Book list Moving up to a big new high school can throw anyone off her game. For Janie it hardly helps her cool quotient that her family is into sustainable living on a farm well out of town. Old friends are no longer in the same lunch period, and boys might as well live on another planet. When she and friend Sarah track a boy they both like, the quest brings them to a weekly Friday-afternoon jam-band session and new musical and social vistas. Then a class project...More

School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-In most books about Noah, his wife plays a supporting role, if any, but Bartoletti makes her the central character of this picture book. While winds and waves buffet the ark at night, Naamah calms restless animals with her lullaby. Her husband, their sons, and their daughters-in-law sleep, but Naamah "sings all through the night." Slowly, two by two, the animals settle into slumber as the soothing poetry lu...More

Publishers Weekly Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven) has a nose for "thin places": places where the boundary between secular and sacred is porous, and ultimate meaning is easier to encounter. In his new novel, Coldwater, Mich., is this thin place, a town where people who have lost loved ones begin receiving phone calls from the dead in heaven. Sully Harding's wife died while he was in prison, and their young son, Jules, hopes h...More