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The fourteen true stories of survival in Hidden Like Anne Frank are emotionally charged and moving.  Editors Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis have collected incredible accounts of what it means to live in hiding, when a ticking clock can remind a survivor of the darkest days of his life. Storytellers not only reveal what it means to be Jewish, but what it means to be a survivor.  They tell of the “years of tears” and the difficulty of loss—the loss of possessions, loved ones, family bonds of affection, and one’s very identity.  At a time when people were persecuted for even looking Jewish, manyRead More →

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Sometime in the future, when nearly everyone uses a “comm” to watch shows, read books, and communicate, Danny Wright drives a badass truck he has named the Beast.  The torque of the 340 horsepower 350 V8 shakes his body, and she growls “like a chained animal waiting to be released, with the power to claw through anything” (7).  Danny, who plays football and dates the darling JoBell, seems to live an idyllic life as a senior in Freedom Lake, Idaho, but his life is anything but typical. At seventeen, he joins the Army National Guard, mostly because the Guard will pay for all the autoRead More →

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“Hope is the thing with feathers-/that perches in the soul,” wrote Emily Dickinson, but ten-year-old Star Mackie isn’t so sure that’s true.  For Star, the main character in Robin Herrera’s inaugural novel Hope Is A Ferris Wheel, hope is a Ferris wheel, and loneliness is perching in her soul.  Star has an empty space in her heart and soul where her dad is supposed to be.  Neither her mom nor her sixteen- year-old sister Winter will talk about Dad, but he is in Star’s head, “making [her] hope for things like birthday cards and ice cream dates and whatever else fathers and daughters [do] together”Read More →

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  Luc, orphaned when his mother dies from HIV, is in debt to Monsieur Tatagani, a moneylender and crook in Franceville, Gabon, who paid his mother’s medical bills.  For the tips and wages to repay Tatagani, Luc works at a hotel bar in the city, but he is always certain to be “home” before dark, recalling the days when his mother would tell tales of the “mock men,” chimpanzees whose screams foreshadowed violence in depths of the jungle, the “Inside.” These are the conditions and the setting as Eliot Schrefer’s book Threatened opens, and so it goes until Professor Abdul Mohammed arrives.  The Prof, who wishes to be Africa’s Jane Goodall, is anRead More →

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Half Native and half White, seventeen-year-old Trent doesn’t understand his native language, Hitchiti, nor how to play stickball.  He did not go through a naming ceremony and receive an Indian name from his Miccosukee tribe in Florida.  As he tries to figure out where he belongs, he drinks to turn down the volume in his brain and to escape the dark energy that he allows to identify himself.  School has become meaningless to him—more a place for robotic behavior.  Like a metaphor for his life, his skateboard deck is chipped and the bearings caked with dirt.  Even blasting tunes on his Gibson guitar stops workingRead More →

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White Space by Ilsa J. Bick starts out as Lizzie McDermott’s story but morphs into Emma Lindsay’s.  Lizzie is the daughter of Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who is an author of horror stories which rival those of Steven King and H.P. Lovecraft.  Lizzie, who considers her mother most beautiful when she is defiant, determined, and enraged, possesses a power that surpasses that of both her parents.  With her memory quilt and the Sign of Sure, she can travel the Dark Passages, the black basement of the brain.  Here, she drifts on the breath of a dream into a black void toRead More →

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Recently graduated from high school and hoping to pursue a career in landscape architecture, Elizabeth Owens can’t wait to leave New Jersey for college at Berkeley.  Lauren Collins, who already lives in San Francisco, wants escape, too, and has requested a single room for the privacy, solitude, and novelty of no longer having to share space with anyone, especially her five siblings, six and under.  So, when Lauren learns her request has been denied and receives a “Hi, Roomie” email from EB inquiring about microwaves and mini-fridges, her reply is cool and somewhat curt.  A bit certain about EB’s warm overtures, Lauren aspires to work inRead More →

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With Elizabeth Eulberg’s recent release, Better off Friends, readers will follow Macallan Dietz and Levi Rodgers as the author asks the question, Can a guy and a girl be legitimately best friends and only friends without the complications of romance? The novel begins when Macallan is just eleven years old and follows her through her senior year in high school.  With Macallan, who craves the discipline and distractions of school, loyalties run deep.  However, “beneath her sweet exterior is a snarky center with quick wit and even quicker rebounds” (116).  She staunchly supports her uncle Adam who was born with a birth defect which affectsRead More →

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Many children were displaced from their families during WWII and living in relative safety in England.  These are the conditions for William Osborne’s debut novel, Hitler’s Secret. Middle school readers of historical fiction and adventure will enjoy this fast-paced and action-packed novel about a female Austrian refugee and a male German refugee who agree to a secret mission: to go under cover as sister and brother, Leni and Otto Fischer.  Disguised as members of the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Youth, Leni and Otto set out to avenge their families destroyed by Hitler’s evil and to change the course of the war. Although only 14 yearsRead More →