- Number the stars
Ten-year-old Annmarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. When the Jews of Denmark are “relocated,” Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be one of the family. Soon Annmarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission to save Ellen’s life.
2. Esperanza Rising
Esperanza, the daughter of a wealthy grape grower in Mexico, leads a charmed life — until bandits kill her father. One of his brothers pressures her mother to marry him, but after he burns down the ranch, Esperanza, her mother, and a family of former servants escape to California to become farm workers. There, Esperanza must learn to work hard, which proves difficult for a girl who doesn’t even know how to use a broom. After her mother is hospitalized with Valley Fever, she joins the field workers through the various crop seasons. But there is more trouble: Some Mexican farm workers are striking, and other migrants are arriving from other areas, threatening to drive down wages. Esperanza struggles to keep her family together — and her hope alive.
3. Holes
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
4. Fire Girl
A middle school boy’s life is changed when Jessica, a girl disfigured by burns, starts attending his Catholic school while receiving treatment at a local hospital.
5. Zero Intolerance
Seventh-grader Sierra Shepard has always been the perfect student, so when she sees that she accidentally brought her mother’s lunch bag to school, including a paring knife, she immediately turns in the knife at the school office. Much to her surprise, her beloved principal places her in in-school suspension and sets a hearing for her expulsion, citing the school’s ironclad no weapons policy. While there, Sierra spends time with Luke, a boy who’s known as a troublemaker, and discovers that he’s not the person she assumed he would be–and that the lines between good and bad aren’t as clear as she once thought. Claudia Mills brings another compelling school story to life with Zero Tolerance