My fifth grader came home from school to tell me about an amazing book her teacher was reading. It was based on real situations (from around the world) and was about a person who lived in a busy city and didn’t have any running water. My daughter was awed that this girl went into a

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Jadav Payeng was just a boy when he mourned for the snakes and other animals that were swept onto small dry island in the middle of the river during the monsoon season. The sandbars were bare, so when the waters receded, the snakes dried in the hot northeastern Indian sun. Though he didn’t know it,

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Chloe in India by Kate Darnton is about an American preteen trying to find her place while living in a foreign country. Chloe is a preteen American girl who has moved to India, but she dislikes living there because she is the outsider. She has blonde hair, she doesn’t know Hindi, and she doesn’t quite

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At first, The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar reminded me of The Help. Obviously, given the very different settings, the book was very different as a whole from The Help. But I loved reading about the friendship and lives of two very different women. The book was beautifully written, and although the realistic issues

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I read a review of Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri on The Pulitzer Project. The next day, I saw it on display at the library. I hope reading a review of it prompts you to pick it up, too. It is an incredible collection of short stories. Amazingly, this collection is the author’s first

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