National Network for Equitable Library Service

USBBY Oustanding International Books selection After he finally manages to escape from being a virtual slave in an illegal cocaine operation, Diego is taken in by the Ricardo family -- poor coca farmers who provide a safe haven while he recovers from his ordeal in the jungle. But even that brief respite comes to an end when the army moves in and destroys the family's coca crop -- and their livelihood. Diego eventually joins the cocaleros as they protest the destruction of their crops by barricading the roads, confronting the army head on.

Commended, Kirkus Reviews Best Children's Books: Historical Fiction It's September 1963 when Rex is blindsided by some unexpected news. His family is moving again -- just to the other side of the city, as it turns out, but it might as well be the other side of the moon as far as Rex is concerned. In desperation, he secretly starts taking public transit back to his old school -- a plan that works just fine until he runs out of money. When his sister Annie catches him stealing change from his mum's purse, sisterly blackmail becomes another problem.

Two years after his father mysteriously disappeared, Jim Hawkins is coping -- barely. Underneath he's frozen in uncertainty and grief. Then Ruth Rose crashes into his life. A sixteen-year-old misfit whose manic moods have to be managed by drugs, she tells Jim that her stepfather is a murderer. Every instinct tells Jim to walk away, to get back to the slow process of dealing with his own grief. Yet something about her fierce conviction will not let him rest. Ruth Rose lights a fire in Jim -- a burning need to uncover the truth, no matter how painful that truth may be.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children, the Society of School Librarians International Best Book Award and a Jane Addams Children's Book Award Honor Book Ever since she was a little girl, Amani has wanted to be a shepherd, just like her beloved grandfather, Sido.

Shortlisted for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award and the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award, selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, the CCBC Choices List, the Bank Street College of Education's Book of the Month, the Bankstreet College Best Children’s Books of the Year 2013, and the Capitol Choices Noteworthy Titles for Children and Teens ListOn a military base in post-Taliban Afghanistan, American authorities have just imprisoned a teenaged girl found in a bombed-out school. The army major thinks she may be a terrorist working with the Taliban.

It has been six years since sixteen-year-old Dec's free-spirited mother, Lindy, disappeared. Dec feels so trapped in the present that he has avoided examining his past. But when an intruder dies in the museum-like family home, the man's death sends forth tremors that reawaken forgotten memories. Suddenly Dec is flooded with visions of his mother so tangible it's hard to believe they're not real. At least Dec has his best friend -- gifted, funny Ezra -- to help him sort out what's real and what isn't.

Meet someone new... Harriet, who sees Mars and tastes pomengranates -- all in one day; Cluny, a girl who wants to publish a magazine for people with weird names; Ky, who lives in a geodesic dome deep in the country; Fletcher, the survivor of an almost fatal illness, who decides to paste the names of exotic places he would like to visit on his chest and stomach; Edward George, who made a discovery and became famous -- famous and forgotten -- on a hot day in 1867.

While the rest of the world anticipates a victorious end to the Second World War, sixteen-year-old Sheila Brary finds life in a remote British Columbia outport suffocating and isolating. A household full of brothers, a philandering father and, most of all, Sheila's embittered mother all stand in the way of a bright, beautiful teenager with ambitions and dreams -- to continue her schooling and become a nurse.

Rex and his friends begin grade six against the backdrop of the 1962 Ban the Bomb protests on Parliament Hill. But once again it is trouble on the home front that has Rex's attention. Why is his father so insistent that Rex go with him to the November Remembrance Day services, and why does Dad become so sad at this time every year? Why does he have a stash of secret photographs and letters -- written in German? How can Rex deal with the new teacher, Miss Garr, a manipulative bully?

Finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Children's Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book It's 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Meanwhile, in rural Manitoba, fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Cote begins a war of her own as she and her brother and sister, all stricken with tuberculosis, are taken by their anguished parents to "chase the cure" at nearby Pembina Hills Sanatorium.