“It was the summer of 1988, / When basketball gave me wings / and I had to learn / how to rebound,” says 12-year-old Charlie Bell. Though he dreams of heroics on the court, truth is, he’s not that good and avoids playing. His father just died, and he’s become closed off and consumed by grief. Frustrated, Charlie’s mother sends him off to his grandparents’ home for the summer. Charlie doesn’t want to go, feeling that “soaring above / the sorrow and grief / seemed impossible.” But because he’s only 12 years old, Charlie doesn’t understand that he’s not the only one suffering a loss. Charlie lost a father, but his mother lost a husband, and his grandparents lost a son.

This novel-in-verse, the prequel to the Newbery Medal-winning The Crossover (2014), includes comic-style illustrations by Dawud Anyabwile that portray Charlie’s hoop dreams, Granddaddy’s pithy reflections on life and plenty of homespun philosophy drawn from basketball. As Charlie begins to open up to the world and his place in it, he rebounds with the love and support of his family and friends. Charlie finds many things over the course of the summer—a restored sense of joy, a new sense of normal and his game.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fresh from winning the 2018 Newbery Medal for her previous novel, Hello, Universe, Erin Entrada Kelly brings readers another beautifully written story of hard-won friendship. Charlotte Lockard and Ben Boxer may live hundreds of miles apart—she’s in Philadelphia, he’s in Louisiana—but they have plenty in common. Both are passionate about their interests. Both excel at online Scrabble (which is how they met). Both are having a hard time navigating their first year of middle school, and they’re experiencing family crises. And even though they don’t know it, both Charlotte and Ben are each other’s only real friend.

Charlotte is busy navigating shifting allegiances at school and her father’s illness at home. Meanwhile, Ben launches a student council campaign, in part to distract himself from his parents’ divorce. When Charlotte and Ben chat during their Scrabble games, they inevitably overstate their happiness and understate their loneliness—but will their long-distance friendship give them the courage to be more authentic, both online and in real life?

Kelly’s novel takes on some challenging topics, from divorce to aging parents to bullying. Both Charlotte and Ben are flawed—they misrepresent themselves and are sometimes unkind—but these flaws are also what make their stories feel honest and real. For the kids who read this story, Charlotte’s and Ben’s stumbles will make their journey toward happiness so much more satisfying.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Twelve-year-old Candice is spending the summer at her late grandmother’s old cottage in Lambert, South Carolina, while her Atlanta home is being renovated. Her parents’ divorce, while amicable, has left Candice feeling adrift. It can be lonely to resettle in a new town, even temporarily. But then Candice meets Brandon, a shy, self-proclaimed book nerd like herself. While rummaging through the attic, the two unearth an old letter from the city’s mysterious benefactor that contains clues to a treasure hunt. The prize is a substantial sum of money. Candice is eager to solve the mystery, not just to alleviate her boredom but also to vindicate her grandmother—Lambert’s first African-American city manager—who was forced out of her job when she tried to solve this very puzzle. Armed with ingenuity and a love of reading, Candice and Brandon bike throughout town, interviewing longtime residents and combing through the town’s archives.

With a nod to The Westing Game, Varian Johnson has penned a smart mystery that deftly explores the history of racial segregation in the South, modern-day discrimination, friendship, love and bullying. Interspersed throughout the novel are the historical narratives of those at the center of the puzzle. Their unique voices and compelling backstories enrich the plot and provide context for the mystery. Beautifully written, this complex story will captivate an adult audience as well.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tiffany Parks’ debut middle grade novel will create a frisson of excitement in readers with its promise of a secret passageway to a hidden room, a mysterious stranger and a long-lost diary. Even more irresistible is Midnight in the Piazza’s setting: Rome.

When 13-year-old Beatrice’s father decides to take a professorship in Rome, Beatrice is dismayed even though she loves history. However, the Eternal City exerts its magic on even the most reluctant resident, and Beatrice is soon smitten with its charms, including the wonderful Fountain of Turtles in the square outside her window.

