Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Walden and civil disobedience
(Thoreau, Henry David)
Presents the texts of American writer Henry Thoreau's "Walden," his reflections on living alone among nature for two years on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and "Civil Disobedience," a treatise on nonviolent resistance and protest.

Wanderers, The
(Howrey, Meg)
"In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they're the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created. Retired from NASA, Helen had not trained for irrelevance. It is nobody's fault that the best of her exists in space, but her daughter can't help placing blame. The MarsNOW mission is Helen's last chance to return to the only place she's ever truly felt at home. For Yoshi, it's an opportunity to prove himself worthy of the wife he has loved absolutely, if not quite rightly. Sergei is willing to spend seventeen months in a tin can if it means traveling to Mars. He will at least be tested past the point of exhaustion, and this is the example he will set for his sons. As the days turn into months the line between what is real and unreal becomes blurred, and the astronauts learn that the complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer space."-- Provided by publisher

Warlight
(Ondaatje, Michael)
Just after World War II, Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth and his eccentric crew of friends. These friends are men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect and educate Rachel and Nathaniel. Their mother returns after months of silence-- without their father, explaining nothing. A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey - through reality, recollection, and imagination - that is told in this magnificent novel.

Washington Black: a novel
(Edugyan, Esi)
Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life.

Watsons go to Birmingham--1963, The
(Christopher Paul Curtis)
Junior Fiction (210 pages) Recommended for Grades 4-12. The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963. (Newbery Honor, 1996 & Coretta Scott King Award Honor, 1996) [Kit added 09/2009]

Weslandia
(Paul Fleischman)
Easy Fiction (40 pages) Recommended for Grades PreK-4. Wesley's garden produces a crop of huge, strange plants which provide him with clothing, shelter, food, and drink, thus helping him create his own civilization and changing his life. [Kit added 11/2012]

Westing Game, The
(Ellen Raskin)
Junior Fiction (216 pages) Recommended for Grades 5-8. The mysterious death of an eccentric millionaire brings together an unlikely assortment of heirs who must uncover the circumstances of his death before they can claim their inheritance. (Newbery Award, 1979) [Kit added 09/2009]

Where the Red Fern Grows
(Wilson Rawls)
Junior Fiction (212 pages) Recommended for Grades 4-8. A young boy living in the Ozarks achieves his heart's desire when he becomes the owner of two redbone hounds and teaches them to be champion hunters. [Kit added 09/2009]

Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail
(Strayed, Cheryl)
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State--and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than "an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise." But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Woke: A young poet's call to justice
(Browne, Mahogany L.)
Recommended for grades 4-8. Woke: A Young Poet's Guide to Justice is a collection of poems to inspire kids to stay woke and become a new generation of activists. Historically poets have been on the forefront of social movements. Woke is a collection of poems by women that reflects the joy and passion in the fight for social justice, tackling topics from discrimination to empathy, and acceptance to speaking out. With Theodore Taylor's bright, emotional art, and writing from Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood, kids will be inspired to create their own art and poems to express how they see justice and injustice. With a foreword by best-selling author Jason Reynolds

Women in the castle, The
(Shattuck, Jessica)
Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold. Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined.."-- Provided by publisher

Wonder
(R. J. Palacio)
Junior Fiction. (315 pages) Recommended for Grades 3-7. Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student. [Kit added 10/2013]

Wrinkle in Time, A
(Madeleine L'Engle)
Junior Fiction (202) Recommended for Grades 5-9. Meg and her friends become involved with unearthly strangers and a search for Meg's father, who has disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government. [Kit added 04/2011]