Immediately engaging, Jerry Pinkney’s middle-grade memoir, Just Jerry (Little Brown Books for Young Readers, January 2023) draws you in instantly on the small neighborhood streets of Philly in 1950. You also might find refuge under the piano bench, where young Jerry hid to draw in peace. (Well, as much peace as he could find in

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Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson is a poetic autobiographical reflection on the author’s childhood. The writing is sparse, written in free verse, and yet each poem packs a punch of emotion. Ms Woodson recalls her earliest of memories (fictionalizing events as necessary). Her early childhood is spent with her grandmother and grandfather in South

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Knees by Vanita Oelschlager (Vanita Books, 2012) and Wings by Christopher Meyer (Scholastic Press, 2000) are two middle-grade books about differences and coming to accept being different. Knees is told from the perspective of a young boy learning to deal with his dyslexia. Wings is told from the perspective of a girl who observes the new boy in town,

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In the middle grade historical novel in poetry May B. by Caroline Rose (to be published January 2012 by Swartz and Wade), young Mavis Betterley, called May, has been sent away from home for the first time, assigned to be a helper for one of her rural Kansas farm neighbors for six months. Despite her

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