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Readers who appreciate survival stories like Hatchet by Gary Paulsen will likely enjoy Flying Through Water by Mamle Wolo. Set in Tovime village in Ghana, Wolo’s novel shares the adventures of Sena who attends junior high, plays football, farms with his family, and dreams of escaping the toil and toll of poverty. He envisions “driving a sports car very day to a high school where students wore whatever they wanted, and talked to teachers however they liked, and fought and sang and shouted and danced in the corridors and flirted and kissed and played sports and never seemed to do any schoolwork” (48). Sena’s realityRead More →

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Readers of Carl Hiaasen, Sneed Collard, and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Vet Volunteers series will likely be drawn to Evan Griffith’s debut novel for middle grade readers, Manatee Summer. Griffith tells the story of Peter Harrison and Tommy Saunders, two Florida youth who will enter sixth grade in the fall. The pair plans to spend their summer completing their Discovery Journal, a project that they began two years ago in which they catalog every animal species they see in the wild. Each discovery in the two hundred-page journal gets two pages. On one, Tommy records research notes; on another, Peter draws pictures. These two lovers ofRead More →