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I’ve waxed on before about how much I love it when a book transports me into a life I’ll never have the chance to live – into a culture, or a time, or a circumstance – because isn’t that the whole point of reading books?  And in a way, that’s the point of all art – whether its a book, a painting, music, theatre – they’re all expressions of the human experience that we share with others to connect us and celebrate the variety and similarity of our time here on Earth.  Last night I started, and was so transported byPadma Venkatraman‘s newest, A Time toRead More →

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Jake Collier is a cyclist, a fierce competitor and a smart strategist.  He’s also a bit jealous of his talented teammate Juan Carlos from Ecuador.  Caught in the middle is Tessa Taylor, the seventeen-year-old host of KidVison, a television show for young people that runs on Greater Boston Cable News (GBC N).  Although Tessa is known as the “PBS Princess” and Juan Carlos is known as the “altar boy,” Diana Renn’s book Latitude Zero proves that we are all more than a nickname. Set in both Cambridge, Massachusetts (latitude forty two), and Ecuador (latitude zero), where poinsettia trees grow wild and unpruned among the lushRead More →

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Amber Lough writes The Fire Wish with a creative style that showcases the simile, so analogies like “The music hung thickly in the air, like the scent of cinnamon” (2-3) are common throughout her imagery-rich book.  The tale—told from the perspectives of two girls living in two different worlds—also features battles, magic, oud music, and many forms of love and loyalty.  One girl, Najwa, is a jinni—a being of fire and sand that lives within earthen tunnels among gems and magic.  In a simple transporting spell, Najwa penetrates the wards that protect the palace in Baghdad enabling her to bring back a rose from theRead More →

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In Katherine Kirkpatrick‘s Between Two Worlds, travelers on a race to the top of the world interrupted life during the 1900’s in Greenland.  The Greenland Inuits were amazed at the expansive wooden ships that rammed upon their shores bringing white men, women in impractical dresses, and canned food. Billy Bah was not exempt from the amazement. She followed the captain of the ship – Captain Peary – and spent time with his wife, especially after the birth of their daughter in the barren tundra of Greenland.  When the Peary’s sail home to America they ask to take Billy Bah with them – the first “Eskimo” toRead More →

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For readers who remember the adventures of Shade, a silverwing bat in the Silverwing Trilogy, Kenneth Oppel  delivers with equal measure, the action-packed and compelling story of Will Everett’s life in his most recent novel, The Boundless.  Set in in the late 1800s, at the time the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was being built, Will, who taught himself to draw when he was ill and bedridden for weeks, is looking for adventure.  The only adventures he has had have been in his head or drawn in his sketchbook or lived out vicariously through his father’s letters from various rail construction sites. When he arrives inRead More →

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15 year old Laila’s father is dead.  Numb with grief, shocked by the unexpected loss, and drowning in pain, her life is unrecognizable.  But that’s only the start: she finds herself exiled, with her mother and younger brother, in a non-descript apartment outside Washington, D.C., having fled her country after her father’s assassination.  Not only has she lost her beloved father, Laila has also lost the only life she ever knew: that of the daughter of a king. Her country has fallen into a civil war, as a long-standing resistance now openly challenges her uncle, who has taken over her father’s place as leader.  TheRead More →

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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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  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 →