Book Lists

2007 Teacher's Choices-Advanced Readers (Grade 6-8)

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Since 1989,  the International Reading Association started the Teachers' Choices project  that will encourage young people to read. These are books that kids will enjoy—and that contribute to learning across the curriculum. Teachers and parents will  find exceptional for curriculum use or reading aloud uses.

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The Firefly Letters

by: Margarita Engle
The Firefly Letters

A lyrical biography of a Cuban slave who escaped to become a celebrated poet.

Born into the household of a wealthy slave owner in Cuba in 1797, Juan Francisco Manzano spent his early years by the side of a woman who made him call her Mama, even though he had a mama of his own. Denied an education, young Juan still showed an exceptional talent for poetry. His verses reflect the beauty of his world, but they also expose its hideous cruelty.

Powerful, haunting poems and breathtaking illustrations create a portrait of a life in which even the pain of slavery could not extinguish the capacity for hope.

The Poet Slave of Cuba is the winner of the 2008 Pura Belpre Medal for Narrative and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Latino Interest.

My Last Skirt

by: Lynda Durrant
My Last Skirt
Jennie Hodgers dressed as a boy for the first time in order to help support her impoverished Irish family with a shepherd's wages. Then her arrival in America confirmed her belief that the world offers better opportunities to young men than to young women. So Jennie maintained her outward identity as Albert Cashier, serving as a grocery clerk in Queens, New York; as a farmhand in Ohio; and as a recruit in the 95th Illinois Infantry during the Civil War. Not only did she survive three years in combat with her true identity undiscovered, she chose to continue living as Albert for nearly all of her life.

Combining careful research with vivid insight, Lynda Durrant portrays Albert Cashier as a soldier who served his adopted country and his comrades with loyalty and heroism, and Jennie Hodgers as a woman of a woman of astonishing strength, courage, and adaptability—a woman sometimes at war with her own secrets. Author's note, bibliography.

Hurt Go Happy

by: Ginny Rorby
Hurt Go Happy

Thirteen-year-old Joey Willis is used to being left out of conversations. Though she's been deaf since the age of six, Joey's mother has never allowed her to learn sign language. She strains to read the lips of those around her, but often fails.

Everything changes when Joey meets Dr. Charles Mansell and his baby chimpanzee, Sukari. Her new friends use sign language to communicate, and Joey secretly begins to learn to sign. Spending time with Charlie and Sukari, Joey has never been happier. She even starts making friends at school for the first time. But as Joey's world blooms with possibilities, Charlie's and Sukari's choices begin to narrow―until Sukari's very survival is in doubt.

Hearts of Stone

by: Kathleen Ernst
Hearts of Stone
Orphaned when her father dies fighting for the Union and her mother expires from exhaustion, and also estranged from their Confederate neighbors, fifteen-year-old Hannah struggles to find a way for her family to survive during the Civil War in Tennessee.

Freedom Walkers

by: Russell Freedman
release date: Nov 04, 2008
Freedom Walkers
Covers the events surrounding and including the Montgomery bus boycott, the end of segregation on buses.

Freedom Ship

by: Doreen Rappaport
release date: Oct 02, 2006
Freedom Ship
Samual and his family are born slaves.  Every day they look beyond the harbor filled with Confederate ships, to the Atlantic Ocean, where the Union ships are--and potentially, their freedom.  If only they could get to those ships somehow....Then, on May13, 1862, Samuel and his family risk it all to be free.
 
Based on a true story, Doreen Rappaport weaves a riveting tale of a boy and his family aboard the gunboat Planter. Captained by Robert Smalls and loaded with fellow slaves, the ship flees to the Union fleet to gain freedom from slavery and deliver much-needed ammunition to the Union Navy.  Rappaport's suspenseful account, illustrated with the moody paintings of Curtis James, creates a vivid and relatable picture of this little-known tale of the civil war.

Dear Miss Breed

by: Joanne Oppenheim
release date: Feb 01, 2006
Dear Miss Breed
A chronicle of the incredible correspondence between California librarian Clara Breed and young Japanese American internees during World War II.

In the early 1940's, Clara Breed was the children's librarian at the San Diego Public Library. But she was also friend to dozens of Japanese American children and teens when war broke out in December of 1941. The story of what happened to these American citizens is movingly told through letters that her young friends wrote to Miss Breed during their internment. This remarkable librarian and humanitarian served as a lifeline to these imprisoned young people, and was brave enough to speak out against a shameful chapter in American history.

Dark Water Rising

by: Marian Hale
release date: Oct 12, 2010
Dark Water Rising
This is a fascinating and very descriptive account of the tragic 1900 storm that took so many lives in Galveston, Texas. Though the book is fiction, it gives what is likely a very realistic account of the event.
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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

by: John Boyne
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne.
Categories: Fiction / Historical, Fiction / Holocaust

Blood on the River

by: Elisa Carbone
Blood on the River
Twelve-year-old Samuel Collier is a lowly commoner on the streets of London. So when he becomes the page of Captain John Smith and boards the Susan Constant, bound for the New World, he can't believe his good fortune. He's heard that gold washes ashore with every tide. But beginning with the stormy journey and his first contact with the native people, he realizes that the New World is nothing like he imagined. The lush Virginia shore where they establish the colony of James Town is both beautiful and forbidding, and it's hard to know who's a friend or foe. As he learns the language of the Algonquian Indians and observes Captain Smith's wise diplomacy, Samuel begins to see that he can be whomever he wants to be in this new land.
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