Title Summary Review Between Shades of Gray Bluefish
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Title Summary Review Sepetys’ first novel offers a harrowing and horrifying account of the forcible relocation of countless Lithuanians in the wake of the Russian invasion of their country in 1939. In the case of 15-year-old Lina, her mother, and her younger brother, this means deportation to a forced-labor camp in Siberia, where conditions are all too painfully similar to those of Nazi concentration camps. By Ruta Sepetys: In 1941, fifteen- Lina’s great hope is that somehow her father, who has already been arrested by the Soviet secret police, might find and rescue year-old Lina, her mother, and them. A gifted artist, she begins secretly creating pictures that can—she hopes—be surreptitiously sent to him in his own prison brother are pulled from their camp. Whether or not this will be possible, it is her art that will be her salvation, helping her to retain her identity, her dignity, Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and her increasingly tenuous hold on hope for the future. Many others are not so fortunate. Sepetys, the daughter of a Lithuanian and sent to Siberia. refugee, estimates that the Baltic States lost more than one-third of their populations during the Russian genocide. Though many continue to deny this happened, Sepetys’ beautifully written and deeply felt novel proves the reality is otherwise. Hers is an important book that deserves the widest possible readership. *William C. Morris Award Finalist *YALSA Top Ten Fiction Award Between Shades of Gray (Booklist) Historical Fiction 344 pages UG By Pat Schmatz: Thirteen-year-old Travis, living in cramped quarters Travis lives with his alcoholic grandfather and his beloved dog, Rosco. When he and his grandfather move to a new town, the dog with his alcoholic grandfather, disappears, and Travis is devastated. Worse, he feels like a “bluefish,” his word for stupid. And, indeed, school is a struggle for longs for his old life in the him because, as the the reader soon discovers, he has a closely guarded secret. Things begin to change when he meets an country, and struggles in school to eccentric, extroverted girl who calls herself Velveeta. Though she has secrets of her own, she and Travis become friends and hide the fact that he cannot read, cautiously, with the help of an understanding teacher, begin to find ways to deal with their troubles and losses. Travis and but a persistent teacher and a Velveeta are sympathetic characters with believable problems. The story is well written and deals realistically with issues that special girl open his eyes to a new plague many teens. (Booklist) Fiction 226 pages MG world. Bluefish Title Summary Review In late December 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn discovered that uranium atoms could be split, and just a few months later the race to build an atomic bomb was on. The story unfolds in three parts, covering American attempts to build the bomb, how the By Steve Sheinkin: This spy thriller Soviets tried to steal American designs and how the Americans tried to keep the Germans from building a bomb. It was the eve of examines the history of the atomic World War II, and the fate of the world was at stake, "[b]ut how was a theoretical physicist supposed to save the world?" It's a bomb, discussing the discovery of true spy thriller, ranging from the football stadium at the University of Chicago to the mountains of Norway, from the deserts of the behavior of uranium when New Mexico to laboratories in East Tennessee, and all along the way spies in the United States were feeding sensitive information placed next to radioactive material, to the KGB. Groups of photographs are sprinkled throughout the volume, offering just enough visual support for the splendid the race to build a bomb, and the character development in the writing. It takes a lot of work to make a complicated subject clear and exciting, and from his impact of the weapon on societies prodigious research and storytelling skill, Sheinkin has created a nonfiction story young people will want to read. A superb tale of Bomb: The Race to Build - and around the world. an era and an effort that forever changed our world. *Newbery Honor Book *Sibert Medal Winner *YALSA Nonfiction Winner Steal - the World's Most Dangerous (Kirkus Starred) Nonfiction 266 pages MG Weapon By Matthew Quick: Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy is the only Finley pretends his earliest memory is shooting hoops in the driveway, where it was easy to zone out and forget what happened to white player on his high school's his family. Now a senior, Finley doesn’t talk much. “My mind is a fist and it’s always clenched tight, trying to keep the words in.” varsity basketball team. When his Keeping the silence