Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
Well holy, moly! How did a dozen years fly by so quickly?! San Francisco indie press Immedium’s 12-part Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, written by founding publisher and author Oliver Chin, comes full circle with a final, rousing cock-a-doodle-dooooo!! Mama and Papa welcome Ray to their flock, earning his name...
River Dean, 17, is not a bad kid: he's got warm relationships with his family (except his runaway dad), does well at school, and has good friends. But when Penny, the love of his life, dumps him, River starts making awful decisions, starting with stumbling...
*STARRED REVIEW The latest from Newbery Medal-winning author Richard Peck takes on important and timely topics – marriage, sexuality, manhood, nontraditional families –and alchemizes them into an affecting story full of warmth, acceptance, and understanding. Sixth grader Archer Magill narrates what he calls "A Tale of...
Benny’s father endures long-lasting effects when he suffers a brain aneurysm. Benny’s life was already tough: his brother George, who has autism, requires special attention; Benny’s best friend moved away, and making new friends hasn’t been easy. Now with his father’s recovery uncertain, the whole...
At 4, Mawi Asgedom fled the civil war cleaving Eritrea and Ethiopia, spending three years in a Sudanese refugee camp. In 1983, assisted by World Relief, the family settled in a Chicago suburb. Their new life wasn't easy: Asgedom's father, once a respected community leader and...
In a tiny Indian village, Anil and Leena are constant childhood companions in spite of their vastly different backgrounds. Anil, a member of the farming community's most important family, is destined for a prestigious medical residency in Dallas. Leena, the only daughter of a modest...
Six days before eighth grade starts, Lily and Dunkin meet for the first time. Lily is still known mostly as Timothy, the boy name he was given at birth – but he's practicing being his true self: a girl named Lily. Dressed in her mother's dress and sandals,...
While his 8-year-old classmates wrote about wanting to be an actress, prime minister or even Harry Potter, David Piper had a six-word wish for his future: "I want to be a girl." At 14, David's wish has only become more fervent, as his traitorous body...
Okay, so I'm warning you right up front: This is just the first of a trilogy. And YES, it's fabulous, stupendous FUN. Which means you're going to immediately want more. Since the first installment just hit shelves last month, who knows when the next will be...
*STARRED REVIEW For the rest of his life, Ajie would be known as the last person to have seen Paul, the family’s exemplary, exceptional firstborn. On a Monday afternoon during Nigeria’s 1995 rainy season, 17-year-old Paul announces he’s visiting a friend in the next compound; he...
The year was 1994. Hirsh Sawhney was in junior high school when Kurt Cobain's suicide made international headlines that April. Just a few weeks later in a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, the boy with the locker next to Sawhney's took his own life with...
Divided into three sections – Homeless, Homeward, and Home –that converge in the titular "High Mountains of Portugal," three men epitomize the concepts after which the sections are named. Part 1's Tomás, grieving the loss of his lover and son, takes his uncle's automobile – one...
Sibling rivalry threatens to destroy the Fire Nation when a frustrated Zuko reveals the kemurikage leader on the first page: "I know that's you ...
Jung Yun’s Twitter profile reads: “Fiction writer. Late bloomer. Better late than never.” Indeed, more than four decades passed before she earned that “fiction writer” mantle, but clearly the careful gestation paid off. So wowed was Yun’s publisher, Picador, with her first novel that hundreds of...
*STARRED REVIEW On an afternoon in November 1999, the 50,000-strong disruption of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle imploded with tear gas and violence. Sunil Yapa’s debut pivots around teenage runaway Victor, whose initial plans to sell marijuana for profit morphs into tenacious participation with...
Whoa! The year-and-a-half wait for this, the latest volume in Kazu Kibuishi’s bestselling Amulet adventures, is finally over!! And was it worth the 18 months of excruciating patience? You betcha! So listen up: first and foremost, if this is the first Amulet cover you're seeing, stop here and...
*STARRED REVIEW "My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives," explains nine-year-old Benjamin. With Father's strict daily oversight missing and Mother busy with...
For those of us of a certain (old) age, we might remember an animated rabbit used to sell artificially colored, chemically flavored powder that altered milk into some sort of sweet goop: Quiky the Quik Bunny would quip "You can't drink it slow, if it's Quik."...
