The Wednesday Wars, Gary D. Schmidt. The year is 1967 and the Viet Nam war is full on. Holling Hoodhood, a seventh grader in Long Island must spend Wednesday afternoons with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, because half his class attends temple and the other half attends Catechism and being Presbyterian, Holling attends neither. He is convinced Mrs. Baker does not like him because she forces him to read Shakespeare plays. One Wednesday afternoon, hoping to clean the erasers like he normally does, Mrs. Baker asks him to clean Sycorex and Caliban's cages (the two white rats that her husband gave her, who is now stationed in Viet Nam) instead. Things don't go smoothly and the two rodents end up loose and make their way into the ceiling. As Holling reads the works of Shakespeare, he finds himself enjoying his words, yet isn't too excited to be performing in the holiday Shakespeare extravaganza that Mr. Goldman, the baker, bribes him into. He must wear bright yellow tights with white tail feathers, causing him to be the "butt" of many jokes and pranks. As luck would have it, the same night as his performance, Yankee player, Mickey Mantle is scheduled to sign autographs at the Baker Sporting Emporium. At the end of his performance, Holling gets locked out of his dressing room and his dad fails to show up as planned to rush him to the Emporium for an autograph. He grabs a bus, makes it in time, only to have Mantle not sign for him because of his outlandish yellow tights. Days later, Mrs. Baker has a sweet surprise for him that he won't soon forget. 

The story progresses through the months of the 1967-68 school year when Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, as is Bobby Kennedy, his older sister's idol. We worry about Mrs. Baker's husband, MIA in Viet Nam, and others that have lost loved ones in the war. We delight in the budding romance of Holling with Meryl Lee, whose father is also an architect, like Holling's father. Tension brews when Meryl's father, in a bidding competition with Holling's father for designing the new middle school, presents the identical floor plans to the school board as Holling's father was going to present. This Newbery Honor book is a delightful read that will not disappoint. Be sure to catch up with some of the same characters in Okay For Now by the same author.

Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal, Margarita Engle. Told in verse, this important story will shed light on the many Caribbean islanders that built the ever important Panama Canal in the early 1900s. Told in alternating voices between Mateo from Cuba, Henry from Jamaica, the young, beautiful, Native Anita, and the rain forest itself, we learn the perils of how this canal came to be. Immigrants earned silver coins for their backbreaking work, while the locals were paid in gold. The harsh working conditions, unfair treatment and blistering hours wake us up to the realities of how the two Americas were joined together.

This is a beautifully written book and important to understand an untold part of our history.

Raymie Nightingale, Kate DeCamillo. Raymie plans to enter the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition, win, and get her picture in the newspaper so her father will leave the dental hygienist he ran away with and come home. She decides to learn baton twirling from Ida Nee, along with Louisiana Elefante, who also plans to win the contest and Beverly Tapinski, who plans to sabotage the contest. Along with baton twirling, Raymie needs to do some good deeds, so she decides to go to the Golden Glen nursing home and read to the patients. She chooses to read A Bright and Shining Path: The Life of Florence NIghtingale, a favorite book given to her by one of her teachers. When Alice, the screamer, frightens Raymie, she accidentally leaves the book under the bed. She convinces Beverly, not afraid of anything, to go back with her to retrieve it.e three girls arrive for baton twirling lessons, only to find Ida Nee not there. Beverly, the quick lock picker, steals them into her house, where they find her snoring away to country music, hugging her baton. Beverly sneakily swipes it from her hands and they continue on to The Very Friendly Animal Shelter to get Archie, Louisiana's lost cat, only to be told they don't have him. On their way back home, they see police outside Ida's house, who reported the theft of her beloved baton.

The girls become the Three Rancheroos and Raymie soon finds out how very much she is like Florence Nightingale, the heroic savior of sad souls, including her own.

Wake Up Missing, Kate Messner. Cat had a concussion, leaving her with headaches and dizziness. When her parents come across a scientific experiment that she can be a part of, they jump at it. She is flown to a remote region to begin the trial with two doctors: Dr. Ames and Dr. Gunther. Once there, she meets up with other kids there for the same reason. Phase one gives her instant relief, which includes oxygenation, walking on a treadmill to re-calibrate her system and new medicines. Early in her stay, she ventures out of her room only to overhear a conversation between the two doctors that leaves her suspicious and uncomfortable. One of the other girls, Sarah, already has her suspicions because the boy she liked, Trent, is changing and not for the better. Cat begins to agree with her. Her fears are confirmed by Molly, the woman that transported the kids by boat to the island, so they plan to meet up with her that night and escape back to the mainland. When she doesn't show up, Dr. Ames finds them and gets suspicious and stays outside Cat's room all night. The next morning, the kids are told the trial is over and that all parents have been called to come and pick them up.

