Swirling Tides

Premise: Chaya Lindner is a teenager living in Nazi-occupied Poland. Simply being Jewish places her in danger of being killed or sent to the camps. After her little sister is taken away, her younger brother disappears, and her parents all but give up hope, Chaya is determined to make a difference. Using forged papers and her fair features, Chaya becomes a courier and travels between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people. Soon Chaya joins a resistance cell that runs raids on the Nazis' supplies. But after a mission goes terribly wrong, Chaya's network shatters. She is alone and unsure of where to go, until Esther, a member of her cell, finds her and delivers a message that chills Chaya to her core, and sends her on a journey toward an even larger uprising in the works — in the Warsaw Ghetto. Thrilling and Moving This story takes place in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust where the main character, a girl named Chaya Lindner lives. Being J

Premise: Twelve-year-old Crow has lived her entire life on a tiny, isolated piece of the starkly beautiful Elizabeth Islands in Massachusetts. Abandoned and set adrift on a small boat when she was just hours old, Crow's only companions are Osh, the man who rescued and raised her, and Miss Maggie, their fierce and affectionate neighbor across the sandbar. Crow has always been curious about the world around her, but it isn't until the night a mysterious fire appears across the water that the unspoken question of her own history forms in her heart. Soon, a chain of events is triggered, leading Crow down a path of discovery and danger. Vivid and Heart-wrenching This story takes place in the Elizabeth Islands in the 1920s. Crow, a twelve-year-old girl, has always lived on a small island off of Cuttyhunk. She was abandoned and set adrift in a small boat as a newborn. She was raised by a man named Osh, who rescued her, and their neighbor, Miss Maggie, and Crow doesn’t know anything

Premise: One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called INKHEART-- and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever. Beguiling and Magical You will read this bestselling book with rapt attention, unfolding a story about a twelve year old girl named Meggie whose mother disappeared nine years ago and meets villains she thought she’d only meet in fairy tales. Ever since, she had been living alone with her father, a simple bookbinder. An evil ruler named Capricorn escaped from the boundaries of the book, landing in their living room, all those years ago after Meggie’s father read out loud from a book called Inkheart. He and his men keep following Meggie’s father because he has two th

Premise: Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnats. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes. It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.  Quirky and Inventive This humorous story is about a boy named Stanley Yelnats who is wrongly accused of stealing the shoes of a famous baseball player who was planning to donate them to charity. As

Premise: A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about a girl in Sudan in 2008 and a boy in Sudan in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours’ walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day.  The boy, Salva, becomes one of the "lost boys" of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya’s in an astonishing and moving way. Poignant and Compelling This inspiring story will be hard to put down. A Long Walk to Water comprises two separate narratives from two people at two different periods of time. One is from a boy named Salva during the second Sudanese Civil War in 1985, and another from a girl named Nya which takes place in Sudan as well, but begins in

Premise: In the shadow of wings . . . humans fight for survival. Ivy doesn't trust the Dragonslayer. He may be her father and the beloved ruler of Valor, but she knows he's hiding more than the treasure from the sand dragon he killed two decades ago. Leaf doesn't trust dragons. They're the reason his favorite sister, Wren, is dead, and now he'll do whatever it takes to slay even one. Wren doesn't trust anyone. She swore off humans after her village tried to sacrifice her to the dragons. She only has one friend, a small, wonderful mountain dragon named Sky, and they don't need anyone else. In a world of dragons, the humans who scramble around underfoot are easy to overlook. But Ivy, Leaf, and Wren will each cross paths with dragons in ways that could shape the destiny of both species. Is a new future possible for all of them . . . one in which humans can look to the skies with hope instead of fear?  Comical and Engrossing This gripping book will be “unputd