Books for kids: 'Doll Bones' by Holly Black
Published: Friday, August 22, 2014 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, August 18, 2014 at 6:42 p.m.
“Doll Bones” by Holly Black. Zach, Alice and Poppy, friends from a Pennsylvania middle school who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to Ohio to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl. This creepy coming of age story is a 2014 Newbery Honor Winner.
“Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific” by Mary Cronk Farrell. In the early 1940s, young women enlisted for peacetime duty as U.S. Army nurses. But when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 blasted the United States into World War II, 101 American Army and Navy nurses serving in the Philippines were suddenly treating wounded and dying soldiers while bombs exploded all around them. The women served in jerry-rigged jungle hospitals on the Bataan Peninsula and in underground tunnels on Corregidor Island. Later, when most of them were captured by the Japanese as prisoners of war, they suffered disease and near starvation for three years. This book is a story of sisterhood and suffering, of tragedy and betrayal, of death and life. The women cared for one another, maintained discipline and honored their vocation to nurse anyone in need.
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