Works by
Karen Hesse
(Writer)

• Wish on a Unicorn (1991)
  Mags doesn't believe in making wishes. What's the point? If wishes came true, she wouldn't live in a trailer and she wouldn't have to wear ratty clothes to school. But then her sister Hannie finds an old stuffed unicorn, and suddenly Mags' luck starts to change. Mags knows the unicorn can't really be magical, but what's the harm in letting Hannie believe that it is?

• Letters from Rifka (1992)
  "America," the girl repeated. "What will you do there?" I was silent for a little time." I will do everything there," I answered. Rifka knows nothing about America when she flees from Russia with her family in 1919. But she dreams that in the new country she will at last be safe from the Russian soldiers and their harsh treatment of the Jews. Throughout her journey, Rifka carries with her a cherished volume of poetry by Alexander Pushkin. In it, she records her observations and experiences in the form of letters to Tovah, the beloved cousin she has left behind. Strong-hearted and determined, Rifka must endure a great deal: humiliating examinations by doctors and soldiers, deadly typhus, separation from all she has ever known and loved, murderous storms at sea, detainment on Ellis Island--and is if this is not enough, the loss of her glorious golden hair. Based on a true story from the author's family, Letters from Rifka presents a real-life heroine with an uncommon courage and unsinkable spirit.

• Lavender (1993) with Andrew Glass, Illustrator
  Codie is secretly sewing a blanket for her favorite aunt Alix's new baby. Will the blanket be "fully done" by the time the baby is "fully done"?

• Lester's Dog (1993)
  A boy overcomes his fear of Lester's fierce dog when he has to protect an abandoned kitten.

• Poppy's Chair (1993, Revised 2000) with Kay Life, Illustrator
  Leah visits her grandparents every summer, but this year is different. Her grandfather has passed away. Leah and Gramm do the things they always do, but Leah doesn't talk about Poppy - she can't even sit in his chair. Finally, after a long talk with Gramm, Leah is able to express her fears about death, to think about Poppy, and to feel happy about her memories.

• Phoenix Rising (1994)
  Nyle's life with her grandmother on their Vermont sheep farm advances rhythmically through the seasons until the night of the accident at the Cookshire nuclear power plant. Without warning, Nyle's modest world fills with protective masks, evacuations, contaminated food, disruptions, and mistrust.Nyle adjusts to the changes. As long as the fallout continues blowing to the East, Nyle, Gran, and the farm can go on. But into this uncertain haven stumble Ezra Trent and his mother, "refugees" from the heart of the accident, who take temporary shelter in the back bedroom of Nyle's house.The back bedroom is the dying room: It took her mother when Nyle was six; it stole away her grandfather just two years ago. Now Ezra is back there and Nyle doesn't want to open her heart to him. Too many times she's let people in, only to have them desert her.Karen Hesse's voice and vision are grounded in truth; she takes on a nearly unharnessable subject, contains it, and makes it resonate with honesty. Part love story, part coming of age, this is a tour de force by a gifted writer.

• Sable (1994)
  Tate is overjoyed when a scrawny mutt turns up in the yard one day. She even persuades Mam and Pap to let her keep Sable, named for her dark, silky fur. But before long, the incorrigible dog begins to cause trouble with the neighbors. Will Sable have to go?

• A Time of Angels (1995)
    This magical book tells the story of Hannah Gold, a young Russian-American Jewish girl who lives in Boston with her two sisters, her great-aunt, and a family friend during World War I. Their mother was trapped in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution and their father enlisted in the U.S. Army. As they struggle to make ends meet, Hannah longs for the time when her parents will come back and lies awake at night waiting. On some nights, she sees angels in the sky. When a lethal flu epidemic hits Boston, Tanta Rosa and Hannah's sisters fall ill. When Tanta Rosa dies, their family friend Vashti fears for Hannah's life and sends her away. Hannah is helped at the train station by a young girl with violet eyes. After getting sick on the train, Hannah is taken to a Red Cross hospital where an elderly German man named Klaus Gerhart takes her under his wing. Through her new "Uncle" Klaus, she discovers that there are humans on all sides of the war with family just like her father. When she is well enough to travel, the young girl with violet eyes returns to take her home and Hannah realizes the girl is actually an angel. This touching novel provides a realistic glimpse of the World War I era and explores the development of relationships between friends and family in ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

• The Music Of Dolphins (1996)
  The stories of children raised by animals are often heartbreaking, but the animals are usually apes, or bears, or wolves. Mia has been raised since the age of four by a pod of dolphins, and when humans discover her, she has no memory of any other family. Her story is beautifully written in three voices from the same source. Mia's thoughts when she writes as a dolphin are printed in italics, and she is articulate and fluent. As she learns English, the print is large and the language childish. Gradually she adjusts to life on land with its rules and restrictions. The print changes to normal type size as her language ability changes. The scientists who have been studying her begin to demand behavior she can't reconcile with her dolphin ways. She begs to be set free to live her real life--in the sea, with her dolphin family. 1996, Scholastic, $14.95. Ages 12 up. Reviewer: Judy Silverman
  
     This is a truly enchanting and provocative story of a human girl raised by dolphins from the age of 4. When the scientists begin studying her, she amazes them with her unique abilities. She plays music, she learns speech and complex ideas, but when they restrict her movements, she cannot reconcile that with the dolphins' free ways. While still in her primitive state, Mila's responses are shown in very large type; as her language acquisition improves, the typeface reflects her sophistication. But Mila knows she will always be an object for study and takes the only path that will allow her to be happy.

