Could you survive if you were washed overboard and marooned on a deserted island? This is not a new concept for a story, but it is a new modern version of survival for intermediate readers who enjoy graphic novels.

When a snobby entitled teenage girl (Valerie) gets washed off of a resort’s new yacht with a young teenage girl (Merissa) member of the yacht’s crew during an upcoming storm, the two must work together to survive. Merissa knows all of the survival skills and many of the dangers of the island they land upon. Merissa is more than willing to show Valerie the ropes. By the time they are rescued, the reader has gained important real life survival skills, and Valerie has learned an important lesson about respect for others, as well as survival skills.

This book includes: three true short tales of survival, an “Island Survival Guide”, “What Do You Think?”, “Island Survival Trivia”, nonfiction network resources through abdobooklinks.com and a QR code.

People of all ages taking care of their individual plots in a community garden. Planting, cultivating, watering, weeding, and playing in the garden over the long weeks before an edible enjoyment of the garden’s success.

Written in short phrases, the word garden makes 24 appearances. Two of my personal favorites are, ” Garden hardly makes a sound growing, slowly, underground” and “Garden growing like a child, rosy, leggy, fresh, and wild _”

Simone Shin’s illustrations are full of the pride and joy of gardening from the work of being hands-on in the soil.

Someday We Will Fly is the story of a Jewish family, as told through the eyes of 15 year old Lillia, as they escape Poland, without Lilla’s mother, and find refuge in Shanghai. Lillia, her young disabled sister, and her heart-broken father learn to fit in as best they can in a foreign culture. The father struggles to find work and the reader is moved to see a once-proud parent reduced to the beaten down hopelessness that settles over him.

Lillia works hard to learn English and to help her little sister whose disabilities and malnutrition weigh on Lillia. Desperate times make people act in ways they might otherwise never consider, as when Lillia takes a job (unbeknownst to her father) as a dancer in a gentlemen’s club.

The reader is impressed by how hard Lillia works to learn Chinese and to achieve in school. She makes friend with Wei, a Chinese boy in her school. Lillia has less supervision in Shanghai than she ever had in Warsaw, but this benefit is greatly overshadowed by the suffering of both the Jewish and the Chinese communities under Japanese occupation.

For a Young Adult novel, there is a pleasantly surprising lack of romance. The ending is a bit contrived and seemed unrealistically optimistic. But it was plausible.

Someday We Will Fly is unique from other WWII historical fictions, covering the little known history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. The reader learns that 23,000 Jews escaped from Europe and found refuge in Shanghai during the Nazi Regime.

Author Rachel DeWoskin spent much of her life in China, including the past six summers in Shanghai where she researched and wrote this book. She teaches fiction at the University of Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member in Jewish Studies and East Asian Studies. Her scholarly background is evident in the Author’s Note and the extensive Sources Consulted at the end of this novel.