William Durbin

Thirteen-year-old Bella wants to be a lector just like her grandfather, who sits on a special platform in the cigar factory, reading great novels, the newspaper, and union news to workers as they roll the cigars. Being a lector is an important role in their immigrant community. But the hard times of the Depression mean that Bella must go to work in the factory; her hope of getting the education a lector needs seems impossible. Meanwhile, the factory...

Could you survive in a cave...for a whole year? That's the challenge facing fourteen-year-old Stepan. Set in Ukraine during the final months of World War II, THE HIDDEN ROOM is based on the true story of a Jewish family who escapes from the Nazis by taking refuge in a remote cave. Stepan adjusts to the hardships of living underground and the dangers of night-time adventures outside the cave. Food is scarce. Darkness, bone-chilling cold, and the fear...

When Pierre LaPage's father has an accident, thirteen-year-old Pierre must quit school and paddle a canoe 2400 miles as a voyageur for the North West Company in order to earn money for his family.

In the 1930s, a young Finnish-American boy reluctantly moves with his family to Karelia, a Communist Finnish state founded in Russia, where his idealistic father soon realizes that his conception of Communist utopia is flawed.