Prairie Pasque Nominees 2007-2008

Marion Dane Bauer

In Anchorage, Alaska, two lonely boys make a connection—a brown bear injured just after his mother sends him out on his own, and a human whose father is a new keeper at the Alaska Zoo and whose mother and sister are still in Minnesota.

Grade Level: 3-5
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

Jeanne Birdsall

Sunny and carefree as a June morning, this old-fashioned story takes readers along on one family's unforgettable summer vacation. The four Penderwick sisters and their father rent a cottage on a Massachusetts estate: home to a kind teenage gardener, a lonely boy named Jeffrey, and his fearfully snobbish mother, who disdains her renters and threatens to send her son to military school.

Grade Level: 3-7
Publisher: Random House Children's Books

Tamara Bower

Serpot, ruler of a land where women live free, without men, leads her Amazon warriors in battle against Prince Pedikhons of Egypt, who has come to see for himself if women can equal men, even in battle.

Grade Level: 2-6
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

Michael Daley

A laboratory rat has escaped and has accidentally stowed away on a creaky old space station. But this is no ordinary rat. This modified, lavender colored rodent, named Rat, has been specially trained by scientists to be a super spy rat.

Grade Level: 3-7
Publisher: Holiday House, Inc.

James Deem

On the morning of August 24, A.D. 79, Mt. Vesuvius began to erupt. Within twenty-four hours, the entire city of Pompeii—and many of its citizens—had been utterly annihilated. It was not until hundreds of years later that Pompeii saw daylight again, as archaeological excavations began to unearth what had been buried under layers of volcanic rubble. Digging crews expected to find buildings and jewelry and other treasures, but they found something unexpected, too: the imprints of lost Pompeiians, their deaths captured as if by photographic images in volcanic ash.

Grade Level: 4-6
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company