Reading the World’s Stories is volume 5 in the Bridges to Understanding series of annotated international youth literature bibliographies sponsored by the United States Board on Books for Young People. USBBY is the United States chapter of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), a Switzerland-based nonprofit whose mission is bring books and children together. The series promotes sharing international children’s books as a way to facilitate intercultural understanding and meet new literary voices. This volume follows Children’s Books from Other Countries (1998), The World though Children’s Books (2002), Crossing Boundaries with Children’s Books (2006), and Bridges to Understanding: Envisioning the World through Children’s Books (2011) and acts as a companion book to the earlier titles. Centered around the theme of the importance of stories, the guide is a resource for discovering more recent global books that fit many reading tastes and educational needs for readers aged 0-18 years. Essays by storyteller Anne Pellowski, author Beverley Naidoo, and academic Marianne Martens offer a variety of perspectives on international youth literature. This latest installment in the series covers books published from 2010-2014 and includes English-language imports as well as translations of children’s and young adult literature first published outside of the United States. These books are supplemented by a smaller number of culturally appropriate books from the US to help fill in gaps from underrepresented countries. The organization of the guide is geographic by region and country. All of the more than 800 entries are recommended, and many of the books have won awards or achieved other recognition in their home countries. Forty children’s book experts wrote the annotations. The entries are indexed by author, translator, illustrator, title, and subject. Back matter also includes international book awards, important organizations and research collections, and a selected directory of publishers known for publishing books from other countries.

Meet Hooey Higgins — along with his oddball family and friends — in a laugh-out-loud madcap adventure loaded with boy appeal. Hooey Higgins is desperately in love — with the humongous chocolate egg in Mr. Danson’s store window, that is. Too bad he and his best friend, Twig, have nowhere near enough money to buy it. But when a shark is spotted off the coast, Hooey and Twig dream up a plan: capture the shark and charge people to view it. Brilliant! With Hooey’s older brother masterminding the foolproof scheme, they set off with ketchup, a cricket bat, a floral quilt, and a rope in tow. What they find is so amazing it blows the shark plan out of the water! Aided by Emma Dodson’s comical illustrations, Steve Voake introduces a hilarious new character in a fast-paced story kids will sink their teeth into.

After rescuing a butterfly trapped in a spider's web, Daisy Dawson discovers that she can now understand everything animals say, which comes in handy when her favorite farm dog, Boom, goes missing. Reprint.

Rescuing a dolphin is easier when you can talk to animals! Daisy returns in a summer adventure, meeting new friends from surfing rabbits to a dancing crab. (Ages 6-9) School’s out for Daisy Dawson, and things couldn’t be any better. Imagine a whole summer at the beach, full of sand, sun, and surfing! And now that she’s making new animal friends - a crab named Pinchy who likes to dance and two fun-loving rabbits named Rabsy and Raberta - her vacation promises to be all the more exciting. But when Daisy hears a call for help from the bottom of the sea, she finds a dolphin in deep trouble, caught in old fishing nets. Will Daisy and her friends be able to save the dolphin before it’s too late?

Meet fourteen-year-old Gary. A self-described "tree-toad,"a sly and endearing geek, Gary has many unwieldy passions, chief among them his cousin Kate, his Underwood typewriter and the soft-porn masterpiece, High School Orgies. The folks of Lake Wobegon don't have much patience for a kid's ungodly obsessions, and so Gary manages to filter the hormonal earthquake that is puberty and his hopeless devotion to glamorous, rebellious Kate through his fantastic yarns. With every marvellous story he moves a few steps closer to becoming a writer. And when Kate gets herself into trouble with the local baseball star, Gary also experiences the first pangs of a broken heart. With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment"(Cleveland Plain Dealer), Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures a newly minted post-war America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural Midwest.

The weather is hot, hot, hot, and the farm animals are getting grumpy. The pigs are arguing with the chickens, and the ducks and newts are sad because their pond has dried up. Where will the water animals live? Luckily, they have the help of Daisy Da