18 books like Hokey Pokey
Agostino
Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the…
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The Great Gilly Hopkins (M Books)
***Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all intensely.*** She has a county-wide reputation for being brash, brilliant, and completely unmanagable. So when **she's sent to live with the Trotters -- by far the strangest family yet** -- Gilly decides to put her brilliant mind to work. Before long she's devised an elaborate scheme…
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A quiet kind of thunder
Steffi doesn't talk. Rhys can't hear. They understand each other perfectly. Love isn't always a lightning strike. Sometimes it's the rumbling roll of thunder ... Steffi has been a selective mute for most of her life - she's been silent for so long that she feels completely invisible. But Rhys, the new boy at school, sees her. He's deaf, and her knowledge of basic sign language means that she's…
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Malafrena
A book about freedom and commitment.
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Voices
Young Memer takes on a pivotal role in freeing her war-torn homeland from its oppressive captors.
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The Caxtons
A coming-of-age Victorian novel, with plenty of add-ons to justify it's classification as a Victorian melodrama or even as Victorian Gothic. Except for its length and prolixity, it is a delightful book. Try the audiobook, if the print or digital version puts you off, which would be a sad shame.
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Sisters in Sanity
"Where are they taking me?""It's for your own good, Brit," Dad said.I was shoved into a small, stuffy room, and the door was locked behind me. I waited for my dad to realize he'd made a terrible mistake and come get me.But he didn't.For sixteen-year-old Brit Hemphill, it's hard to know who she can trust. Convinced she's out of control, her father has sentenced her to Red Rock: a center for…
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Harold and the Purple Crayon
Harold decides to go for a walk one evening and as he goes he fills in the scene using his purple crayon. Adventure goes hand in hand with imagination to create this charming classic story.
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The Lost Hero
Jason has a problem. He doesn’t remember anything before waking up on a school bus holding hands with a girl. Apparently she’s his girlfriend Piper, his best friend is a kid named Leo, and they’re all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for “bad kids.” What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea―except that everything seems very wrong.
Piper has a secret. Her father has been…
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Down to the Bone
Here's what it means to be a tortillera. It means you're a girl who loves girls. Which means you get kicked out of Catholic school faster than Mother Superior Sicko can say "immoral." Which means your wacko Mami finds out. Which means you're kicked to the curb with nowhere to go, and the love of your life is shipped off to Puerto Rico to marry a guy.But this is Miami, and if you have a bighearted…
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Elan, son of two peoples
In 1898, just after his Bar Mitzvah, thirteen-year-old Elan and his family travel to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he meets his mother's family and participates in the Pueblo ceremony of becoming a man.
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The little bookroom
Collects twenty-seven of Eleanor Farjeon's stories, which include kings, princesses, servants, a mysterious flower, orphans, enchanted woods, an organ-grinder, giants, a little dressmaker, fairies, and a kindly farmer.
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Missing the Piano
When Mike's mother and sister go on tour with "Les Miserables," Mike's father and his new wife enroll Mike in St. Matthew's Military Academy where, facing brutality and ignorance, he learns to survive.
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I Was Born for This
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The Temptress four
Four best friends, one graduation cruise, a week of partying. Eight days of strife and storms . . .It's supposed to be the best eight days of their lives.Bonds will be broken... But when a fortune-teller predicts trouble the night before their trip, One of you will not come home...Fiona, Killian, Alma, and Yoli are left on edge, wondering what it could all mean. Gaby Triana gets right to the…
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Breaktime
A classmate's challenge to prove that literature is ever related to real life spurs Ditto to chronicle his amazing life-changing adventures during spring break, but he leaves it up to his friend to decide if it is true, or just a story.
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Family Reunion
(Gr. 6-7+ 11-12 yrs+) **When the invitation to the Preffyn family reunion arrives, interrupting a perfectly decent summer vacation, 15-year-old Shelley Wollcott is anything but enthusiastic.**
With her father away on business and her older sister visiting their mother in Paris, Shelley must face the "perfect" Preffyns' reunion with only her prankster younger brother and her insecure new…
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Black Beauty
(Ages 9-12, Gr. 4-7) An **animal rights classic** that's also an engaging read, **BLACK BEAUTY follows the life of an ebony horse from birth to old age**, and from pasture to the cobblestone streets of **19th century England** This morality tale and **animal "autobiography"** gives a sweet and kind horse **a voice that's relatable yet unsentimental.**. Black Beauty's life begins on the grounds of…
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