Children’s Books
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Jumping Off the Planet is not your usual science fiction story. It is the first book of a three-part series the author David Gerrold calls the Starsider’s Trilogy. This is the story of three adolescent brothers and their struggle to gain their own independence from their feuding parents. The protagonist is thirteen-year-old Charles Dingillian, who goes by the nickname “Chigger.” He lives with his… Read more
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I happened to pick this book up in a used bookstore because the combination of young adult and WW2 historical literature interests me. It’s Brian Crawford’s story of Julia, a teenage farm girl growing up in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second world war. In addition to the struggles of living under the Nazis, she must keep the farm functioning despite her stepfather’s alcoholism. She thinks her life is complicated enough, until… Read more
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Jennifer Nielsen may be known for her fantasy novels like The Once and Future Prince, but she has a number of young adult historical novels, and Resistance is one of them. The heroine of the story is Chaya Lindner, a Jewish teenage resistance fighter in the midst of the Holocaust. Because she can pass as… Read more
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A Novel You Simply Must Read! A fellow writer acquaintance recommended I read Between Shades of Gray and it’s one of the best pieces of advice I have ever followed. When Ruta Sepetys published Between Shades of Gray she immediately had a problem in that the title was similar to that horribly written novel… Read more
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People have said you can teach any subject at any age. Jill Paton Walsh’s The Green Book is proof of that. The plot centers around a group of families who leave earth to make a new home on an alien planet. The story tells virtually nothing about their life before leaving Earth or about the… Read more