is important in his neighborhood, where the Irish mob and black gangs clash. Snitches and their families are coach asks him to mentor a ruthlessly punished. He and his girlfriend, Erin, play varsity b-ball and dream of getting away. When Russ moves to the troubled African American student neighborhood, Finley is worried about the newcomer’s basketball superskills, but Russ has problems, too. After his parents’ murder, who has transferred from an elite he adopted the persona “Boy21,“ a benevolent, emotionless alien stranded on Earth. Finley’s glum reluctance to help Boy21 grows private school in California, he into surprising grace and friendship, and when Russ begins to heal, Finley confronts his own tragic past. Finley’s relationships are finds that they have a lot in sweet, supportive, and authentic. The revelation of what happened in Finley’s childhood is heartbreaking, but the hopeful ending common in spite of their apparent pays off. An unusual and touching story. (Booklist) Fiction 250 pages UG Boy 21 differences. Title Summary Review By Michael Grant: In the near With science as soft as pudding (though, really, who cares—pudding is delicious), Grant envisions nanotechnology so advanced future, the conjoined Armstrong that brains can be rewired, memories manipulated, and senses hacked by robots and gene-spliced creatures the size of dust mites. twins, under the guise of the A war between two ultra-secretive, competing ideologies—one championing free will, the other promising enforced happiness—is Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation, being fought “down in the meat,” and Grant gleefully exposes the biological ickiness of the body going about its everyday business plot to create their own version of in paranoia-inducing scenes of nanobots scuttling across spongy brain matter or plunging probes into optic nerves. At the same utopia using nanobots, while a time, he doles it out on the macro level as two teens are enlisted to help stop a maniacal baddie and his team of “twitchers,” guerilla group known as BZRK who are planning to infiltrate the heads of the world’s most powerful nations. With simmering pots of near-nonstop action and the develops a DNA-based biot that can threat of howling madness or brain-melting doom around every corpuscular corner, Grant’s new series is off to a breathless, stop bots, but at risk of the host's bombastic start. (Booklist Starred) Fantasy Fiction 386 pages UG BZRK brain. Lots of kids think they live in a zoo; Wahoo Cray actually does. Wahoo's dad, Mickey, was the best wild-animal wrangler in south By Carl Hiaasen: The difficult star Florida until an iguana, frozen solid in a flash freeze, fell from a tree and conked him on the head. Now, Mickey has migraines of the reality television show, and double vision, and the family's in such dire financial straits that Wahoo's mother has taken a temporary job. When offered "Expedition Survival," disappears good money for the use of Mickey's tame animals, there's no saying no to the production company of Expedition Survival!, a on location in the Florida "reality" show starring Derek Badger. The Crays, however, draw the line at harming any animal; and Derek doesn't think the Everglades, where they were filming scenes are "real" enough. The production company hires Mickey and Wahoo as guides on an Everglades location shoot, which is animals from the wildlife refuge complicated in true Hiaasen fashion by an abused, runaway girl from Wahoo's class, a toothy encounter with a jazzed-out snake, a run by Wahoo Crane's family, and disastrously unsuccessful live-bat brunch...and a vanishing star. Hiaasen's novel features a shy, deep-feeling protagonist who's also a Wahoo and classmate Tuna Gordon pragmatist and plenty of nature info and age-appropriate cultural commentary. Humorous adventure tales just don't get any more set out to find him. wacked...or fun to read than this. (Kirkus Starred) Adventure Fiction 290 pages MG Chomp Title Summary Review Wein’s exceptional -- downright sizzling -- abilities as a writer of historical adventure fiction are spectacularly evident in this taut, captivating story of two young women, spy and pilot, during World War II. Wein gives us the story in two consecutive parts -- By Elizabeth Wein: In 1943, a the first an account by Queenie (a.k.a. Lady Julia Beaufort-Stuart), a spy captured by the SS during a mission in Nazi-occupied British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-France. Queenie has bargained Linden to write what she knows about the British war effort in order to postpone her inevitable occupied France and the survivor execution. She charms her captors (and readers) as she writes her report and, mostly, tells the story of her best friend Maddie, the tells a tale of friendship, war, pilot who dropped her over France, then crashed.