Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

The infamous Ratsos
(LaReau, Kara, )
Junior Fiction (55 pages) Recommended for Grades K-4. Rat brothers Louie and Ralphie Ratso try to prove they can be as rough and tough as their father in the Big City, but every time they try to show how tough they are, they end up accidentally doing good deeds instead. [Kit added 11/2017]

Things fall apart: authoritative text, contexts and criticism
(Achebe, Chinua.)
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Thirteen Reasons Why
(Jay Asher)
Young Adult Fiction (288 pages) Recommended for Grades 8-11. When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death. [Kit added 7/2011]

Thousand splendid suns, A
(Hosseini, Khaled.)
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Tomboy: a Graphic Memoir
(Prince, Liz, )
Biography, Graphic novels, Gender identity (234 pages) Recommended for Grades 8-12. Eschewing female stereotypes throughout her early years and failing to gain acceptance on the boys' baseball team, Liz learns to embrace her own views on gender as she comes of age, in an anecdotal graphic novel memoir. [Kit added 12/2015]

Triangles
(Adler, David A.)
Introduces triangles, discussing the different types of triangles and the concept of triangle size measured in degrees [Kit added 01/2017]

True Story Of the 3 Little Pigs, The
(Jon Scieszka)
Juvenile Fiction (32 pages) Recommended for Grades Kindergarten-3. The wolf gives his own outlandish version of what really happened when he tangled with the three little pigs. [Kit added 12/2015]

Truth like the sun
(Lynch, Jim, )
Roger Morgan, the promoter responsible for bring the World's Fair to Seattle in 1962, runs for mayor in 2001, right after the tech bubble bursts, while budding reporter Helen Gulanos probes his secretive past

Turtle in Paradise
(Jennifer L. Holm)
Junior Fiction. (188 pages) Recommended for Grades 3-7. In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida. [Kit added 10/2013]

Twelve tribes of Hattie
(Ayana Mathis.)
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

Two boys kissing
(Levithan, David.)
A chorus of men who died of AIDS observes and yearns to help a cross-section of today's gay teens who navigate new love, long-term relationships, coming out, self-acceptance, and more in a society that has changed in many ways. [Added 06/2017]

Tyrell
(Booth, Coe.)
Fifteen-year-old Tyrell, who is living in a Bronx homeless shelter with his spaced-out mother and his younger brother, tries to avoid temptation so he does not end up in jail like his father