Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine, $15.99. Told from the point of view of a child with Asperger’s syndrome, this story maintains a disconcertingly (if character-appropriate) even tone in describing a horrific event and its fallout.
As the story opens, Caitlin is eyeing her brother’s Eagle Scout project, a wooden chest. Now, following his death in a school shooting, the chest evokes his funeral casket.
She is hyper-literal, an Asperger’s symptom. When someone tells her they need to “know where you’re coming from,” Caitlin’s startled response is: “I come from here,” indicating the room where the conversation takes place. She refers to the day of the shooting as The Day Our Life Fell Apart, as succinct and accurate a measure of time as B.C. and A.D.
Knocking against debris in the chaotic wake of her brother’s death, Caitlin seizes upon the idea of finishing her brother’s chest. Can she persuade her devastated father that this is what they both need? Ages 9 to 12.
A Stone in My Hand, by Cathryn Clinton, $6.99. For a Palestinian girl, living in Gaza City in the late 1980s and early ’90s means being constantly alert to the Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets.
Malaak, 11, climbs to her home’s roof daily to search for her father, who disappeared (was he in prison? a victim of a suicide bombing?) when he went to seek work in Israel. She copes with his absence by taming a dove, and worries about her volatile brother. His anger at the presence of Israeli soldiers and settlers seems to increase every day.
Quietly, the pacifist sister does her best to literally and figuratively disarm her brother, especially by relocating the stash of stones he hides to throw at Israeli soldiers. But what happens when she’s too late to stay his hand? Author Clinton creates a tense image of life in a city where Palestinians constantly feel besieged. Ages 11 and up.
Bag in the Wind, by Ted Kooser, $17.99. Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate, follows the journey of a plastic bag, accidentally freed from a landfill by a bulldozer. Tugged aloft by the wind — plastic bags make excellent impromptu kites — the bag first witnesses the vehicles dragging more stuff to the landfill, then travels farther afield.
Sometimes it’s noticed, irritating a territorial red-winged blackbird, or pleasing a can collector. Other times it blends into the countyside and urban camouflage before ending up in the arms of one of its unconscious saviors. Ages 3 and up.
The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, by Francisco Stork, $17.99. Three young Latinos form an odd trio: Vengeful Pancho, determined to murder his sister’s lover; cancer patient D.Q., who comes up with the Death Warrior concept; and gentle Marisol, a teen care provider.
Both boys fall hard for Marisol — D.Q. with the ardent hope of a born romantic, Pancho unwillingly, because ardor clouds his fixation on murder. They also find themselves wrestling D.Q.’s formidable mother, a vastly wealthy woman determined to save her estranged son.
This is an intricate, engaging story, with the occasional parallel to “Don Quixote,” about the fictions people tell themselves when the truth is too daunting, and the ways they manage to forge bonds despite (sometimes because of) their lies. Ages 12 and up.
The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz and illustrated by Peter Sìs. $17.99. Celebrated poet Pablo Neruda grew up as Neftalí Reyes, a timid boy whose father has neither time nor patience for music or art. Yet in this inhospitable environment, questions and images sprout like relentless seedlings in Neftalí’s fertile mind:
“What does the wind give? What does the wind take away? Where is the storehouse of lost and found?”
Through Muñoz, Neftalí perceives a lyrical world where even a malicious fire makes “thoughts and cares and affections (grow) singed and curled,” sending “the remnants of his soul (floating) into the sky like gray snowflakes.”
How splendid that such a battered soul could become a voice that spoke so eloquently for others whose disappointments made them mute. Ages 12 and up.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
