Her mom just doesn’t get it. Reha wants to fit in at school, but her mom wants her to hold fast to the Indian traditions from her mother’s home in India. But Reha feels more American, than Indian most days. Like how can she explain to her mom that she wants to wear jeans to a party, when her mom thinks she should wear a pretty, fancy dress? Plus, it sometimes makes things harder that Reha is an only child and has no one to share her issues with. Even though Reha wishes things could be easier, she is devastated when her mother gets sick. How can she be upset with her mom when the world seems to ..read more

After her brother died, it just seemed the right thing to do. For her to join the war effort and do all she could to defeat the Nazis. That is how Lucie finds herself in occupied France, in 1943, pretending to be a French citizen, even though she is an American, and pretending to be 18 years old, when she is only 16. Her parents don’t even know she has decided to join the war. She just left home one day. It isn’t like she left two happy people, because neither of her parents seems very happy, ever since they immigrated from France to the United States. Still, she is doing her best to be a help ..read more

Simon is thrilled to be moving to a place in the United States with no internet, or cell phones, or computers or even….microwaves! Yup, nothing like that. He and his parents have moved to the National Quiet Zone which is where there are a ton of radio telescopes. These telescopes listen in on outer space and can’t have anything interfere with that. Which makes it the perfect place for Simon and his family, because Simon doesn’t want anyone to know what happened to him, two years before. And he knows no one can find him if the internet isn’t there! What Simon isn’t expecting though, is on his f ..read more

Every Sunday, Marlene dreads going to the salon. Like, dreads it. Hates it. But, she knows it makes her mother happy. But what is really wrong with Marlene’s hair the way it is, naturally? Marlene decides that enough is enough and she wants to find out what her hair would look like if she just let it be! All of this happens after a party for her cousin (who has the PERFECT hair) brings home just how much everyone in Marlene’s family base things on looks. Especially about how the women’s hair looks. However, when Marlene tries to do things her way, she meets with some disastrous results and it ..read more

Not all true crime books have a solution. After all, that is what makes it real, and not packaged up nicely in an hour television show. There are plenty of mysteries left to be solved in the world and maybe you have what it takes to break a case wide open! For example, there is a major art heist that still has not been solved and it happened in 1990. Artwork was stolen from the Gardner Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts by two men who said they were police officers coming to check on a call about a disturbance. Turns out, the disturbance was the robbers dressed as police officers! To this day ..read more

Class can be boring, or interesting, depending on what comes out of Hoodie’s (yes, like the sweatshirt) friend’s mouth. Because his best friend, Moshe Tzvi could make some interesting arguments with the Rabbi during halacha class where they were all learning about Jewish law. But on this particular day, Hoodie was more interested in the girl who was dancing outside the window of his school. Clearly, the girl was not an Orthodox Jewish girl, the only kind that Hoodie was supposed to notice, if he noticed any girls at all, which he also wasn’t supposed to do. Still, something about the girl was ..read more

For Sage, she understands it is bad, that the area around where she lives, is burning. It feels real, and unreal all at the same time. She hears the sirens, she sees the firetrucks and the burned out shells of former homes, but still, she carries on. So does her mom, even though her mom starts talking about moving from the only home Sage has ever known. How can her mom even talk about leaving the house that Sage’s dad grew up in? With her father is gone, the house feels like one solid connection she still has left with him. The summer is filled with old and new. She meets a new friend, who is ..read more

Tre feels trapped in some ways. Trapped by the shadow of his older brother, Jaxon, trapped by the pressure of reservation life, and trapped by his own expectations. After all, when you live in a place where everyone tells the story of how your father was one of the greatest basketball players to ever play at the Red Lake Indian Reservation high school, and has the stats and the banners hanging in the school to prove it, things can be a bit overwhelming. Especially when all Tre was interested in for years were comic books and video games. But when he started to get into basketball, it was his o ..read more

April thinks her life is about to change in a good way. She has decided that she MUST pursue her love of drumming, even though some of her past lesson teachers have not be so supportive. That is okay, because her best friend, Zee, and his dad, are. Even if her mom likes things to be super quiet and calm, April knows she can count on her music loving friend and neighbor to pull her along. After all, Zee and his dad get it. Zee is a musical prodigy on the violin and has even gotten into a fancy music school to start the school year. While April misses having him in her life each day at school, s ..read more

World War II might be over, but the world has decided that a new one, a cold one, can take its place. In 1963, everyone, including Josephine – Jo for short – knows that the Soviet Union and the United States are still locked in a battle for who will dominate the world moving forward. And because no bullets are being shot, or bombs dropped, all the “fighting” has to be done in different arenas – like in the arena for the Pax Games. The Pax Games, like the Olympics, only come around every four years and began after World War I, when the mechas had come into being. These huge suits of armor for t ..read more