A Season of Gifts
By Richard Peck

Set in 1958, more than 20 years after the events in the Newbery winner A Year Down Yonder (2000) and the Newbery Honor Book A Long Way from Chicago (1998), this episodic novel shows that time has not mellowed Grandma Dowdel.

Talking with Tim Tingle
By Ernie Cox

Choctaw storyteller and children’s book author Tim Tingle has been sharing tales of the Native American experience for more than a decade. His American Indian Youth Literature Award winner, Crossing Bok Chitto, depicts the connection between African Americans and Choctaws in the 1800s through the story of two children. It is a fine example of how Tingle works to deepen and expand the non-Indian’s perspective and understanding of the past, present, and future of American Indians.

One of the strengths of children’s and young-adult historical fiction is the ability to make history come alive for today’s young reader by telling the stories of everyday people. This article looks at some of the outstanding read-alouds that present different regions of the country as well as significant time periods from 1900 through the 1970s.

Family Literacy
by Terrence E. Young Jr.

Parents can have a big influence when they spend time reading with their children. Family literacy begins in the home and can help break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy by improving the educational opportunities of families. Promote family reading with these practical ideas and tips just in time for National Family Literacy Day on November 1.

In Puffling, the author-illustrator team that created Our Granny (1994) tells a warm, loving family story of safety and adventure, nurturing and letting go. A puffling hatches out of its egg and is fed and cared for by both loving parents in their burrow until he is ready to strike out on his own. Puffling cannot wait. Each day he asks, “Am I strong enough yet?”

Published in conjunction with the Anne Frank House and the Resistance Museum of Friesland, A Family Secret by Eric Heuvel is a moving graphic novel translated from the Dutch that tells of Holocaust perpetrators, rescuers, collaborators, and bystanders through the experience of one family under Nazi occupation in Amsterdam.

Mann’s successful adult book 1491 (2006) is reshaped in Before Columbus for a younger audience, to good effect. Certainly, the material is fascinating. Mann’s major point is that much of what’s considered common knowledge about the Americas is now under reconsideration.