Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
In Predicting the President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), historian Allan Lichtman lays out the historical reasons the presidents won their elections in history since the 1800s, using his own system of “keys” to predict which candidate or political party will win for the upcoming election. Even after reading the
Doug Swieteck, a fourteen-year-old transplant to the small town of Marysville, learns to cope with his life as he adjusts to new situations during the 1968-1969 school year in Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2011). Even as he faces the struggles of moving to a new middle school, Doug must still
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is a powerful young adult novel that shares the pivotal 1967-1968 school year from the perspective of seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood. In The Wednesday Wars, his fellow students go to their religious schools (Catholic school or the Jewish synagogue) on Wednesday afternoons. As the lone
World War II was in full-force when Dory Byrne’s father left to fight. Now Dory and her two brothers are on their own, with their father’s assurance that the community will help them while he’s gone. Nothing Else but Miracles by Kate Albus (Margaret Ferguson Books, September 2023) tells the story of this spunky tween
The Einstein Effect by Benyamin Cohen (Sourcebooks, July 2023) shows the ways in which Albert Einstein has influenced life and culture today, from the providing of refugee aid, to the creation of GPS and so much more. With the subtitle “How the World’s Favorite Genius Got into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds,” Cohen
Before Silicon Valley was what we imagine today, it was the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Hope in the Valley by Mitali Perkins (Farrar, Straus and Giroux July 2023) is a captivating middle grade novel set in 1980 in those early days of the changing Silicon Valley. Pandita Paul, a 13-year-old Indian-American girl, grapples with the
Light Comes to Shadow Mountain by Toni Buzzeo (Pixel + Ink, July 2023) is a fictional middle grade novel centered around Cora May Tipton, a spirited and eager girl living in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression. Cora resides on Shadow Mountain, a considerable distance from the nearest town. Thanks to President Roosevelt’s New Deal
I have read many books and novels about the Japanese-American Internment program during World War II, but nothing quite as unique as Seen and Unseen by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki (Chronicle Books, 2022). This nonfiction middle-grade Siebert Award winner is subtitled “What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adam’s Photographs Reveal about the Japanese
A Girl Named Rosa: The True Story of Rosa Parks by Denise Lewis Patrick (Scholastic, January 2018). I like this book because Rosa Parks was independent, and since at that time people said that blacks shouldn’t be as good as whites. They said that they couldn’t go to the same schools. They couldn’t sit in
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (2011 National Book Award for Young People and Newbery Honor Award) is a novel in poetry about a young girl’s relocation to American from Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It is about the challenge of starting over and the pain of discrimination in a strange new country and
Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky by Sandra Dallas is an appropriate book for reading just before our country’s Independence Day. It focuses on a Japanese American family during the early part of World War II, when thousands of people of Japanese descent were relocated to special “camps”. The Japanese internment is not someting I
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan is a powerful story about a rich and spoiled Mexican girl whose sudden impoverishment in the 1930s takes her into the migrant worker camps of California. It teaches much about the Great Depression as well as discrimination during that period. At the beginning of the novel, Esperanza lives a
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