This matches up extremely well with Lost Boy, Lost Girl to compare fiction and nonfiction about the Second Sudanese Civil War. While Linda Sue Park says this is fiction, she does mention how closely she based it on the real Salva Dut’s life. Like in Lost Boy, Lost Girl, the depiction of human perseverance in spite of horrible circumstances is amazing.

The really cool part about Long Walk is that it has an interwoven story from 2009 with an update on how southern Sudan is doing. What I love is that Salva Dut, just like John Bul Dau, hasn’t just enjoyed his time in the United States; he has gone on to found Water for South Sudan, an organization to install wells for clean water. Go check them out.

I am convinced that Ken Oppel is required by contract to have at least one weird creature in his books. We’ve had flying cats, lonely bats, and maybe even mutated rats (that last one I may be wrong on, but it rhymes, so I’m keeping it).

In This Dark Endeavor, though, the creatures are real. Some are rare, but they still exist. That’s what I love most about the book. Yes, it’s a prequel to Frankenstein and it’s all about alchemy, but the chemistry and the biology stay pretty realistic.

Victor Frankenstein, creator of the famous monster, is the protagonist and the narrator. What is interesting is that Victor is deeply brooding – which, little known fact, is also a requirement by contract for YA characters. Oppel does a good job setting up the man who will try to conquer death itself through science. I guess that’s part of the trend of the “when they were young” books that are coming out; we get to see the origins of well-known characters.
The downside of that trend, though, is that those books sometimes rely too heavily on prior knowledge from the original source. While I benefited from having read the original Frankenstein, students that have read only This Dark Endeavor were still able to understand and appreciate what was going on. In fact, some went on to check out the original.

Having a semi-villain for a protagonist makes for an interesting romance. Normally, you cheer for the hero to win their love, but this time he’s trying to steal from his brother, we know he’s making things worse, and can’t quite endorse what he’s doing. It’s definitely not your normally love story.

Oppel succeeds in making the Frankensteins seem like a real family from history and the characters are the backbone of the story. Students who like adventure stories and won’t be daunted by an 18th-century setting will enjoy it.

The book explores Deaf culture (lower case “d” is the condition, upper case is the culture) in two different eras. One thing I never really thought about before was that, during the silent movie era, both hearing and nonhearing audiences could enjoy the movie just the same. Once theaters added “talkies”, a whole people group was left out.

Side note: did you know that some movies offer captioning? Check out http://www.captionfish.com/ to search for captioned movie showings in your area.

The book moves quickly, although it feels like there is more text in Wonderstruck than Hugo. I also missed the photos from movies that Hugo had. We do get to meet Lillian Mayhew, an actress from the 1920s that went through personal scandals in Hollywood. We also learn about some of the inner workings of museums around New York.

It’s one to check out. I finished it within a 24-hour period. I really enjoyed seeing a Star Wars poster in the background of one of the drawings, since the book takes place the summer of 1977. One thing you’ll have to look for when you read it: all of the references to E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Even though I knew ahead of time that the little sister would be left behind (that’s in the cover synopsis, so I’m not ruining much), it’s how Senzai tells it that makes it emotionally jarring. It’s third-person perspective limited to Fadi’s viewpoint. A middle schooler is not as naive as an elementary school student, but still doesn’t know all of the details of what danger awaits his family.

Fadi is able to make it to the United States and struggle with the traditional middle grade conflict of dealing with bullies. What sets this apart in Shooting Kabul, though, is that Senzai shows how bullying increased after the World Trade Center attacks. The types of slurs the bullies use are the exact same I heard uttered in 2001. Only once did the dialogue seem a little far-fetched: a janitor yells, “You ruffians!” It took a serious scene, where Fadi is alone and jumped by bullies, and made me laugh, which is not the reaction I wanted.

The photography aspect of the story is interesting. You can tell that either Senzai is a photographer or has done her research. Fadi’s father gives advice on how to take better photos that readers could apply to their own photos immediately.

