Landon Dorch longs to play football, and he is definitely built for the game. Unfortunately two things stand in his way: his mother’s worries and the fact that he is deaf. Landon hopes that the family’s move to a new town will offer him a fresh start and that he can leave behind the teasing and taunts that marred life at his former school. But his speech problems and his cochlear implants seem to invite bullying.
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When Dyamonde Daniel’s friend Damaris suddenly becomes a picky eater, it doesn’t take Dyamonde long to figure out the problem: Damaris is secretly dieting because some mean girls teased her about her weight. Dyamonde can’t let her friend go on this way. But how can she make Damaris see that she is perfect just the way she is?
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Dyamonde Daniel has her eye on a new pair of red high-top sneakers. Following some bad advice from a classmate, she thinks she has the right idea to go about getting them – by demanding her mother buy them! Unfortunately for Dyamonde, Mrs. Daniel doesn’t appreciate being told what to do and decides to teach her daughter a lesson. Soon Dyamonde finds herself in a clothing crisis, with almost zero to wear! Dyamonde is furious. But she begins to realize that some people have troubles much greater than hers…including her friend, Isabel Martinez, whose family has suffered a real crisis. Deciding she must she must help the Martinez family, Dyamonde enlists the aid of everyone she knows to do so. Witty and endearing, this heart-warming tale – told by Nikki Grimes herself – beautifully displays the difference between “wanting” and “needing.”
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Dyamonde Daniel’s best friend, Free, thinks he’s poor because he can’t buy a new video game. So when their teacher announces a poetry contest with a $100 prize, Free decides he’ll try to win it. But Free is not the only poet in the class. Before the contest is over everyone will know a little more about what being rich and being poor are really all about.
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“Dyamonde Daniel was a gem waiting to be discovered. Just ask her.” With these opening lines, best-selling author Nikki Grimes introduces us to a new character kids are bound to love, a super smart third grader with wild-crazy hair and a can-do attitude.
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Nilly is new to the neighborhood, but he is quick to make friends: Doctor Proctor, an eccentric professor; and Lisa, who is teased by the twin terrors Truls and Trym. Nilly and Lisa help Doctor Proctor develop his latest invention, a powder that makes you fart!
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Charles Benoit has created a stunner of a debut novel, one of the most anticipated titles of the fall season. Told entirely in the second person, the story quickly immerses us in the world of bright, disaffected Kyle Chase, who once showed great potential but by tenth grade has become a genuine slacker. With uncanny insight, crafting what can only be called YA Noir, Benoit takes us deep inside the mind of a young man on a collision course with catastrophe.
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Kyna has a deep-seated (and well-earned) fear of the water. So when her adoptive parents announce that they have rented a summer house on Lake Champlain, she begs to be left behind for the summer.
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There’s not much true science fiction available for the intermediate grades, so we were delighted to find this terrific outer space adventure. Though it is humorous and exciting, it takes its science quite seriously, as any good SF novel should.
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Travis Tacey is in a peck of trouble. His mother is hospitalized from a serious accident and his father, lost in a haze of grief, has focused his anger and guilt on his oldest son. Which is why, at age fourteen, Travis finds himself out of a home and on the road in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains.
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