Each of the following four chapter books has been honored in the Newbery Awards or National Book Awards for children’s literature, and right now they’re all priced at just $1.99 each.
Walk Two Moons (ages 8 and up, 4.5/5 stars)
In her own award-winning style, Sharon Creech intricately weaves together two tales, one funny, one bittersweet, to create a heartwarming, compelling, and utterly moving story of love, loss, and the complexity of human emotion.
Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle’s mother has disappeared. While tracing her steps on a car trip from Ohio to Idaho with her grandparents, Salamanca tells a story to pass the time about a friend named Phoebe Winterbottom whose mother vanished and who received secret messages after her disappearance.
One of them read, “Don’t judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”
Despite her father’s warning that she is “fishing in the air,” Salamanca hopes to bring her home. By drawing strength from her Native American ancestry, she is able to face the truth about her mother.
Walk Two Moons won the 1995 Newbery Medal.
The Great Gilly Hopkins (ages 8 and up, 4/5 stars)
At eleven, Gilly is nobody’s real kid. If only she could find her beautiful mother, Courtney, and live with her instead of in the ugly foster home where she has just been placed! How could she, the great Gilly Hopkins, known throughout the county for her brilliance and unmanageability, be expected to tolerate Maime Trotter, the fat, nearly illiterate widow who is now her guardian? Or for that matter, the freaky seven-year-old boy and the shrunken blind black man who are also considered part of the bizarre “family”? Even cool Miss Harris, her teacher, is a shock to her.
Gutsy Gilly is both poignant and comic as, behind her best barracuda smile, she schemes against them and everyone else who tries to be friendly. The reader will cheer for her as she copes with the longings and terrors of always being a foster child.
Katherine Paterson, winner of the 1978 Newbery Medal for Bridge to Terabithia and of the 1977 National Book Award for The Master Puppeteer, again reaches across boundaries with her wit, compassion, and love, and here creates an immensely engaging story about a child’s desperate search for a place to call home.
The Great Gilly Hopkins is also a National Book Award winner.
The Bronze Bow (ages 8 and up, 4.5/5 stars)
In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, Daniel bar Jamin is fired by only one passion: to avenge his father’s death by crucifixion by driving the Roman legions from his land of Israel.
He joins an outlaw band and leads a dangerous life of spying, plotting, and impatiently waiting to seek revenge.
Headstrong Daniel is devoid of tenderness and forgiveness, heading down a destructive path toward disaster until he hears the lessons taught by Jesus of Nazareth.
With a brand new cover, young readers won’t be able to pass up this timeless tale.
The Sign of the Beaver (ages 9 and up, 4/5 stars)
Although he faces responsibility bravely, thirteen-year-old Matt is more than a little apprehensive when his father leaves him alone to guard their new cabin in the wilderness.
When a renegade white stranger steals his gun, Matt realizes he has no way to shoot game or to protect himself When Matt meets Attean, a boy in the Beaver clan, he begins to better understand their way of life and their growing problem in adapting to the white man and the changing frontier.
Elizabeth George Speare’s compelling survival story is filled with wonderful detail about living in the wilderness and the relationships that formed between settlers and natives in the 1700s.
A Newbery Honor Book. Now with an introduction by Joseph Bruchac.