River Readers

Marinka lives with her Baba in a house with chicken legs. Baba is a Yaga who helps guide the dead through the gate into the afterlife. Marinka is expected to become the next Yaga but she wants a normal life. She wants to stay in one place and make friends, maybe go to school. Right now her only friend is her pet jackdaw and she never knows when the house will decide to walk to the next destination. 

This is not a book for everyone. It is Patrick Ness's retelling of the Moby Dick story from the perspective of the whales. Whales are hunters of men just as men are hunters of whales. There is an endless war between the two. Bathsheba is the third apprentice for Captain Alexandra. They are on the hunt for the infamous devil Toby Wick. Along the way they capture a man named Demetrius and Bathsheba becomes a bit too friendly with him. In her conversations with him, she comes to realize not all men are the monsters whales believe them to be.

Jocelyn Hook is back and looking for her father's treasure. She has the map but not the key to decoding it. Captain Krueger is hot on her trail also after the treasure. Jocelyn decides they need to find the Jolly Roger in order to break the code. To do that they need Peter Pan's help. So they kidnap his new "mother" Evie. Turns out Evie is not just any 14 year old girl. She is Jocelyn's very own mother and she is having the time of her life in Neverland. Jocelyn has to find a way to convince Evie to go back to her "when" so that Jocelyn isn't stuck in Neverland forever. 

Things are a bit chaotic in the Jones house at 7:15 am on the first day of school. When the doorbell rings, Carter finds that they have been sent a butler. Grandpa Jones in England has died and left enough money for his gentleman's gentleman to come serve their family in America. Carter's dad is in the military and stationed in Germany so it is just him, his mom and three sisters. Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick quickly gets the family settled in to a new routine. This routine includes figuring out who each of them are and making good choices. The butler spends a lot of time working on Carter.

Babies born with heart defects that affected the flow of oxygen were called blue babies because their extremities would be blue instead of a healthy pink. Cardiac surgery was not something doctors even considered as the heart was a sacred organ and to cut into it seemed wrong. That all changed in the 1940s at Johns Hopkins Medical Center.

Jocelyn is the daughter of the great Captain Hook, who she has never actually met. She has been raised by her mother's father who is finally fed up by her antics. So Jocelyn is sent off to finishing school where of course she doesn't fit in. Jocelyn doesn't want to fit in, she wants to be a pirate and avenge her father. At finishing school, Jocelyn only makes friends with the cook's boy Roger. They sneak off every chance they get to an abandoned carriage house filled with rejects from the school. There they dream about going on adventures.

This is a beautiful story about a grandfather's struggles with dementia and the son and grandson who are trying to help him hang on to his memories. We get to see inside Grandpa's head and how he stores his memories. We see how Noah tries to help him and how Grandpa has regrets about his son. We then move past Grandpa's memories to those of the father and Noah and they live with an ever increasingly frail Grandpa. It is a touching story of loss and love and one many people with aging family can relate to.

Olive is one of those kids who has a lot of friends and gets along with lots of different types of people. That is great until the school talent show when all her friends pair off into their groups and no one invites Olive to join them. So Olive has to figure out where she belongs and what she is supposed to do. It is a story about cliques and being who you are no matter what. It was awesome and I think fans of Raina Telgmeier and Victoria Jamieson will love it.

This book will be published January 2019.

Arthur is a young fox groundling at Ms. Carbunkle's Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures. It is a dreary place where the young half-human, half-animal children slave away. Arthur and his new friend Trinket make their escape one day and travel out into the world. Trinket is off to find her only relative, an uncle. Arthur is off to Lumentown to see if he can find out anything about his history. All he has is an address and hope. In Lumentown Arthur makes new friends, gets into trouble and uncovers a plot. Miss Carbunkle plans to steal the music of the world.

Despereaux is an unusual mouse right from the very beginning. He is tiny with huge ears and he doesn't act like other mice. He doesn't scurry and he doesn't eat paper. He is more likely to read a book than eat it. But his biggest transgression is the fact that he loves a human. He fell in love with Princess Pea the moment he saw her. And because of that love he spoke to her and let her touch him. These are big no-nos for mice so Despereaux is banished to the dungeons to be eaten by rats.

Annie is the youngest of nine children in a poor Catholic family. Her dad works three jobs and is almost never home. Her mom suffers from depression, hoarding and is abusive. Annie has pretty much been raised by her older sisters and brother, some of whom are nice and others are definitely not. Luckily she has friends at school in Kristin and Jordan. Annie is very smart but has dyslexia so she has problems reading. It is 1985 and there isn't really a lot of help for her in school. 

A plane traveling across the globe experiences a freak accident. The plane is torn apart and everyone on board disappears in a strange electrical storm. Everyone except eight kids. They survive the crash and find themselves in the middle of a tropical jungle. How can that be when they were flying across the arctic? Stranger than the disappearing passengers and the jungle is the fact that it is like nothing on earth. There are two moons in the sky. The animals and plant life are very dangerous and very different than normal. The kids also discover an anti-gravity machine in the plane.

Anastasia McCrumpet is not having a great first day of school. It gets even worse when she is pulled from class and sent off with her great-aunts Prim and Prue who she has never met. She is told her parents where in a vacuum cleaner accident and she is now going to live with the aunts at their classic Victorian asylum. Anastasia finds herself locked in a dreary room at night where she has to use a chamber pot and doing chores like collecting leeches during the day. Who are these aunts? Why do they live in an old asylum? Why do they collect pictures of missing kids? 

Nisha is given the diary as a gift from Kazi their cook. She lives in India in 1947 with her father, grandmother and twin brother. Her mother died in childbirth and Nisha writes letters to her in the diary. India is being given self rule from England and is breaking apart into India and Pakistan. The Muslims will be going to Pakistan and the Hindus to India. Unfortunately, Nisha and her family live in what is to be Pakistan and are Hindus. Or more specifically half-Hindu, half-Muslim. Her mother was Muslim and her father Hindu.

Amina is a typical middle school girl in Milwaukee. She isn't comfortable speaking in front of groups and even though she has a beautiful voice refuses to sing for anyone. She becomes uncomfortable when her best friend Soojin decides to change her name to something more "American" when she becomes a citizen and doesn't like the fact that Emily is now their friend even though she has always been mean to them. To make matters worse her uncle is coming from Pakistan and they have to be on their best behavior for three months while he is visiting.