Like I said at the start, Shooting Kabul is a simple story. There are no car chases, no life-threatening illnesses, and the controlling government is not the main antagonist. The book does have realistic interactions between Fadi and his family. Fadi’s motivation, winning a photo contest to travel across the world to find his sister, runs throughout the entirety of the story and never lets us forget just why we like Fadi.

This is a sorta sequel to Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. Jeffrey, the younger brother from the first book, is now the main character. He is in remission and has been labeled a cancer survivor. Even though he’s a survivor, cancer could still come back and that’s a fear Jeffrey and his family deal with each day. He makes friends in elementary school with a boy named Tad who also survived cancer. This is part of what sets After Ever After apart from other books that deal with cancer.

The two major players in the book deal with cancer through humor but have very different attitudes towards others. Tad is extremely defensive to the point of being downright mean to everyone in the school. Jeffrey is constantly coaching him on how to be nicer while Tad pushes Jeffrey to never give up.

Cancer is the big force of the book, yet standardized testing is the looming conflict. Jeffrey is doing better in Math, but his efforts could be meaningless if he doesn’t pass the state test and is held back. Methotrexate treatments have made it tough for Jeffrey to stay focused for extended periods of time. The fact that his girlfriend could go on to high school, and high school boys, without him adds to the distraction.

None of this sounds funny, right? What balances the book is a sarcastic narrator. Sonnenblick took a risk making his main character so flippant about life-threatening decisions. It reads as if Jeffrey has truly endured and learned what to take serious and what is out of his control.

Like how Okay for Now made me want to go back and read Wednesday Wars, After Ever After makes me want to read Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. This is a must-have addition to any library.

Here’s another reminder of HopeKids, an organization that helps families with life-threatening illnesses. Good friends of mine run one of the branches. It’s definitely worth checking out.

The book starts with Caitlin staring at her brother’s unfinished Eagle Scout project. Since the story’s from her perspective, I was a little lost as to what was going on. The second chapter came quickly and the audience is able to see Caitlin at a funeral for her brother. She’s trying desperately to figure out what’s going on, why people are saying the things they do, and why her brother is dead.

The Eagle Scout project represents Closure (she capitalizes it because it’s so important) and continuing with life despite an event that hurts an entire community. Seeing it through Caitlin’s eyes is really interesting because she does not understand empathy. As she learns how to feel what others are feeling, we as an audience learn more about what happened to her older brother.

It’s a beautifully simple book that had me growing in empathy alongside Caitlin. The short length of the book helps – too much longer would be too much of a good thing (or too emotionally exhausting, depending on your perspective). I’m excited to booktalk this to students. I don’t think the cover sells the book at all, but it definitely deserves a read.

Okay for Now does not deal with race issues, but it reminds me of the same style as To Kill a Mockingbird in that the second half of the book tackles some pretty difficult issues.

Okay for Now is set in the late 1960′s like Wednesday Wars. We see the town through Doug Swieteck’s eyes as his family moves because his dad switches jobs. Doug runs into trouble at school and the first part of the book is him dealing with bullying, both by students and staff. In real life, Schmidt tested poorly and was tracked into a lower group at school. He could have stayed in that lower group, but a teacher mentored him and helped him with his academics, especially reading. It makes sense, then, that he draws on this experience when Doug is taken in by a teacher who coaches him in reading.

The second half of the book, though, involves Doug’s older brother coming back from Vietnam. There are some huge surprises there, though, so I don’t to give away too many spoilers. The book has a plot, yet most of the fun is hanging out with the characters. They are very believable and I feel like I know them. It may be obvious for those that know me, but I attached to the awesome librarian who is the first friendly interaction Doug has in town. The guy teaches Doug how to draw from Audobon’s Birds of America. The town is tearing out pages from this rare book and selling them to keep the town running. Doug is on a mission to regain the pages in a great metaphor of his own journey to completeness.

I do have have one complaint about the book, but it is a semi-spoiler, so I will put this picture of a paper bag face here so those that don’t want to continue on won’t accidentally read my complaint.

