Kid's Intermediate Summer Book Club

The Last Words of Will Wolfkin by Steven Knight

It's funny. If you're born a certain way, you don't really understand how it is to be any other way. So it has been for Toby Walsgrove—paralyzed since birth, unable to move or talk, with no known family, he has spent his entire life at a Carmelite convent in London. That is, until the day that his cat, Shipley, starts talking to him. Shipley has been watching over Toby his whole life and tells him they must go to Langjoskull, a city of exiles buried deep below the surface of Iceland. Because Toby is no ordinary boy—he's a descendant of the great king Will Wolfkin, and his kingdom needs him. Toby has never wielded a sword that can stop time. He has never shifted into his kin creature. He has never even walked on his own two legs before. Ready or not, though, he has a destiny, a responsibility, even a family—and not all of them are happy to meet him. . . .

Hawksmaid: The Untold Story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian by Kathryn Lasky

Before she was Maid Marian, she was Matty. . . . Matty has been raised to dance well, embroider exquisitely, and marry nobly. But when Matty's mother is murdered before her very eyes and her father, a nobleman, is reduced to poverty, Matty's life changes. As the daughter of Nottingham's most famous falconer, she finds a new destiny in the hawks her father keeps. She begins to understand their thoughts and even speak their language. The beautiful merlin Marigold becomes Matty's closest winged companion and her fiercest ally. It is a treacherous time in England. The sheriff of Nottingham is rising to power, and a true king has been kidnapped. Determined to fight, Matty's friend Fynn becomes Robin Hood. As Maid Marian, Matty joins Fynn and his Merry Men, famously robbing from the rich to give to the poor.

You thought that you knew the legend, but this is the untold story. Bestselling author Kathryn Lasky soars to magnificent new heights here, giving us a bold tale of bravery and romance.

After working all summer at an unpleasant job in a convenience store, Eve is about ready to start high school carrying some unwanted weight. Fast food and junk food are plentiful in a convenience store, and Eve ate her fair share. Now, she is barely fitting into her baggiest jeans and raiding her father's closet for shirts that will cover up her bulging tummy.

On the first day of school, Eve overhears Zoe describing her as a "blob". It's upsetting - but mostly because Eve realizes she might be right.

Using the wonderful world of the Internet, Eve finds a diet that looks promising. Day 1 - eat as much fruit as you want. Day 2 - eat as many veggies as you want. It doesn't look too bad until Day 4 - only eat bananas and drink milk. Eve thinks bananas are okay, but she hates milk. She gives the diet a try, but all she thinks about is food, food, and more food. When she finds herself beginning to cheat, she gives up.

Can her mother's compliments and encouragement keep her on track? Maybe joining the Mentor Club will give her the incentive to lose those unwanted pounds.

The Starker family is infamous. They've been chronicled on blogs, profiled on TV and researched by paranormal investigators. They appear to be cursed: everyone of Starker blood has died after being struck by lightning. Fourteen-year-old Newton Starker is the last of his line--except for his great-grandmother, Enid, a woman as friendly as a pickled wolverine--and he's determined to survive. Newton has spent all of his life surviving, following a list of rules for selfpreservation, guidelines passed down through generations of Starkers. But Newton wants to try something new. He has enrolled at Jerry Potts Academy of Higher Learning and Survival in Moose Jaw with the hope that he'll be able to beat the odds--he has a dream of becoming a great chef someday. If he wants to go beyond just getting by, Newton is going to need more than rules. He's going to need friends. From the creative mind of award-winning writer Arthur Slade--author of Dust, Tribes and Megiddo's Shadow--comes a quirky, laugh-out-loud story about dreaming big, standing out and knowing when you need help.

Neil Flambe and the Marco Polo Murders by Kevin Sylvester

Neil Flambé is a fourteen-year-old wunderchef. He can cook anything, and he brags that he can cook it better than anyone else. He`s cocky, but he may also be right. Patrons pay top dollar and wait months for reservations at his tiny, boutique restaurant.What many of Neil’s patrons don’t know is that he’s also a budding detective. It all started when he used his knowledge of cooking and his incredible sense of smell to acquit his mother’s client of murder. Ever since, Police Inspector Sean Nakamura has relied on Neil to help him crack case after case.

Now, the city’s crime scene has taken a turn for the personal. Some of the best chefs in town are turning up dead. The cops are stumped; the only real clues are a mysterious smell and some equally mysterious notes that seem to have something to do with Marco Polo. As more chefs fall prey to the killer, Neil finds himself working not only to solve the murders, but to eliminate himself as the prime suspect!

