by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Picture Book
Sister Anne, a young nun, is teaching young children in a school, but she is dark-skinned, and the children she teaches are having a hard time adjusting to her and accepting her. How do we teach our children to accept others who are not exactly like them? How do we...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Realistic/Contemporary Fiction
Well, the two get jobs at the diner in town, and as they work, they meet some amazing people who are willing to risk and to fight for doing the right thing. Incredibly heart-warming! This book is a 2001 Newbery Honor Winner.
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Realistic/Contemporary Fiction
Sixteen years old and just finding her feet much less her wings, Jenna starts to work at Gladstone’s, a shoe store. This is a family-owned operation that values quality of service and merchandise. They know shoes, and they know feet, but things are changing. The...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Science Fiction
Sixteen-year old Tally has a big choice in front of her. In her world sixteen-year-olds have a choice to become pretties-to-be perfect and live a life of parties and no worries. She zooms through the air on hoverboards as she struggles with a secret message from her...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Realistic/Contemporary Fiction
Sixteen-year-old Jimmy Lynch and another juvenile delinquent, Kevin, are able to avoid being sent to a youth facility, when they agree to go for a community mentoring program with a man named Duke, who just happens to run a barbershop. The two boys enter into the...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Historical Fiction
Sixteen-year-old Julia Hamilton lives in an empty house in London with her remote father. When she hears he is going on an extended trip to the Levant, she persuades him to allow her to come along. It’s 1907, and the Ottoman Empire and adventure call. Her father...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Mystery
So how would you like to be fourteen years old and be Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister. Enola (alone in reverse) is in exactly that position. She, too, has great powers of deduction and at this point in life, she has decided to open her own detective agency and...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Non-Fiction
So there you are parenting along and trying to find the best books for your child and trying to do a good job of it all, and sometimes you just stop and wonder, where am I going with all this? What am I really aiming for with my children and my job as a parent? Well,...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Picture Book
So what’s it like when those rollicking, hugging relatives from Virginia show up and spread out all over the place. What warmth. What a sense of love and togetherness. What a family. This is a simply-told story of a time when the relatives come to visit and...
by Mike Costanzo | Mar 24, 2009 | Mystery
So, remember Nancy Drew and how you read one of her books after another? Meet Sammy Keyes, a ten-year-old girl, who lives with her grandmother in a “home” where no children are allowed. Sammy is the kind of young lady who faces life head-on and rises to...
