School Library Journal Gr 8 Up-In this riveting novel, 17-year-old violin prodigy Carmen Bianchi is forced to question everything she believes when she falls hard for a rival musician. At first, she is, with her manager mother's encouragement, completely focused on her career and winning the Guarneri Competition. On her mother's orders, Carmen even takes prescription pills to steady her nerves during performances. When she meets Jeremy King,...More

School Library Journal Gr 3-6-Erdos (1913-1996), the Hungarian-born son of two math teachers, displayed his fascination with numbers early on. Before entering school he could calculate the number of seconds a person had lived just by asking the time and date of their birth. Unable to sit still and follow rules in school, he was homeschooled by his mother. High school was a better fit, and he made friends with students who shared his love of math. Hi...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