Author: Sonya VanderVeen Feddema

Set in present-day England, Home Ground is part of a series of soccer stories which include pertinent facts for middle school readers. This novella relates the story of a losing soccer team. One of the players, Jordan, is arrogant and refuses to be a team player. He insists that the team’s losses are everyone else’s fault, including Sam’s, one of his teammates.

Twelve-year-old Hanako knows what it’s like to be rejected. She’s already spent four years as a prisoner, forced along with her family and thousands of other Japanese-Americans into internment camps by the United States’ government order after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Now, though World War II has ended, the American government is coercing thousands of Japanese-Americans to renounce their citizenship, and return to Japan, a country many have never been to. Hanako, her younger brother, and her parents are part of the returning throng.

Narrated in Swahili and English, this vividly illustrated children’s picture book set in Tanzania relates the story of Ngama, a boy too old to be considered a child and too young to be deemed a man. One day a car arrives in Ngama’s village – a rare occurrence – and he wonders who the visitor is. His father, the chief of their clan, tells him that the country’s leader visited the village to ask the clansmen to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa, and light a candle at the summit to mark Tanzania’s independence.

Nitty Luce has known only rejection, criticism and hunger in the ten years she’s lived at the Grimsgate Orphanage. Though she fears the headmistress’s threats of what will happen to orphans who run away, one day she ventures far from the despicable home into the nearby town and encounters a grim sight. A crowd gathering by the travelling Gusto and Gallant Circus is anticipating the hanging of an elephant, the Great Magnolious, who is accused of killing his trainer.

In the spring of 1944, during the holocaust’s final phase, 15-year-old Max Eisen and his family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from their home in the wartime boundaries of Hungary. Approximately 800,000 other Jews from that area met a similar fate. Of the 60 members of Max’s extended family, only three survived.

A young girl lives in a little house by a train track in the middle of a vast prairie. Each morning, as the train whizzes past, the girl waves at the engineer and he waves back. Though the train engineer comes and goes, “his wave and her wave together made a home in her heart.” The girl wonders about the engineer: Where does he come from and where is he going? Does he like his uniform and engineer’s cap? And she wonders if she might go away some day, too.

When God created the world in all its grandeur and variety, he also made animals of every kind and declared his creation “good!” In this vividly illustrated picture book using digitally coloured ink drawings, author Daniel Kirk celebrates creatures of the sea, earth, and air.

In this graphic novel for young adults, author and artist Jarrett J. Krosoczka relates the true story of his childhood and teen years. The son of an absent father and a mother addicted to heroin, Jarrett experienced neglect and witnessed numerous traumatic scenes.

In this compelling book for young adults (and adults, I might add), author and photographer Susan Kuklin interviewed nine young adults who came out of the shadows to talk about their lives as undocumented people living in the United States.

In this third book of the On Bird Hill and Beyond series, a boy walks along the beautiful shoreline in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When he notices a starfish marooned on the beach, he goes to retrieve it; but “as I bent down by wave and spray, / A gull flew down, snatched star away.”

According to author Nancy Pearcey, “human life and sexuality have become the watershed moral issues of our age.” In this astute analysis of these moral issues, Pearcey – co-author with Chuck Colson of How Now Shall We Live? – looks beyond the latest media reports to the “real action” below the surface of things.