The truth is that the doctors aren't planning on sending them home but somewhere else to further their experiment. Their plan it to take DNA from famous dead scientists, like Albert Einstein, Marie Curry and Robert Oppenheimer, to recreate their genius. The kids finally find a way to escape but not before Cat insists on sneaking into Dr. Ames' office to grab his computer. While traveling through the swamps, they must hide from Ames and his henchmen. They soon learn why Molly didn't meet them that night.

Readers will be on the edge of their seat as they traverse swampy terrain where alligators roam, escaping men with guns and a mad doctor on the loose.

Pax, Sara Pennypacker. Peter, a young boy and Pax, his pet fox are inseparable. Peter's mother died on her way to the grocery store and his unfeeling father must leave for war, meaning Peter must go to live with his grandfather. On their way, they stop by the edge of a woods to drop Pax off, who has never had to fend for himself. Realizing he made a terrible mistake, Peter runs away from his grandfather's to go back to hopefully find Pax in the same spot. He trips. He breaks his leg. He wakes up in the home of Vola, a reclusive woman who has her own demons to work through. She insists Peter stay with her so his leg can be casted and healed. Despite his protests, he stays; however, itching to leave and make his way back to Pax. She gives him three conditions and then she will let him go. When he senses he must leave, she says she can take him into town to catch a bus that will take him two-thirds of the way there. He consents; however, he has his own three conditions for her.

Told in alternate chapters by Peter and Pax. the reader follows the two as they make their way through war torn lands, coyote attacks and uncertain futures, back to one another. This is an emotional story sure to tug at the heartstrings as they realize they may not be able to go back to the way things once were.

The Boy on the Wooden Box, Leon Leyson. This is a memoir written by a man that survived the Holocaust due to Oskar Schindler, the very man renowned for saving hundreds of Jews during WWII. Leon and his family moved from rural Narewka, Poland to the bigger city of Krakow when his father got a new job. When the Nazis conquered Poland, Leon, his parents, three brothers and sister were taken away by train to live in the ghetto behind the barbed wire fence. From there, they were transported to work camps where their hope was tested over and over. Beatings, starvation, sickness, fatigue and separation were a constant. Gas chambers, massacres, massive graves were all around. Sunken eyes, caved in bodies, hollow souls. Leon remembers the day his older brother Tsalig was taken away by train and never seen again.

Leon's father, good with locks, happened to impress a Nazi soldier who allowed him to stay in his employ. It was none other than Schindler himself.  Despite the horror of the camps, the family had an angel looking out for them. Little did they realize how much Schindler himself was going out on a limb to protect his Jewish employees.

When the allies came to Poland, capturing the German soldiers and releasing the Jews, Leon, his parents, one brother and his sister lived to tell their stories. Leon followed his parents to Los Angeles where he closed himself off from his past and made a new life. His experiences remained silent, until others encouraged him to tell the world his story. Here it is. Read it. Be moved. Never forget.

The War that Saved My Life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Young Ada, living in England at the start of WWII, has never left the rat-and-roach-infested apartment where she lives with her younger brother, Jamie and her Mam. Ada has a club foot and her Mam deems it too embarrassing to let her outside. Her only connection with the world is looking out a window and waving. She gets around by crawling, until she forces herself up on her feet, painfully learning to walk. One night, when all the children are leaving on trains for the countryside, Ada and her brother sneak out, joining the evacuation. Upon arriving to the outskirts of England, when all the children are provided a home, Ada and Jamie are forced upon Susan, the local spinster, who doesn't want them either. However, through Ada's nightmares and Jamie's bed wetting, Susan warms to them, despite their resistance. She encourages Ada to go outside, getting her a pair of crutches to get around. Butter, the pony, becomes her first friend, whom she learns to ride like the little girl she saw from the train window. Wanting to get Ada the surgery she needs to correct her foot, Susan consistently sends letters to Mam asking for permission, only to be met with silence. Despite feelings of unworthiness, Susan is persistent and shows Ada she is smart, capable and lovable. Ada makes friends, Jamie goes to school and life takes on a routine until the air raid sirens go off, forcing them to below ground shelters. Susan is encouraged to send them further away, but she holds tight, maintaining they will stay together.

One day, on her trek to help Fred with the horses, she notices an unusual sighting: a man rowing ashore, burying something in the ground and walking toward the road. Told that any suspicious behavior should be reported to the authorities, she races to the police station, only to be met with chuckles. Standing strong and waiting to tell someone that will listen, they soon find out that the man was, indeed, a spy.

As war is getting closer and closer, Ada and Jamie arrive home one afternoon to find Mam standing outside the house. She forces them to go home with her and there is nothing Susan can do, but try to give Jamie his cherished copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. The stench, the rats, the lack of food, the hatred all come rushing back to them both. With Mam having taken Ada's shoes and crutches and air raid sirens going off, they hold each other tight, wanting to go "home."

This is beautiful and I couldn't stop reading it. The reader will be right next to Ada as she continues to triumph over the hand life dealt her. She learns to love and accept and believe and hang on. She is a character with grit and fortitude and fingernails to hang on. Read it and be moved.