Wolves of the Beyond: Lone Wolf by Kathryn Lasky

In the harsh wilderness beyond Ga'Hoole, a wolf mother hides in fear. Her newborn pup, otherwise healthy, has a twisted leg. The mother knows the rigid rules of her kind. The pack cannot have weakness. Her pup must be abandoned on a desolate hill--condemned to die. But alone in the wilderness, the pup, Faolan, does the unthinkable--he survives. This his story - a story of survival, of courage, and of love triumphant. The story of a wolf pup who rises up to change forever the Wolves of the Beyond.

Bea lives in the podunk, nowhere town of Elbow, where it rains so much the residents have green mold growing between their toes. Nothing ever happens in Elbow. Its closest claim to fame is a giant pickle factory, owned by Herman, the Pickle King. Herman’s a small-time big shot, a local celebrity.... Until he turns up dead. And when Bea, Sam, and their friends stumble across his body--minus one eyeball--in the waterlogged basement of a creepy old house, suddenly they’re the ones in a pickle! With a mystery to solve, maybe this summer won’t be such a bore after all.

A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata

A boy and his elephant escape into the jungle when the Viet Cong attack his village immediately after the Vietnam war.

Savvy by Ingrid Law

Mississippi, aka Mibs, and her family each get a magical gift, called a savvy, on their thirteenth birthday. Rocket, Mibs's brother, has the savvy of being able to control electricity. He is a lot like those comic book heroes, good-looking with electric sparks coming off of his hands. At thirteen, her other brother, Fish, found out that he can control weather, especially causing water storms. So at thirteen the kids become homeschooled and have to learn how to control their special abilities.
When the story opens, Mibs is two days away from turning thirteen herself. She is excited about her special birthday when her father is in a horrible twelve-car accident on the highway. He ends up in a coma in a hospital in Salina, Kansas.

Fourteen-year-old Korean adoptee Joseph Calderaro is stumped when his social studies teacher assigns an ancestry essay. Joseph knows very little about his background (and his parents are not very forthcoming with details), so he pretends that Olympic marathoner Sohn Kee Chung was his grandfather, and creates an award-winning essay to that effect. Once his lie is unmasked, however, Joseph must redo the assignment, which prompts him to begin a committed search for his birth family. Kent's debut novel humorously captures the feelings of a young teen who thoroughly enjoys his Italian-American family but still wonders about his birth parents and the circumstances that led to his abandonment. His search ultimately leads him to a young woman who may be his cousin. Subplots involving Joseph's younger sisters, crushes on several girls in his class, and a new Korean friend round out the action and keep the story light. This will have special appeal for adoptees, but the questions about family roots that Kent raises are universal.

Beneath the crackled and faded painting of a horse, underneath the worn and dusty floorboards of the dining room, lives Celeste, a mouse who spends her days weaving baskets, until one day she is thrust into the world above. Here Celeste encounters danger—and love—unlike any she's ever imagined. She dodges a hungry cat and witnesses the brutality of hunting for the first time. She makes friends with a singing thrush named Cornelius, a talkative osprey named Lafayette, and Joseph, Audubon's young apprentice. All the while, Celeste is looking for a new home. Is her home in the toe of a worn boot? Nestled in Joseph's pocket? Or in the dollhouse in the attic, complete with mouse-size furniture perfect for Celeste? In the end, Celeste discovers that home is really the place deep inside her heart, where friendships live.

Nature Girl by Jane Kelley

Eleven-year-old Megan is stuck in the wilds of Vermont for the summer with no TV, no Internet, no cell phone, and worst of all, no best friend. So when Megan gets lost on the Appalachian Trail with only her little dog, Arp, for company, she decides she might as well hike all the way to Massachusetts where her best friend, Lucy, is spending her summer. Life on the trail isn’t easy, and Megan faces everything from wild animals and raging rivers to tofu jerky and life without bathrooms. Most of all, though, Megan gets to know herself—both who she’s been in the past and who she wants to be in the future—and the journey goes from a spur-of-the-moment lark to a quest to prove herself to Lucy, her family, and the world!

Medina Hill by Trilby Kent

The story begins in 1935 London, England. Eleven-year-old Dominic has pretty much stopped speaking to anyone outside of his immediate family. His silence is clearly stress-related: Dominic’s father is unemployed, his mother is coughing up blood, and he and his younger sister Marlo are victimized at school. Life changes when Uncle Roo offers to take both children to stay with him and Auntie Sylv in Cornwall. Roo (for Rupert) was a conscientious objector in the First World War, and therefore knows what it means to be an outsider. Now, he and Sylv have created an artists’ colony, a haven for misfits  populated by an eccentric trio – a musician, novelist, and a spirit medium-cum-visual artist. Dominic and Marlo fit right in. Both children also find solace in books. For Marlo, it’s one of her mother’s cookbooks, which seems to promise comfort and a better life. Dominic, by contrast, pores over a biography of T.E. Lawrence, an outsider who accomplished something great.

