Blue
Joyce Moyer Hostetter has researched a fascinating look at the polio epidemics during WWII in this young adult fiction story. Ann Fay is thirteen years old when her father goes off to fight Hitler and leaves her to run the farm until he returns. She works exhausting hours and makes her younger siblings work too. When her four year old brother contracts polio and dies, she blames herself for working him too hard. Her bout with polio highlights the real ife "Miracle of Hickory" polio hospital in Hickory, North Carolina in 1944. I learned a lot about how polio was percieved and how doctors and nurses worked to save children from being crippled. Four stars!

Dead Connection
I have a theory that "first books" are always best...maybe everyone has one good novel in them? Charlie Price's first novel, Dead Connection, is a case in point. Just like the boy in Sixth Sense, Murray hear's dead people talk. Because of a horrible home life with an alcoholic mother, Murray spends much of his time in the local cemetery where he imagines himself to be a kind of "comforter" to the dead. He has special people he listens to and talks with...and one day hears a young girl calling for help. He can't quite locate her grave, but hears her moans. With the help of the cemetery keeper's daughter, Murray realizes that the girl is the missing cheerleader, Nikki, who local detectives can't find. It is an engaging book, easy to read, told by many voices as each has his or her own chapter. Five stars.

Bad Kitty

Jasmine is a high school super sleuth who wants nothing more than to solve mysteries...any kind of mysteries. Her family is spending a week in Las Vegas with her snooty "evil"cousin and friend who only want to impress people, and Jasmine would rather have adventure.
She calls in her friends to help her with her forensic pursuits when falls in love with a cute guy who she fears may be involved in some illegal activities.
Only a two or three star...it was hard to follow the improbable plot, partially because of the constant footnotes, meant to replicate text messages from her friends, but rather annoying to the story line.

Sand Dollar Summer

This first novel by Kimberly Jones is the story of the summer Lise's mother is in a debilitating auto accident that sends the family into a tailspin. Five year old Free has yet to talk, although his mother is firmly convinced he is just waiting for the right time to speak. Lise is sure that this is the worst possible thing that could have happened to her family, especially when her mother decides to recuperate in a "shack" in Maine, right on the ocean. Lise learns that this is where her mother grew up and where she is supposed to enjoy carefree days romping in the ocean. Instead, she is afraid of the algae and all the little things that probably live there, and is bored and indignant. A friendship with an aged Indian who clings to his home on the beach hits a climax when a hurricane threatens the shore and Lise tries to rescue her friend who realizes that this is his time to die.
Four and a half stars.

Hard Hit

Ann Turner's poetic novel gives us a hard look at what it's like to be a high school boy about to lose his father to pancreatic cancer. Althought this tear-jerker takes a scant hour to read, it is a "hard hitter" for the reader. Realistic characters and emotion will strike a chord with all readers. The National Help Lines at the back of the book will guide students to places to find more information about dealing with grief and cancer.
Four stars.

Victory

Victory, by Susan Cooper, interweaves the lives of a young, modern-day English girl and a young man on the ship of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson. Molly has been recently transplanted to America when her mother marries a man from Connecticut. She painfully misses her grandparents and friends in London, the only home she has ever known.
Sam Robbins is a farm boy living in the early 1800's. He is kidnapped from the streets of London and put aboard an English sailing ship to work in the English Navy. This is the time of English "impressment" and although he is allowed to sign on as a sailor, rather than being impressed, he still is powerless to get out of the navy. It so happens the ship he is on is the Victory which sails in the Battle of Trafalger and is the ship where Nelson loses his life.
When Molly buys an old book on the life of Horatio Nelson, she finds a piece of the sale from the original Victory, secreted in an envelope. This was once Sam's and seems to hold a kind of mystical hold on the past. Molly visits her grandparents in London for a week, and her grandfather takes her on a tour of the refurbished Victory. There, she falls into a dreamlike trance, reliving the life of Sam on the ship.
Although the character of Molly realistically reflects a young teen who is unhappy with her family's move, the final interweaving of her life with Sam's takes an incredulous turn. For her to be hospitalized and then realize she must return her "Sam's bit of Nelson to the deep" is a stretch. There is much good history here about the English Navy and the hard life of a sailor, and the glossary at the end of the book explains many terms having to do sailing in the nineteenth century.
Four stars.

Dairy Queen

Catherine Murdock's Dairy Queen is a novel about football, dairy farming, and family relationships. A good book for boys? No... D.J.Schwenk is a fifteen year old girl single-handedly
running her family's dairy farm and living in the shadow of two older brothers who were football all-stars. Her family has been intimately connected with high school football, and D.J. worked out with her brothers and watched their every move as they starred on the Red Bend, Wisconsin high school team.
In the summer before her junior year, Brian Nelson, the big rival school's potential quarterback, is sent by his coach to help the family out on the farm and learn what it means to really work. D.J. becomes his "trainer" and teaches him the workouts and work ethic her brothers had that made them stars. She becomes so involved in the game that she goes out for the Red Bend football team and makes it as a valuable linebacker and receiver. Her family life worries her and causes her to consider her role in the family and what her priorities should be.
Although there is no Dairy Queen ice cream, beauty pageant, or cow competition in the story, D.J. is the queen of the dairy farm by her dogged determination. Yes, she does fall in love with Brian...and weirdly finds out that her best girl friend for the last six years is actually in love with her. This seems unnecessary to the plot line but may serve to show that D.J. is all woman and longing for a relationship with her quarterback.
Four stars...