"Quietly moving, full of surprises and, with Clare's colloquial and spirited voice, highly readable. (Fiction. 10-13)"
One minute, Clare is a middle school student in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but the next, she is in Bethlehem—"the real one"—and she's a cat.
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"As gay Chippewa 16-year-old Zack puts it, 'They tried really hard to kill us all off, and we're still here!'—a welcome and necessary reminder to all. (introductory notes, photos, annotated lists of organizations) (Nonfiction. 12-16)"
In distilled interviews, 45 young Native Americans express hope, resilience, optimism—and, rarely, anger—amid frank accounts of families plagued by drug, alcohol and sexual abuse, as well as murder, suicide, extreme poverty, and widespread discrimination, both public and private.
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"Readers will learn much about the war in Afghanistan even as they cheer on this feisty protagonist. (author's note) (Fiction. 11 & up)"
In a follow-up that turns the Breadwinner Trilogy into a quartet, 15-year-old Parvana is imprisoned and interrogated as a suspected terrorist in Afghanistan.
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"Casey, whose misplaced loyalty indicates startling ignorance of her friend's character, is a bore. Jess—sharply insightful, but selfish and entirely lacking in empathy—may be a piece of work, but she grabs readers' attention and never lets it go. (Fiction. 12 & up)"
Known for powerful tales of social injustice in the developing world, Ellis here offers readers a flawed but gripping character study of teens in small-town Canada.
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Fifteen-year-old Abdul, an Iraqi Kurd, has escaped war-torn Baghdad and traveled for four months across six countries only to hit a dead-end in the Jungle in Calais, a community of migrants trying to survive in squalid shanties with winter coming.
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"Photographs of the interviewees and a glossary round out an important chronicle of war and the world's most vulnerable—the children. (Internet resources) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)"
In her previous volume, Off to War: Voices of Soldiers' Children (2008), Ellis interviewed Canadian and American children whose parents were off at war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
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"This will work best where short fiction is in high demand, but some teens will find it preachy. (Short stories. YA)"
Readers of activist and award-winning Canadian novelist Ellis's novels won't be surprised that the short fiction collected here deals with substance abuse and impoverished peoples in countries large and small.
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"Ellis continues to be an important voice of moral and social conscience, and this volume will be followed, in January 2009, by Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees. (glossary, further information) (Nonfiction. 9 & up)"
With 13,500 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and one million American military personnel in Iraq, millions of children on the home front and in the war zones have been affected.
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"An exciting story that confronts young readers with a very different kind of childhood. (Fiction. 10-14)"
Bolivians have long consumed coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine, as a mild stimulant tea to minimize the effects of hunger and altitude sickness.
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"Ellis creates an exotic atmosphere of sights, sounds, and tastes for her novel about a memorable, if anachronistic, heroine. (Fiction. 12-15)"
A baby girl born with a facial deformity is left to die in the dessert of Persia, but her mother, the number one wife in the harem, rescues the child.
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"Allan Stratton's Chanda's Secrets (p. 498) is far deeper and better written (though its African country is fictional). (author's note, map, author interview) (Fiction. 10-13)"
This AIDS-in-Africa story, though occasionally poignant, smacks of intention.
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