Society, after suffering various crises (including pandemics), has returned from the brink via a carefully controlled, male-dominated technocracy called the “SCS.” Only “Upper Sphere” elites have the right to easily marry, bear children, and serve useful functions as artists, planners, legislators, and the like. “Outcastes,” at the opposite end of the social spectrum, are simply …
Victoria Barrón was born in Mexico but was orphaned when she was 8 years old. Her paternal uncle, Elias, and his wife, Marta, adopted her and raised her in El Paso, Texas. Now, she’s an immigration attorney in that city with her own law firm called the Center for Help. In her office, she finds …
The author, a self-described “Astronaut Intelligence” teacher, prepares kids who might be interested in space travel with what they can expect if they become astronauts—and what they can do to prepare. He reminds readers that space travel for kids is not a very far-off possibility, especially when it involves the space around the Moon and …
Munro, who knows her way around a maze, here fits a series of them into a simple storyline about a child who’s taking a trip to visit Grandmother, accompanied by Mom and Dad. Written in second person addressed to readers, the book starts at Sunnyside Airport, and from there, we move—never in a straight line!—through …
Eighteen-year-old Josephine Marzynski has had the best opera training available in Boston, but to advance in her art, she must go to Berlin. “I wanted to learn from the best in the world,” she narrates, and “the best were German.” Normally, it would not be a problem for Josephine to study in her mother’s native …
Eleven-year-old Lizabeth “Liza” Gordon is used to moving house; as her grandmother says, her dad “was bitten by the gobug when he was young.” This time, Liza’s dad aims to start a family gelato business in Greenblossom, South Carolina, that he’ll call Gordon’s Gelato. Liza and her older brothers, Pete and Brad, are going to …
It’s typically American, Johns Hopkins musicologist Celenza notes, that rebelling colonials adopted the derisive British song “Yankee Doodle” as a badge of pride. But a true anthem was wanted, and it came in the War of 1812 (which “we tend to forget…began as an act of US aggression”): the “Star-Spangled Banner,” written by a lawyer …
Following the untimely deaths of her beloved parents just a few years apart, focused, determined Liliana Chamberlain hides out from state authorities, scraping by in her family’s apartment, focusing on getting to her 18th birthday in May, and keeping her grades up for her full-ride college scholarship. But her estranged maternal grandparents’ lawyer—who was her …
Some still doubt that the son of a glovemaker who never left England could have created the imaginative universe we behold in the plays and poems. Amussen, a historian at the University of California, Merced, writes a social history of England in the late-16th century to affirm that a man of the theater, a highly …
For six years Sasha has lived in Haven, the underground society built to withstand nuclear war. Since the war, since her family’s deaths, since discovering she doesn’t get sick like everyone else does, Sasha’s life has been full of death and overfull with grief. While working in the Ward, Haven’s limited hospital, she stays with …
