Recently I wrote a review of Tortilla Sun by Jennifer Cervantes. I highly recommend this book for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 9 to 12, possibly even older. I just became aware of a few other resources that go along with Tortilla Sun, that I thought you’d like to know about too.
If you want [...]

Noonie is sure that she will someday be a famous artist. She knows many well-known artists go through periods where they focus on color, and she herself has been through a blue period. This came after her mom died while she was in kindergarten and her dad’s job as an archeologist took him to locations [...]

Abbie Adams has a lot to worry about. Her little brother isn’t always good at controlling his magic, so she often has to use her own magic to reverse his spells and make his first-grade teacher and his classmates forget weird things they’ve seen. But sometimes she forgets to cover her own tracks well enough, [...]

Izzy and her mother have moved more times than she wants to remember. She’s just getting settled again when her mom announces she’s received a research grant to study in Costa Rica and Izzy will be spending the summer with her nana in New Mexico.
Izzy doesn’t know her grandmother very well, and she’s not at [...]

Pia is feeling down about having to adjust to a new home for herself and a new stable for her horse, Drummer, after her parents get divorced. She’s worried about making new friends with the other kids who ride, and she hopes Drummer gets along with the new horses too. When she takes a tumble [...]

Jessie is acting on a dare when she shows up at the Laurel Hill Cemetery one night. Her instructions are to spend a whole night while wandering the cemetery and collecting rubbings from the gravestones of 10 residents. Desperate to make friends in her new high school, Jessie has agreed to the task despite her [...]

Nick is tired of living in the Las Vegas hotel/casino that acts as the cover for his magical family. All he gets to eat is Russian food, all he does is practice magic, and his older cousins keep access to the outside world at a minimum for him. So he’s excited to think of a [...]

From her Japanese grandmother, twelve-year-old Ophelia learns the stories of strong women from Japanese and Chinese legends.  From her horseback riding teaching, she learns the Celtic myth Rhiannon. The Greek goddess Artemis comes to her in a quiet moment. Through these stories of powerful women making difficult choices to be true to themselves, Ophelia learns [...]

Ever since her mama left home two years before, Nyssa’s been adjusting to new situations. Not being with her mama all the time, getting to know her papa’s new wife, ignoring the comments of gossipy people in her small Louisiana town. She’s no longer sure how she fits into it all.
When her mama swoops in [...]

Joseph Calderaro is an “eighth-grade optimist” whose “bag of barbecue chips is always half full.” That is until he has a lousy 14th birthday and his teacher assigns a 1,500-word paper called Tracing Your Past: A Heritage Essay. The only trouble is, Joseph is adopted. Fourteen years ago he was left on the steps of [...]