School Library Journal Gr 9 Up-Alex is looking for something real-more real than her distant father, who never speaks in complete sentences, more real than the faded memories of her mother, who died on the night she was leaving her family, even more real than her two best friends and their plan for a graduation trip to Colorado. She thinks she has found what she has been looking for in Cole, the new boy at school whom she has been assigned to tutor....More

Publishers Weekly Pattern-driven digital illustrations pair with concrete verse to express water's cyclical nature: "Thirsty air/ licks it from lakes/ sips it from ponds/ guzzles it from oceans/ and this wet air/ swirls up." In a bone-colored landscape in another part of the world, a child in a hut and wild animals in a barren tree await a gray storm cloud. When a torrent comes, a lullaby-like line assures: "Honey,/ living things ...More

Library Journal The author of Seabiscuit now brings us a biography of World War II prisoner of war survivor Louis Zamperini (b. 1917). A track athlete at the 1936 Munich Olympics, Zamperini became a B-24 crewman in the U.S. Army Air Force. When his plane went down in the Pacific in 1943, he spent 47 days in a life raft, then was picked up by a Japanese ship and survived starvation and torture in labor camps. Eventually repatriated, he had a spiritua...More