September/October 2003
— Bloody Jack by L. A. Meyer; Harcourt, Inc.: New York, 2002; $17 Sometime in your life you most likely will experience the thrill of getting involved with something and loving...
— A Cuban immigrant dominates the Little League World Series with perfect games until guilt over lying about his age forces him to confess, sacrificing his baseball dreams.
— While watering tomato plants, a boy watches water flood an ant colony and desperately tries to save drowning ants, reflecting on empathy and the value of small lives.
— A foster girl discovers a mermaid near her temporary home on an island, reads a diary from 1820 about the same creature, and chooses to join the underwater world.
— A lonely girl who volunteers at an animal shelter discovers that music calms an aggressive dog no one else can handle, leading to friendship and her first pet.
— A boy showing off in an old boat gets swept downriver at night, then ingeniously lassos a giant snapping turtle to pull him to shore at dawn.
— Girl of Kosovo by Alice Mead; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2001; $16 When people thought the Holocaust was over, it wasn’t. For the Jews it may have been...
— While searching for a book, a girl finds her sister's forgotten box of seashells, triggering a memory of an Easter trip where she lost a found conch shell but gained...
— A girl who stopped speaking Spanish to avoid classmates' mockery finds solace in the woods and resolves to reclaim her heritage language.