Young Adult

In 1911, fourteen year-old Joan Skraggs finds herself trapped at home on a run-down farm, working tirelessly for her cruel father. He pulls her from school and requires her, “an ox of a girl” and “ugly” in his estimation, to mend, …

In the fall of 2011, an eighth-grade student of mine wrote a beautiful letter to Ruta Sepetys, the author of Between Shades of Gray, detailing what she’d gleaned from Sepetys’ first novel  – the power of perseverance, integrity, and love. Since then, …

The Book Thief is one of those books that everyone I knew was raving about five years ago, yet I somehow never managed to sit down and read it. I have been drawn to books about the Holocaust since I …