title: Rain Forest Girl: More Than an Adoption Story
author:  Chalise Miner 
description: Grade 3-6-It is rare for an adoption story to focus on the waiting child rather than on the waiting parents. Daiane's adoptive mother has written a book about her daughter's life from the time the girl's ailing mother gave her up at age seven, through a two-year wait living in a convent while paperwork was completed, to her first confusing weeks in the U.S. Daiane's difficult and isolated life in the Brazilian rain forest is only briefly described. However, the author does an excellent job of conveying the strangeness of the adoption process, new English-speaking parents, and the first hotel stay and airplane ride for this nine year old. Readers share her relief when she meets an American girl who speaks Brazilian Portuguese. An epilogue introduces the 16-year-old Daiane, now Diana, who has visited the nuns in Brazil and dreams of returning there to help poor children, but in the meantime "kicks the soccer ball farther than anyone on her team." The black-and-white photos are informative. This title complements Perry Schwartz's Carolyn's Story (Lerner, 1996), a book that depicts an adopted Honduran child's life in the U.S.<br /><i>Nancy Schimmel, formerly at San Mateo County Library, CA</i><br />Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: THE WITCH OF DUVA
  
  by
  
  Leigh Bardugo
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  There was a time when the woods near Duva ate girls.
  
  It’s been many years since any child was taken. But still, on nights like
  these, when the wind comes cold from Tsibeya, mothers hold their daughters
  tight and warn them not to stray too far from home. “Be back before dark,”
  they whisper. “The trees are hungry tonight.”
  
  In those black days, on the edge of these very woods, there lived a girl named
  Nadya and her brother Havel, the children of Maxim Grushov, a carpenter and
  woodcutter. Maxim was a good man, well liked in the village. He made roofs
  that did not leak or bend, sturdy chairs, toys when they were called for, and
  his clever hands could fashion edges so smooth and fasten joints so neatly you
  might never find the seam. He traveled all over the countryside seeking work,
  to towns as far as Ryevost. He went by foot and by hay cart when the weather
  was kind, and in the winter, he hitched his two black horses to a sledge,
  kissed his ch