novels in verse

After her arrival in a wildlife sanctuary with friends Ivan and Bob, Ruby is reunited with a beloved caretaker from the elephant orphanage in Africa where she was raised. With Ivan and Bob there for support, Ruby relates her happy and sad memories from her time in the African savanna.

Offers a biography in verse of Nicaraguan poet Rube?n Dari?o. Begins with Dari?o's childhood, growing up listening to the exaggerated tales of his uncle and working forward in his life to when he became an adventurer in Central and South America and discovered his love of poetry.

Twelve-year-old Adnan dreams of making it to the Ultimate Table Tennis championship, but when tragedy strikes his family, Adnan loses his passion for table tennis and must learn to channel his grief and heal.

"Edgar wants nothing more than to live his life out loud. But telling the truth about his sexuality isn't so easy in his traditional Mexican-American family, and his Ama?? has made it clear she won't accept who he is. Things get even harder when Edgar's macho father returns home after months away, and the house erupts into fighting and simmering tension. Edgar worries what would happen if he told his father the truth about who he is, and feels he'll never fit in anywhere. Then Edgar runs into Alex, a popular football player at school. With Alex, Edgar feels happy and free, believing he might finally pick up all the broken pieces of his heart. But falling in love is more complicated than Edgar can ever imagine--and coming out might destroy the only life he's ever known.".

"After a rocky first year, Anna's family have settled into life in California--their small restaurant is even turning a profit. Then her parents make a shattering discovery: their visas have expired. Anna's world is quickly overwhelmed by unfamiliar words like 'undocumented' and 'inequality.' She longs to share the towering secret that looms over every aspect of her life with a friend, but her parents strictly forbid her from telling anyone. As Anna grapples with the complexities of being undocumented, the strain that it places on her family, and the loneliness of keeping it all to herself, she has to wonder--if America is the promised land, why does everything she's hoped for feel like a lie?"--From the publisher's web site.

Nine-year-old Betita and her parents fled Mexico after her uncle was killed by the cartels, and settled in Los Angeles seeking political asylum and safety in what her father calls Aztlan, the land of the cranes; but now they have been swept up by by the government's Immigration Customs Enforcement, her father deported back to Mexico, and Betita and her mother confined in a family detention camp--Betita finds heart in her imagination and the picture poems her father taught her, but each day threatens to further tear her family apart.

In the room beneath a theater stage, the ghosts of Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and other teenage girls who died tragically in Shakespeare's plays, share their experiences and trauma and get the chance to retell the stories of their lives in their own terms.

When a hurricane exposes Soleida's family's secret sculpture garden, the Cuban government arrests her artist parents, forcing her to escape alone to Central America where she meets Dariel, a Cuban American boy, and together they work to protect the environment and bring attention to the imprisoned artists in Cuba.

"When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She's alone--left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned. With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten. As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie's most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day"--Amazon.