*SPOILER*
My complaint? The ending. For being a book that delves into spousal abuse, child abuse, veteran trauma, and school corruption, the book resolved way too quickly. Doug’s dad says he’s sorry and then everything’s cool. We just move on, which is really the only option we have, but it seems like a switch was flipped and then everyone decided to get along with each other.

Yes, Schmidt set up some of the changes, but I expected some things to be left unresolved. To my recollection, everything is wrapped up with a nice bow on top. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book; it’s just an observation about style. It’s like how I complain when not enough characters die in a story. The English teacher part of my brain has something wrong with it. Hamlet much?

Love That Dog is great. It’s a simple story about a boy writing poems in class and his teacher’s reactions. We have to infer her reactions because we’re only getting one side of the story.

The entire book is in verse, which helps make it a quick read. What I especially loved, though, is the inclusion of eight other poems from published authors. The main character makes commentary on each one. My favorite?

…who wrote about
those snowy woods
and the miles to go
before he sleeps –
well!

I think Mr. Robert Frost
has a little
too
much
time
on his
hands.

So great. I sometimes see in YA fiction references to other YA works. Avi’s reference to The Outsiders in Nothing but the Truth is a prime example of this. In Love That Dog, the main character reads a poem from Walter Dean Myers. He loves it so much that he writes to Walter Dean Myers to see if he can visit their school. I think I’m just as much of a fanboy as the fictional protagonist and would love for Myers to visit our junior high. (Just like in the book, we have a clean school full of mostly nice kids.)

Love That Dog is a little bit older (it was published in 2001), but if you have it on the shelf and haven’t read it yet, it’s a definite must.

The catch is that those details are mainly from the Franks’s perspective. When I taught it in my 8th grade Language Arts class, my students routinely didn’t like the van Daans (the van Pels in real life). They thought that Hermann van Pels was a villain that should be kicked out on the street, thrown to the mercy (or lack thereof) of the Gestapo.That right there illustrates that we see the characters of the play as merely characters and not real people. (That assumption is on a spectrum of maturity and worldview.)

Annexed is from Peter van Pels’s point of view. Anne is seen as annoying at first and Hermann is a caring, sacrificing father. Many times Peter will say to Anne, “Don’t put this in your diary” to account for why Anne didn’t record it. That gives Dogar some liberty with the dialogue, but one of my complaints is the addition of Liese, a made-up girlfriend for Peter that the author felt was needed to represent the loss Jews felt. It’s realistic to have a girlfriend be called-up, but bugged me that she couldn’t demonstrate the call-ups in another way.

What I was thankful for was that the tension between Margot and Anne, which one Peter would fall in love with, didn’t sink to an Edward/Jacob, Gale/Peeta cliche. The love grows through their times sneaking off to the only places not occupied by the other six people in the Annex and it is helpful to think through what Peter would be feeling. It’s an abstraction and not always fact, but it does add depth to the situation.

The book is told through flashback as Peter is in the sick bay at Mauthausen. From time to time, the narrative breaks to have italicized thoughts from Peter drifting in and out of consciousness.

It’s almost like the book is two books. Up to the point when they are discovered (that shouldn’t be a spoiler), it’s all stuff I knew. (I taught the play at least 15 times and I know there are others who have done it even more than that.) It is a novel, so you expect tension and conflict, but it’s pretty predictable. Where the book did grab me, though, was right when the Gestapo is taking the families to the concentration camps. That’s where Dogar’s research really shines through and makes for an engaging read.

This week we had a World War II veteran speak and his experience liberating Dachau made Peter and Otto’s stay at Mauthausen very relevant.

Like I said at the start, I applaud Sharon Dogar for tackling such a big project. Not only is it a story we know, but it’s of a subject matter that requires precision in writing and respect for the dead. If Annexed ended at the Annex, it would have been a so-so novel. Shining light on the horror of the death camps turned it into a book that I will remember.