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Fifty summer-themed titles, beach reads, and other books for vacation reading from CBC member publishers.
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Down in the Piney Woods
Written by Ethel Footman Smothers
Ages 8 and up
ISBN: 0802852483
Price: $7.00
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Annie Rye Footman, ten, has no use for her three older half-sisters, especially after they join her Georgia sharecropper family permanently, but in time she learns to take her Grandma's advice to bear along with each other. This first novel, based on the author's childhood in the 50's, is rich in vividly felt moments.
"Smothers explores the value of strong family bonds and Annie Rye's reluctant but ultimately wholehearted acceptance of her new sibs with some insight. A promising debut." —Kirkus Reviews
"In a conversational style with a soft dialect, Smothers successfully conveys, with humor and sensitivity, the joys and trials of growing up in the segregated South during the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1950s." —The Horn Book
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The Enemy Has a Face
Written by Gloria D. Miklowitz
Ages 12 and up
ISBN: 0802852610
Price: $8.00
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Fourteen-year-old Netta Hofman wakes one morning to find that her older brother did not come home the night before. Having just moved from Israel to Los Angeles, the family of seventeen-year-old Adam is stunned and baffled by his disappearance. Adam has not had time to make many friends yet, and he has always been responsible, the last person who would leave home without a word.
Netta and her parents desperately seek answers to Adam's disappearance. Could he have run away with a girl he met on-line? Was he abducted for ransom? Or, is it possible that Palestinian terrorism is to blame—revenge for his Israeli father's work?
When Netta makes a new and unlikely friend at school, an Arab boy named Laith, she begins addressing issues of prejudice—her classmates' prejudice against foreign students, her own prejudice against Palestinians, and her family's growing suspicion that Palestinian hatred of Israelis is behind Adam's disappearance.
In this thoughtful and suspenseful book, Gloria Miklowitz explores issues of Middle Eastern relationships through the eyes of young people on both sides of the age-old conflict. The surprising conclusion to the novel will leave readers with a renewed understanding of other people's needs, fears, and beliefs.
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Everything on a Waffle
Written by Polly Horvath
Ages 10 and up
ISBN: 0-374-42208-7
Price: $5.95
Sunburst Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers
In this Newbery Honor Book from National Book Award winner Polly Horvath, eleven-year-old Primrose, living in a small fishing village in British Columbia, recounts her experiences and all she learns about human nature and the unpredictability of life after her parents are lost at sea. Primrose's parents have been lost at sea, but she believes without an iota of doubt that they are still alive, somewhere. She moves in with her Uncle Jack, but feels generally friendless. Her only real refuge is a local restaurant called The Girl on the Red Swing, where the owner, Miss Bowzer, serves everything on waffles—except advice and good sense, which come free of charge and are always reliable. "In [Polly Horvath's] capable hands the dilemma of Primrose Squarp is revealed with hilarity and buoyant good nature. . . . Subtlety and slapstick is a challenging combination; Horvath pulls it off beautifully." —The Horn Book, starred review; "Hilariously puckish." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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The Exploding Toilet
Modern Urban Legends
Written by David Holt & Bill Mooney
Illustrated by Kevin Pope
Ages 10-14
ISBN: 0-87483-715-4
Price: $6.95
August House Publishers
A new collection of modern urban legends from the authors of Spiders in the Hairdo.
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Explorers Wanted: Under The Sea
Written and illustrated in black & white by Simon Chapman
Ages 8-12
ISBN: 0316155403
Price: $5.99
Little, Brown Books For Young Readers
Each book in the exciting new Explorers Wanted series challenges readers to explore the unknown! Crammed with practical survival advice, real-life explorers' stories, fascinating natural history facts and the author's own expedition sketches, the books use their interactive format to educate in a fun, innovative way.
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Fat Cat
A Danish Folktale
Written by Margaret Read MacDonald
Illustrated by Julie Paschkis
Ages 4-8
ISBN: 0-87483-765-0
Price: $7.95
August House Publishers
Cat's boundless appetite gets her into more and more trouble as the refrain-driven story careens toward its tumultuous apex.
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Forgive the River, Forgive the Sky
Written by Gloria Whelan
Ages 9 and up
ISBN: 0802852564
Price: $8.00
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Twelve-year-old Lily Star loves the Sandy River, which flows through the small northern town that she's lived in all her life. "But as much as I love it," she says, "I can't forgive it." She holds the grudge because her father died while fishing on the river—and her whole life changed after that.
She and her mother had to leave the cabin in the woods on the river, the home Lily grew up in, and move into an apartment in town. What makes city living even worse for Lily is that a mysterious stranger moved into her home on the river and is building a fence that keeps her away from the land she knows and loves. Independent and strong-willed, Lily confronts the stranger about the fence and gradually gets to know him. As they become friends, she learns that he is struggling with loss and forgiveness just as she is.
By turns poignant and funny, this beautifully told story introduces readers to a young girl with a tender heart who learns that loss is an inevitable part of love.
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Francie
Written by Karen English
Ages 10 and up
ISBN: 0-374-42459-4
Price: $5.95
Sunburst Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers
In this Coretta Scott King Honor Book, Francie lives with her mother and younger brother, Prez, in rural Alabama, where all three work and wait. Francie's father is trying to get settled in Chicago so he can move his family up North. Unfortunately, he's made promises he hasn't kept, and Francie painfully learns that her dreams of starting junior high school in an integrated urban classroom will go unfulfilled. Amid the day-to-day grind of working odd jobs for wealthy white folks on the other side of town, Francie becomes involved in helping a framed young black man to escape arrest—a brave gesture, but one that puts the entire black community in danger. In this vivid portrait of a girl in the pre-Civil Rights era South, Karen English completes Francie's world using lively vernacular and a wide array of flesh-and-blood characters. "A keenly perceptive and gutsy heroine." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Ghost of a Hanged Man
Written by Vivian Vande Veld
Ages: 10 and up
ISBN: 0-7614-5154-4
Price: $5.95
Marshall Cavendish Children's Books
In the summer of 1877 famous outlaw Jake Barnette is about to be hanged for his numerous crimes. Showing no remorse for three train robberies, two dozen bank hold-ups, and sixteen murders, he has issued one final threat. He has vowed to return from the grave to take the sheriff and his deputy, the judge and jury foreman, and their families back with him! Though at first uneasy, the town gradually forgets about Jake Barnette's curse. The strange and terrible events of the following spring, however, force everyone-especially the sheriff and his two children, twelve-year-old Ben and nine-year-old Annabelle-to remember. Young readers will shiver with fear (and delight) as unusually heavy rains flood the cemetery and bring coffins to the surface, as gypsy fortune-tellers warn of evil, and as a ghost carries out his dreadful promises one by one.
"The author grabs readers' attention in the first sentence of her tale of ghostly revenge, and she doesn't let go until the last sentence." —Booklist
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Going for the Record
Written by Julie Swanson
Ages 12 and up
ISBN: 0802852734
Price: $8.00
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Seventeen-year-old Leah Weiczynkowski, about to begin her senior year of high school, is on the brink of realizing her dream—playing soccer for the under-eighteen national team, her gateway to the World Cup and the Olympics. Everything she's worked for in her young life has been about this moment. She can't wait to tell her dad, her biggest fan and her faithful chauffeur to games and practices.
Unfortunately, her dad, Pete Weiczynkowski, has news of his own.
Going for the Record addresses Leah's passion for her sport, her love for her father, and her growing recognition of her father's faith and bravery. Loosely based on the author's own experience, Going for the Record is a coming-of-age story on a number of levels, as Leah must question everything that's mattered most to her and how she will define herself in the future.
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