A Crooked Kind of Perfect

How it was supposed to be..…I was supposed to play the piano. That is was Zoe Elias wanted to do. She wanted to play classical music on the piano at Carnegie Hall wearing a ball gown and tiara. It would be sophisticated and worldly. She would wear white gloves that came to her elbows and she would delicately pull them off one finger at a time as the audience waited with anticipation for her to begin.

How it is…..I play the organ. Zoe Elias's father has agoraphobia (a fear of crowds) and when he went to buy the piano he got nervous and bought an organ instead…a wood grained, vinyl-seated, wheeze bag organ. So instead of playing beautiful, sophisticated classical music, Zoe is playing TV theme songs from the 80's. She begins taking lessons from Ms Person (that’s Per-saaahn) who is full of tidbits of wisdom as well as delightful exclamations such as Mozart’s postman, Chopin’s toaster, and Beethoven’s barbershop, and soon Zoe is scheduled to compete in the Perform-a-Rama!

Nothing goes the way Zoe plans. She is dumped by her best friend at school but befriended by Wheeler, considered a troublemaker by his teachers. Wheeler begins spending every afternoon after school in Zoe's kitchen with her father baking cookies and pastries. And Zoe is playing a wheeze bag of an organ instead of the piano of her dreams. And even though none of it is as Zoe dreamed, it turns out to be "a crooked kind of perfect" and she wouldn't trade it for the world.

The Naked Mole-rat Letters

Frankie Wallop is normally a straight-A student, but her life begins to reel out of control when she discovers her father, a widower, has met someone while at a conference in Washington, D.C. Frankie begins to correspond with the lady through emails, trying to discourage her interest in her father by telling some outrageous lies. The lies get bigger and more out of hand as Frankie tells more and more lies to cover up the ones she has already told. As Sir Walter Scott says, "O what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." It all begins to affect her grades, friendships, and family's lives until Frankie must face the consequences of her storytelling. Through her emails with her father's new friend--the rat lady (a zoo-keeper in charge of the naked mole-rats) Frankie begins to grow and the real reason she is so unhappy is slowly revealed. Written mostly in diary entries and emails, this Rebecca Caudill 2010 nominee by Mary Amato has humor and even a few vocabulary lessons along with the life lessons Frankie learns.

Elephant Run

It was 1941 and every night the Germans were bombing London. It became routine for 14-year-old Nick Freestone to wake up to the air raid sirens and go to the subway tunnels until the all clear siren was sounded. Routine, that is, until a bomb destroyed his apartment. Then his mother decided it was time for him to go live with his father on his teak plantation in the jungles of Burma (present day Myanmar) where it was safe. Of course, there were the poisonous snakes, leeches, tigers, leopards, swarms of biting insects, wild elephants and more dangerous animals and diseases. It turns out they were the least of Nick's problems because the Japanese were invading all of Southeast Asia. Within his first few days in Burma, an enraged elephant cracked his ribs, the Japanese took over the plantation, his father was made a prisoner in a labor camp, and Nick was forced to become a house servant to the Japanese Colonel who had set up camp in their plantation home. With the help of his new friend, Mya, and her great-grandfather, a very old and highly respected monk and mahout (elephant handler), Nick makes plans to escape to Australia. However, Nick does not intend to leave Burma without his father or Mya's brother, Indaw. His determination, a Freestone family trait, will put everyone is danger before it is over. The danger and suspense in this 2010 Rebecca Caudill nominee starts at the very beginning of this book and continues until the very end.