February Picks

1. Beyond the Bright Sea by Lauren Wolk
   Twelve-year-old Crow has lived her entire life on a tiny, isolated piece of the starkly beautiful Elizabeth Islands in Massachusetts. Abandoned and set adrift in a small boat when she was just hours old, Crow’s only companions are Osh, the man who rescued and raised her, and Miss Maggie, their fierce and affectionate neighbor across the sandbar.

   Crow has always been curious about the world around her, but it isn’t until the night a mysterious fire appears across the water that the unspoken question of her own history forms in her heart. Soon, an unstoppable chain of events is triggered, leading Crow down a path of discovery and danger.

2. An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage
   Food's influence over the course of history has been just as prevalent in modern times. In the late eighteenth century, Britain's solution to food shortages was to industrialize and import food rather than grow it. Food helped to determine the outcome of wars: Napoleon's rise and fall was intimately connected with his ability to feed his vast armies. In the twentieth century, Communist leaders employed food as an ideological weapon, resulting in the death by starvation of millions in the Soviet Union and China. And today the foods we choose in the supermarket connect us to global debates about trade, development, the environment, and the adoption of new technologies.

3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
   Duny, a young boy living in a small rural village, grows up wild without a mother and without much attention from his blacksmith father. One day, he witnesses his aunt calling out strange words to a goat, commanding it to do her will. Fascinated, he repeats the words.
   His aunt, a witch, teaches Duny the magic she knows–words of power that can call and command different elements of nature, but Duny soon learns everything she can teach him. One day, the wizard Ogion hears of Duny’s magical prowess and takes him as his apprentice, giving him his true name, Ged. Under Ogion’s tutelage Ged learns much, but it also tempted into working dark magic that he doesn’t truly understand, creating a shadow that is bound to him. Ogion gives him the choice: to stay with him at Re Albi or learn high magic at the wizard school far away on the island of Roke. Taking his shadow with him, Ged embarks on his training as a wizard.

4. We Dream of Space by Erin Entrada Kelly
   Cash, Fitch, and Bird Nelson Thomas are three siblings in seventh grade together in Park, Delaware. In 1986, as the country waits expectantly for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, they each struggle with their own personal anxieties. Cash, who loves basketball but has a newly broken wrist, is in danger of failing seventh grade for the second time. Fitch spends every afternoon playing Major Havoc at the arcade on Main and wrestles with an explosive temper that he doesn’t understand. And Bird, his twelve-year-old twin, dreams of being NASA’s first female shuttle commander, but feels like she’s disappearing.

5. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

   An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution.