ...
For the most magnificent experience, choose to go aural with a pitch-perfect quartet to narrate the four distinct stories that make up this stupendous new novel from award-winning Pam Muñoz Ryan. Then – in another reason to visit your local library often – make sure to at least...
"Well, my mama was a hairdresser, but she had this big dream that what she really wanted to be one day was a – an astronomer," 12-year-old Galileo Galilei Barnes explains to her teacher and class on her first day at her new school. Pointing at the...
In case you initially peruse this manga the Western way (flip pages from the right side to left), here's what you'll see a few pages in: "We used to fanatically watch reruns of Ultraman as kids," the creators Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi confess. "We never dreamed...
While this summer's Justice League and Fantastic Four make for great celluloid entertainment, for true inspiration, Mister Doctor – as Dr. Janucz Korczak was called by his beloved children – is a real life superhero to be admired and emulated. His accomplishments beyond doctoring included also being a scholar,...
"I was a typical twelve-year-old girl, far more interested in what I should wear to school than what I might learn there," co-author Caitlin Stoicsitz (as she was named then) introduces her 1997 self. "I assumed most kids, regardless of where they lived, had lives...
