A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park is a non-fiction book about a young girl named Nya who walks eight hours every day to get water for her family in 2008, and about a boy named Salva who walks away from his family and the only home he has ever known to stay safe from the war in 1985. In Afric...
This is a Christmas book, but the Christ child is only featured as a reference at the end of the book. This story is actually about a boy learning to collect myrrh by gathering resin from trees. I love the history and culture and people in the book, the simple tale and how it teaches so much with...
tI’m going to start off by saying Archer’s Quest by Linda Sue Park was one peculiar adventure. The thought that its tale lasted only a day is quite stunning! There were only four major settings, and two main characters which was awesome for me because some books just have too much to keep track o...
Julia Song and her friend Patrick want to team up to win a blue ribbon at the state fair, but they can't agree on the perfect project. ThenJulia's mother suggests they raise silkworms as she did years ago in Korea. The optimistic twosome quickly realizes that raising silkworms is a lot tougher th...
Eyes tap-dance as Linda Sue Park explains the spur-of-the-moment decision to give her Newbery medal for A Single Shard to her dad at the ALA awards ceremony in 2002. The auditorium went from noisy to dead silent as I walked to the edge of the stage to hand Dad the medal. "I'm thinking to myself,...
Like Seesaw Girl, this book deals with choices in life. Some choices we can choose: the choice of occupation, the choice of attitude, the choice of following traditions. Some choices we cannot choose: choice of being a boy or girl, the choice of siblings, or the choice of birth order. Young-sup i...
This rousing novel is a perfect mash-up of real historical events and fiction. I started reading When My Name Was Keoko solely because I had to. However, I finished it because I genuinely wanted to. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to end and would not mind reading it again sometime in t...
Impatient with the constraints put on her as an aristocratic girl living in 17th-century Korea, 12-year-old Jade Blossom determines to see beyond her small world. Jade Blossom can never go beyond her family's inner court. All girls from good Korean families must learn to sew, do laundry, and wor...
He whipped the huge knife off the tray and hurled it at Atticus; in the next split second, the knife was followed by the skewer. Dr. Siffright reacted so quickly that it seemed like Amy’s scream was still reverberating. She threw her six-foot-plus frame in front of Atticus...
New teacher, different kids in her class, the feeling of being a year older, which was somehow a lot stronger when she went into a new grade than it was on her birthday. She had a new white blouse with a darling round collar. And after weeks of begging, she had finally persuaded Mom to cut bangs ...
It wasn’t the boys, they were still with her, but Amy knew that her instincts had been right: It was someone who knew they’d be here, on their way to Yale. . . . Dodging between the cars as fast as she could, Amy felt bewilderment mixed with fear. This is crazy! Vesper One...
To all the kids around the world who cannot read! —I.B. Clarion Books a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003 Text copyright © 2007 by Linda Sue Park Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Istvan Banyai The illustrations were executed digitally. The text was set in...
Water had to be flowing constantly into the borehole to keep the drill running smoothly. The crew drove to the pond and back several times a day. The pond water was piped into what looked like a giant plastic bag—a bag big enough to fill the entire bed of the truck. The bag sprang a leak. The lea...