More Books for Curious Kids
Biology Lessons by Melissa Kantor (Feiwel & Friends, $19.99)
“How had being pregnant turned me from a law-abiding citizen who just wanted to go to college to a girl who had to watch what she googled and lie to her period app, because someone might use those things to prove she was a criminal?”
High school senior Grace Williams, a stellar biology student in Buehle, Texas is assigned to tutor a handsome, out-of-her-league, popular baseball-playing classmate, Jack Nelson. Their relationship develops into a brief romance and—after it’s over—she learns she is pregnant. Grace’s parents have not been thrilled that, in planning to attend Barnard College in the fall, Grace is following in the footsteps of her liberal-minded liberated great-aunt who lives in New York. Grace is sure that if they knew about her pregnancy her parents would not only make her have the baby, but also insist she keep it. Desperate and fearful, she depends on two dear friends and the support of “the Jennifers” who help her obtain an out-of-state abortion. Appended to the novel are interviews with a sex educator and a client services manager at Jane’s Due Process, and a legal scholar on reproductive issues.
Jella Lipman and Her Library of Dreams: The Woman Who Rescued a Generation of Children and Founded the World’s Largest Children’s Library by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Sally Deng (Chronicle, $21.99)
“It was obvious that the children of Germany whom Jella had come home to were in desperate need of food, of clothing, of safe shelter… ‘Nourishment for the soul’ was even more important.”
This picture-book biography for older readers tells the story of Jella Lepman (1891–1970), who from her youth had a great passion for books. This became her life’s work. Raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Germany, widowed with two kids at age 31, she became the first woman editor of then-liberal newspaper Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt. With the rise of Nazism, in 1936 she escaped with her teenage kids to Italy and then to England. After World War II she was recruited to return to the American zone of Germany to help in the post-war cultural rehabilitation of German women and children. With devotion and persistence, and eventual help from Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rockefeller Foundation, she founded what became the International Youth Library in Munich—the largest children’s books collection in the world—and the literary organization IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People.
Rachel Friedman Breaks the Rules by Sarah Kapit, illustrated by Genevieve Kote (Henry Holt, $17.99)
Rachel flouts the rules of decorum, flying a paper airplane and doing a handstand in the aisle at Friday-night services.
In this first in a series of early chapter books, Rachel also crosses a street which she was forbidden to do, to rescue her escaped cat. Rabbi Ellen, who knows Judaism has many rules as well as different points of view about them, is able to help Rachel’s widowed dad, sometimes overprotective and strict, to be more flexible.
Two Pieces of Chocolate by Kathy Kacer, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard (Second Story Press, $21.95)
In their bunk in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a mother shows her twelve-year-old daughter two pieces of chocolate she has been hiding, saying they would save them for when they’d be most badly needed. In an empathetic gesture, they end up giving the chocolates to a fellow prisoner, a woman who is hiding her pregnancy. According to the back matter in this picture book, their miraculous survival is remembered years later when the girl and the baby meet as adults at a conference on Holocaust survivors and mental health.
One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe by Dara Horn, illustrated by Theo Ellsworth (Norton Young Readers, $18.99) If you’ve ever been to a Passover seder, you know it can feel interminable, especially to a young person. In this graphic novel, a large family’s chaotic seder goes on for six months because they’re missing the afikomen to complete it. We readers follow the narrating wise son as he chases after a goat who has hidden the afikomen, and we witness his discovery that “The night of the seder is like a tel [a hill]. All the seders that ever happened in the past, before this one, they’re all here, underneath yours.”
Things That Shimmer by Deborah Lakritz (Kar-Ben, $19.99) “I feel trapped—trapped in this building, trapped in my life. “I’m a goody-goody teachers’ pet with a weird family, and I’m scared that’s all I’ll ever be.”
Eighth-grader Melanie, whose mom suffers extreme anxiety years after an automobile accident, feels she finally has a friend who understands her when she meets Israeli-born Dorit, whose dad continues to suffer from his battle experience in the 1967 Six Day War. Melanie is torn between wanting to have a true best friend and wanting to be accepted into the clique of popular but sometimes mean girls in her class. In this middle-grade novel, set in the 1970s during the time of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s impeachment, the term PTSD had not yet been invented.
Naomi Danis is an editor emerita at Lilith and the author of several picture books, most recently Bye, Car.
