Mexican WhiteBoy, by Matt de la Peña, $15.99. Danny’s Caucasian mother is poised to launch herself and her family from a San Diego barrio to an elegant San Francisco neighborhood. His Mexican father is somewhere in Mexico, he thinks, strangely unresponsive to Danny’s optimistic letters.
Spending the summer with his Mexican uncles and cousins, Danny feels at sea — too white to be part of their group (especially because he speaks little Spanish) — except on the baseball field, where his pitching skills are closely monitored by a presumed Mexican baseball scout.
When an unlikely friendship blossoms between Danny and Uno, whose parents are Mexican and African- American, both boys begin to comprehend the complicated milieu they inhabit, and the power they wield in setting their future courses. Ages 14 and up.
Polar Bear Math: Learning About Fractions From Klondike and Snow, by Ann Whitehead Nagda and Cindy Bickel, $7.99. School is in session, and a couple of adorable polar bear cubs might help make math a little less onerous. Colorado author Nagda teams with Bickel, a longtime Denver Zoo staffer and mainstay in the zoo’s nursery.
Exchanging “Numerator/Denumerator” with “Mother bear with twins/All mother bears in this set” is one way to illustrate the fraction two-thirds and far more memorable than cold numbers for nearly anyone with math anxiety.
“At three months, the bears were drinking only four bottles of milk a day (though they also got some milk mixed into their solid food). For each bear, the whole amount, or set, was four bottles, so each bottle was 1/4, or one-fourth, of the whole set.”
Similarly, illustrating twelfths and thirds is abruptly concrete when the concepts are expressed as the 12 bottles of milk (a combination of puppy milk and half-and-half, another math problem) the cubs drink daily. Accompanying the approachable text: bear photographs that are arresting, if not quite material. Ages 4 to 8.
Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, by Michael Rosen, illustrations by Quentin Blake, $6.99 Simple and poignant, this picture book looks grief directly in the face. The author writes about mourning the deaths of his mother and son, and how their loss shook his personal universe:
“Sometimes I’m sad and I don’t know why. It’s just a cloud that comes along and covers me up. It’s not because Eddie’s gone. It’s not because my mum’s gone. It’s just because. Maybe it’s because things now aren’t like they were a few years ago. . . . So what happens is that there’s a sad place inside me because things aren’t the same.”
Anyone who’s ever lost someone dear knows exactly what Rosen means. Buy two copies — one for yourself, and another to lend to friends and relatives weathering their own sadness. All ages.
Listen! by Stephanie S. Tolan, $5.99. Recuperating from a car accident that left her with a brain injury and a rod in one leg, teenager Charley lives on a lake with her workaholic father. One day, she notices a feral dog, skinny and ghostly, whose wariness approximates Charley’s constant caution.
Deciding to tame the dog, she approaches the task after reading up on Jane Goodall’s research methods, but winning that trust requires formidable work and numerous setbacks.
Can wild hearts be converted? Is it possible to intuit events and emotions by listening and focusing intently on an individual? Quite a few campaign strategists would like to believe that it is, though their motivations might be less selfless than Tolan’s. Ages 10 and up.
