HSL's Kindle Deals of the Day for October 17, 2018
Today's Best Book Deals for Your Homeschool
(Prices are correct as of the time of writing, but y'all know sales move fast — check before you click the buy button! These are Amazon links — read more about how we use affiliate links to help support some of the costs of the HSL blog here.)
The Great Gilly Hopkins is $1.99. This middle grades classic takes a difficult, depressing story — of a girl in foster care who years to be reunited with her mom — and resists the urge to wrap it up with a traditional happy ending. That doesn’t make it any less warm or funny, though.
Bone Gap is $1.99. Booklist says, “'In Ruby's refined and delicately crafty hand, reality and fantasy don't fall neatly into place. She compellingly muddles the two together right through to the end. Even then, after she reveals many secrets, magic still seems to linger in the real parts of Bone Gap, and the magical elements retain their frightening reality. Wonder, beauty, imperfection, cruelty, love, and pain are all inextricably linked but bewitchingly so.'' For high school.
Still on sale
The Wednesday Wars is $1.99. This is a quirky charmer of a story about how Shakespeare can change your life, set in Vietnam-era New Jersey.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is $2.99. There’s so much to love about Douglas Adams’ galaxy-hopping novel that it’s hard to know where to start: Arthur Dent accidentally hitches a ride on a passing spaceship just before the Earth is destroyed to make room for an intergalactic superhighway — and as the last Earthling, sets off with his alien buddy, a trouble-making galactic leader, a girl he once tried to date, and a depressed robot to explore the universe.
Tuck Everlasting is $3.99. This one’s almost never on sale, but Babbitt’s story about the possibilities and costs of eternal life is always a profound read that leaves you with lots of talk about.
Breaking Stalin’s Nose is $3.99. This was one of our Readaloud of the Week picks: “Eugene Yelchin wanted to illuminate a piece of history that we don’t often get to read about in U.S. classrooms: the fear and horror that people in Stalin’s Soviet Union had to live with every day. Because Sasha’s only 10 years old, his understanding of what’s actually happening in his country develops along with the reader’s, and it’s a great book to launch discussions of propaganda, politics, and fake news.”
The Game of Silence is $2.74. Shelli loves this series about an Ojibwe girl navigating changes during U.S. westward migration: “The book opens with Omakayas standing on the shore of her home, an island in Lake Superior. In the far distance, she sees strange people approaching. Once they arrive, her family finds that these people are Anishinabeg people too. (We call them the Ojibwe or Chippewa people now.) They are haggard, hungry, and some of them have lost members of their family. Among them is a baby boy who has lost his parents, and now he becomes Omakayas’s new baby brother. These people are refugees who have been pushed out of their homes by the chimookomanag, or white people, and as the story unfolds, Omakayas’s family realizes that they, too, must leave their homes.”
The Iron King is $1.99. Lately I’ve been recommending Julie Kagawa to people who want something fantastic to follow up the Percy Jackson series. Like Percy, Meghan has her world upended when she discovers — on the 16th birthday — that she’s the daughter of a mortal mother and a faery king father. In this first book, Meghan discovers the truth about herself when she ventures in the dangerous world of faery to find her little brother, who’s been swapped for a changeling.
Strange the Dreamer is $2.99. School Library Journal said it better than I can: “There is a mythological resonance to her tale of gods and mortals in conflict, as well as in Lazlo's character arc from unassuming, obsessed librarian to something much more. VERDICT This outstanding fantasy is a must-purchase for all YA collections.”
Sunshine is $1.99. If you, like me, have a sweet spot for vampire stories with plucky heroines, you will appreciate this totally YA novel about a baker in a post-apocalyptic world who harnesses her own power to fend off the vampiric threat to her hometown.
Coraline The Graphic Novel is $1.99. If you are in the market for a spooky Halloween graphic novel, Gaiman’s now-classic about a girl who discovers another — darker — world behind a secret door in her new apartment is hard to beat.
Nightmares! is $2.99. Just in time for Halloween, this just-scary-enough middle grades story pits a group of kids against their biggest fears as nightmares start to invade the everyday world.
Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab: A Mystery with Electromagnets, Burglar Alarms, and Other Gadgets You Can Build Yourself is $1.99. This book is a MacGyverish delight, and if you have a budding maker, you need it, stat.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay is $2.99. Harry Potter completists won’t want to miss this script that kicks of the Newt Scamander movies, even though it takes place many years before The Boy Who Lived was born.
The Book Thief is $2.99. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. In 1939 Germany, an orphan falls in love with book — and Death himself narrates the stories. Holocaust stories can be both punishing and profound, and this one is no exception — but when you’re ready, it’s worth reading.
Howl’s Moving Castle is $3.99. Sometimes a curse can be just what you needed, as Sophie discovers in this delightful fantasy about a hat maker's daughter who's cursed to premature old age by the Witch of the Waste. To break the curse, Sophie will need to team up with the mysterious wizard Howl, who happens to be stuck under a curse of his own — but first, she'll have to get to his castle, which has a habit of wandering around. I love this as a readaloud, on its own, or (of course) a companion piece to the equally wonderful (though often quite different) movie adaptation.
Jackaby is $1.99. This first in the series (of which I am a fan) introduces the supernatural Sherlock Holmes and his new assistant, runaway young lady (who’d rather be a paleontologist) Abigail Rook.
The Glass Town Game is just $0.99. I snagged this one as soon as I saw it since it made Suzanne’s Best of 2017 list — she says “Similar in style to Valente’s Fairyland series with a dash of The Phantom Tollbooth, this would be a great read-aloud and introduction to the Brontes (although you may have to prepare your listeners for some post-book heartbreak when they learn about the eventual fates of the siblings). I especially loved the Jane Austen cameo, presented (as Valente apologetically notes) from Charlotte’s point of view (she’s not a fan).”