Susanna and Pina. For as long as they’ve lived at the Istituto di Gesù Bambino — a home for babies abandoned after the War — they have been best friends. As children, they played rag dolls under the watchful eyes of the nuns and hide-and-seek among the lemon trees on the rooftop terrazzo overlooking Naples. But now strangers are coming to the chiesa, couples hoping to adopt children. Susanna thinks Pina — pale, pretty Pina with her gleaming yellow braid — will be adopted at once. Susanna, on the other hand, is a mulatta. Her father was an American soldier, a nero. No Italian has hair or skin like hers. But when a surprise visitor comes to the istituto just to see Susanna, will the friends be separated after all? Or will a miracle make both of their dreams come true?

The wish stealers by Tracy Trivas

Griffin Penshine is always making wishes. But when a sinister old woman tricks her into accepting a box of eleven shiny Indian Head pennies from 1897, Griffin soon learns these are no ordinary pennies, but stolen wishes.

This box of labeled pennies comes with a horrible curse: People in possession of the stolen coins are Wish Stealers, who will never have their wishes granted.... In fact, the opposite of what they've wished for will happen. Griffin must find a way to return these stolen wishes and undo the curse if her own wishes are to come true.

One crazy summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the past. When the girls arrive in Oakland in the summer of 1968, Cecile wants nothing to do with them. She makes them eat Chinese takeout dinners, forbids them to enter her kitchen, and never explains the strange visitors with Afros and black berets who knock on her door. Rather than spend time with them, Cecile sends Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern to a summer camp sponsored by a revolutionary group, the Black Panthers, where the girls get a radical new education.

Kyna hates water. Ever since a boating accident left her orphaned, her fear of water has taken over. She is afraid of walking on the beach. There's no way she could swim. Even the idea of taking a bath is enough to send Kyna into a panic attack.

So when Kyna's adopted parents announce they've rented a lake house for the summer in hopes that Kyna will take more water steps, tasks to get her closer to the water, she is less than pleased.

How can she stay in a house surrounded by a body of water? She'd much rather spend time taking photos on dry land.

Kyna's summer starts to look a little brighter when she befriends Tylo. Tylo claims to have seen silkies in the lake and wants Kyna to help him find the truth with her camera. Kyna isn't thrilled about getting close to the water, but she doesn't want to lose her new friend.

The thirteenth child by Patricia C.

WredeEff was born a thirteenth child. Her twin brother, Lan, was born the seventh son of a seventh son. This means he’s supposed to possess amazing talent—and she’s supposed to bring only bad things to her family and her town. Undeterred, her family moves to Frontier, where her father will be a professor of magic at a school perilously close to the magical divide that separates settlers from the beasts of the wild. With wit and wonder, Patricia Wrede creates an alternate history of westward expansion that will delight fans of both J. K. Rowling and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

When Reynie Muldoon's tutor encourages him to respond to a strange ad in the newspaper, he begins an adventure that will spark the interest and challenge the intellect of listeners young and old. Through a series of mysterious, mind-bending tests, Reynie and three other unique, gifted children are recruited to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened to derail a plot to take over the world. Using intellect, imagination, and resourcefulness, they embark on an adventure that will entertain "gifted" children of all ages. Del Roy's narration is inspired. His serious tone communicates his respect for the skills and talents of the youngsters in the story, as well as the listeners who are playing along.

Encourage animal-loving readers to bury their beaks in this first entry in the Crow Chronicles trilogy, which provides a perfect segue to the more exhaustively evoked universes of Adams' classic Watership Down and David Clement-Davies' Fire Bringer (2000). During the annual migration, escalating conflicts threaten to split the members of the Kinaar Family forever. Then a dangerous blizzard strikes, and ostracized hothead Kyp and two friends serve the flock in a way that casts their tradition-defying attitudes in a positive light. Though the framing of the story as a ritual recitation by an elder ("Still your feather, calm your beak. . . . I'll tell it to you as it happened, word for sacred word") distances readers from the heroic, boundary-testing protagonists, there's much to admire about this first novel. It's no easy task to drum up sympathy for main characters generally regarded as unsavory pests, and Martini meets the challenge admirably, parlaying facts about crow behavior into a convincing, wholly absorbing anthropomorphic society.