When Beatrice hears of the legend and mystery surrounding the fountain, she is determined to separate fact from fiction. Stumbling upon the Duchess Mattei’s diary from the 1500s only creates more complications for solving the local lore. However, not all mysteries are ancient. While looking out her window one night, Beatrice sees someone tampering with the fountain. Since she doesn’t speak Italian, she finds an ally in a bilingual local boy. However, his behavior becomes suspect, and Beatrice begins to think she made a mistake in telling him of her investigation and the discovery of the diary.

Midnight in the Piazza is a pleasurable escapade in the vein of the Nancy Drew series. Beatrice is a clever sleuth, and the Roman landmarks that appear in this book are an added bonus, allowing readers to vicariously experience and learn about some of the greatest architectural treasures in the world.

Melba Pattillo Beals follows up her award-winning adult memoir, Warriors Don’t Cry, with a potent middle grade read that tells the extraordinary story of her childhood as a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who first crossed the color barrier to integrate Central High School in 1957. A precocious child, Beals listened to the political conversations around her and understood far more than the adults anticipate. As a result of these conversations and the social injustices she and her family experience, she constantly questioned the rules of the Jim Crow South: the differences in drinking fountains, not being provided dressing rooms to try on clothing, and waiting for hours to pay for her purchases because white customers are allowed ahead of her.

Fear was also ever-present in her life. When the Ku Klux Klan rides through her neighborhood, attacking or taking people, she recalls feeling fear, but she also experienced everyday fears such as saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way. At first, Beals felt safe in her house, but that fragile illusion soon crumbled. Church was the only safe harbor—until the KKK took the sanctity of that place away from her, too. After this horrifying event, Beals turned to her books and became an excellent student. Propelled by her grandmother’s advice that sometimes you have to go where you’re not wanted, Beals is accepted into the first integrated class at Central High School in Little Rock.

Beals includes a stirring epilogue summarizing that year and critical years afterward to help young readers put her story into the context of the larger civil rights movement. March Forward, Girl is sure to inspire young people to take action against injustices in their world.

A 17th-century German girl with a passion for caterpillars and butterflies may seem like an obscure topic for a children’s book, yet Newbery Honor winner Joyce Sidman has painted a stunningly beautiful and accessible portrait of the relatively unknown scientific illustrator and ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian.

Merian was born to a family of printers, but life wasn’t a world of opportunity for a young girl in her day. Still, she managed to absorb her father’s business knowledge and paired it with her passion for nature and drawing. She studied caterpillars and butterflies incessantly, with a fervor many thought odd. Seeking to understand each insect’s life cycle, she sketched and recorded their stages of development and the plants they ate. Her passion eventually took her to the Dutch colony of Surinam, where her observations led to her grandest accomplishment: publishing her own volume on the insects of the South American country.

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science is filled with Merian’s stunningly detailed and colorful botanical drawings created more than 300 years ago. Sidman’s arrangement of the story and its chapter titles (as well as one of Sidman’s original poetic stanzas) smartly draw a parallel between Merian’s growth as an artist and the stages of a butterfly’s life.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“When people on television talk about walls and documents, I never thought they were talking about my mom,” muses Jason Riazi, the 12-year-old narrator of Nadia Hashimi’s action-packed The Sky at Our Feet. Jason always knew his mother grew up in Iran, but he had no idea that she was an illegal immigrant until he watches immigration officials take her away.

Jason never met his father, an Afghan translator who was murdered while awaiting his American visa. Jason’s mom was already studying in America when Jason was born prematurely, but after her husband’s death, she was too frightened to apply for asylum.

After his mother disappears, Jason goes on the run, leaving his New Jersey home to seek help from his mother’s best friend in New York City. There, he meets an epileptic girl who joins him for an exciting avalanche of events and coincidences. As unbelievable as these circumstances may be, young readers will be swept up in Jason’s likable, sincere narration.

Hashimi’s unusual, riveting thriller provides a thoughtful look at the issues facing two tweens who feel like outsiders.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.