The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

Dear Student by Elly Swartz Delacorte Press (imprint of Penguin Random House), 2022 Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Sandy Wasserman Buy at Bookshop.org Dear Student is the perfect book for any middle school child, boy or girl. It takes place in Grade 6, where even the most perfect-appearing, self assured kid is not! NOT at all! Autumn is anxious and thinks she's weird and doesn't have friends, never says the right thing, always second guesses what she might say or ought to have said. Author, Elly Swartz lets us in on all of Autumn's thoughts, her conflicts, her attempt at emergence into the world of her new school, her new home, and her family angst. Everyone else seems so in-the-know, even her kindergarten sister. Surprising herself, she makes a friend, Logan, relatively quickly. And the boy-without-a-name she met on her first morning heading to school, Cooper, becomes her friend, too. The reader comes to know what a great writer Autumn is, as we are witness to the creat...

Last Witnesses (Adapted for Young Adults) by Svetlana Alexievich, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Delacorte Press (imprint of Penguin Random House) Category: Young Adults Reviewer: Meg Wiviott Buy at Bookshop.org In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an unofficial agreement in which the two countries agreed to stipulations of non-aggression against one another and to partition and divide Poland. Despite this agreement, German invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Last Witnesses (Adapted for Young Adults) presents an oral history of the children of the Great Patriotic War (what we in the West know as either Operation Barbarossa or the Eastern Front of WWII). Originally published for adults in Russian in 1985 as Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II , Penguin Random House has now made both adult and a young adult adaptation available in English.   Nobel Prize winning author Alexievich...

 The Good War by Todd Strasser Delacorte Press (imprint of Penguin Random House) Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Stacy Nockowitz Buy at Bookshop.org In 1981, Todd Strasser wrote The Wave , based on the true story of high school history teacher Ben Ross and the class experiment he carried out in 1969. By creating a stringent behavioral “system” in his classroom, Ross showed his students how easily people could be swept up in a movement like Nazism. Now, forty years later, Strasser has written an updated, middle school version of The Wave titled The Good War. Instead of a high school history class, The Good War takes place in the newly formed eSports club of a middle school. The students in the club represent a wide swath of middle school types: the goody-goody, the high achiever, the hulking athlete, the “weird” loner, the bully, the mean girls, and so on. The kids come together after school to play a video game called The Good War , a World War II simulation game that pits the ...

 Rebel Daughter by Lori Banov Kaufmann Delacorte Press (imprint of Penguin Random House) Category: Young Adult Reviewer: A.R. Vishny Buy at Bookshop.org Rebel Daughter follows Esther, the daughter of a priest in the Second Temple, during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The novel imagines the life of the young woman memorialized in real life by a two-thousand-year-old tombstone found in Southern Italy, described in the Author’s Note. Esther’s comfortable life in Jerusalem is gradually upended, as factions in the city decide to rebel against Roman authority and those that stand in their way. The fighting culminates with the siege and the destruction of the Temple. Esther is caught up in the conflict, and must survive being sold into slavery in Rome. There are few examples of Jewish historical fiction in YA that are set outside the 20th century, so the setting in itself was refreshing to see. This book follows in the tradition of The Dovekeepers and The Red Tent in r...

The Assignment by Liza Wiemer Category: Young Adult Reviewer: Kathy Bloomfield Based on a true story, The Assignment is about two high school students who stand up to their teacher, their peers, and the entire community to stop an assignment that was given to them in their History of World Governments class. Their teacher is someone they greatly respect, but the assignment – To debate “A Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as was done at the Wansee Conference in Berlin in 1942. The book is well-written and profoundly disturbing. It contains the expected backlash to the students from hate-mongers in their school and their community, surprising revelations about the students involved and unexpected alliances that are formed along the way. Overall, an emotional, page-turning read. This is a strong contender for a Sydney Taylor prize. Given the subject matter, which is ripped from today’s headlines, and the nature of the assignment based on an actual Holocaust event, the s...

Turtle Boy by M. Evan Wolkenstein Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Ruth Horowitz Will Levine, a.k.a. Turtle Boy, has a thing about turtles. He’s facing surgery to correct a medical problem that’s making his chin recede, and has inspired his humiliating nickname. When life gets tough, he hides inside a psychological shell. On a more positive note, he’s fascinated by actual turtles – but he collects them illegally from the Back 40, a beloved wild area. Will Will summon the courage to undergo surgery? Will he learn to face life’s difficulties? What will happen to his turtles? Will developers destroy the Back 40? Enter Rabbi Harris. Will needs to perform a community service for his upcoming bar mitzvah, and the rabbi arranges visits to RJ, a wise-cracking, punk-rock drummer teen who’s dying at a local hospital. Can fulfilling the mitzvah of visiting the sick make Will a better, stronger person? Short, snappy chapters and a lively first-person narrator keep this multiple-thread stor...