Sahara Special
Esmé Raji Codell, author of the bestsellingEducating Esmé: Diary of a  Teacher's First Year, makes her children's book debut with the  warm, funny novelSahara Special. "Can't a woman get a divorce without her kid going special ed on her?"  This is the question Sahara's mother asks her daughter after a huge  stack of letters that she'd written to her dad (but never mailed) falls  out of her locker and on to her teacher's feet. When those letters are  confiscated and locked up in the school counselor's filing cabinet,  Sahara decides she will stop supplying "evidence" to the school; she  stops doing her assignments, and is subsequently paired up with a  Special Needs teacher, a fate equivalent to being "the street person of  a school." What no one knows is that the newly dubbed "Sahara Special" is really  "Sahara Jones, Secret Writer," a girl who hides herHeart-Wrenching  Life Story and Amazing Adventuresbehind a public library shelf. No  one, that is, until her show-stealing, deliciously unorthodox  fifth-grade teacher Madame Poitier (Miss Pointy) arrives on the scene to  remind her, so simply, that "a writer writes." Any child with a secret  self (every child) will revel in Sahara's clear-sighted observations and  sense of humor about a world that doesn't see who she really is. As in  Sharon Creech'sLove That  Dog, readers will meet a likeable, difficult-at-first student  and an extraordinary teacher who transforms lives by sharing her love of  story and words. Highly recommended. (Ages 9 to 11)--Karin Snelson