• Out Of The Dust (1997) -- Winner 1998 John Newbury Medal
   The always-inventive author of A Time of Angels has done it again. She's found a new approach to telling a compelling historical tale. In this "novel" she renders the story of a young girl struggling to survive the dust bowl through first person narrative poems. Young Billie Jo tells her story in a series of thoughtful and touching poems as she tries to come to terms with the horrific death of her mother, the loss of her talent to play the piano, and the threat of losing her father to long cancer. In this testament to the strength of one girl's will, Hesse takes a poetic turn at telling the story of the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. 1997, Scholastic, $15.95. Ages 10 up. Reviewer: Alexandria LaFaye
  
     This Newbery Medal winner is written as a series of free verse poems by fourteen-year-old Billie Jo who creates incredible images to keep her soul alive in the bleakness of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Depression. Through her eyes we see the dust's coming "like a fired locomotive" that "hisses against the windows" and feel its textures as "my lowered face was scrubbed raw by dirt and wind. / Grit scratched my eyes, / it crunched between my teeth...." She tells of its treachery too, until it becomes almost a character in the book; a setting threatening takeover. And it might, if the character's voice and plot weren't so strong. Billie Jo writes of how she accidentally sets her mother on fire with a bucket of burning kerosene, how she fights to put out the flames, and is scarred physically and emotionally as her mother, nine months pregnant, delivers and dies in agony. "She smells like scorched meat. / Her body groaning there, / it looks nothing like my ma. / It doesn't even have a face." Billie Jo's swollen lumps of hands won't let her help her suffering mother, or play the piano, which once comforted her. The novel is harsh and ugly, strong stuff that made my eleven-year-old cry when we read it aloud. But the similes shine like jewels in dark caves, lighting the heroine, finally, to a resolution she can live with.

• Just Juice (1998) with Robert Andre Parker, Illustrator
  Letters and numbers still don't make sense to Juice Faulstich. She'd rather skip school and spend the day at home in the North Carolina hills, anyway. But when the bank threatens to repossess her family's home, Juice faces her first life-sized problem.

• A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin Karen Hesse (1999)
  Deep, literary, and soulful, Ms. Hesse once again holds us in her spell as she reconstructs the past at an intense time in United States history. Amelia Martin is fifteen years old, and she lives with her father and mother on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She works as a teacher and, more importantly, helps her father as assistant Keeper of the Light, Fenwick Island Lighthouse. Her first diary entry is Christmas eve, 1860, and the country is on the brink of civil war. We come to know the many daily rituals of tending the Lighthouse, the attention always on subtle nuances of weather and sky, wave and water. Her parents' relationship is torn apart by the issue of slavery, in the very same manner as the country itself, and so it is that the shadow of divorce mirrors the painful situation of our country at that time. The tapestry of plot and subplot is woven with brilliant craftsmanship--all in the simple language of a young, intelligent girl. There is a historical note at the end, explaining the history of the Civil War. This title is part of the distinguished "Dear America" series.

• Come On, Rain (1999) with Jon J. Muth, Illustrator
  In a hot city in the summer, a child spies the clouds rolling in. "Come on, rain!" she whispers. The neighborhood girls pull on their bathing suits and as the dust dances with the first rain drops, the friends dance and play in the streaming rain. The mammas join the girls in sweet abandon. The city street fills with the laughter and joy that only a summer shower can bring. Hesse writes beautiful words to capture the anticipation and exhilaration. "We turn in circles, glistening in our rain skin." The before, during and after rain scenes are spare watercolors producing the sequence of endless heat, a cloudburst and happy wetness. Ethnic diversity is represented among the characters with color coordination for each mother-daughter pair. The book is an eloquent celebration of a shared and simple experience.

• Stowaway (2000) with Robert Andrew Parker, Illustrator
     Fact: one Nicholas Young, age eleven, stowed away on H.M.S. Endeavor in 1768 and ended up spending three years sailing around the world with Captain James Cook. Karen Hesse takes this tantalizing tidbit of history and expands it into a young boy's voyage of discovery, both personal and geographic. In the course of reading Nick's journal we learn that he is escaping from something that makes the rats, bugs and scurvy of the trip personally worthwhile, at least at first. Later, after Nick has met and lost his Tahitian friend Tarheto, the boy begins to distinguish between injustices and to understand the value and the costs of his original rash action. Nick becomes secondary, however, to what Hesse is really doing: taking her readers on a very exciting and illuminating journey with Captain James Cook. Parker's illustrations and an evocative cover and endpapers help to make the book the most handsome of packages, too.

• Witness (2001)
  Leanora Sutter. Esther Hirsh. Merlin Van Tornhout. Johnny Reeves . . .These characters are among the unforgettable cast inhabiting a small Vermont town in 1924. A town that turns against its own when the Ku Klux Klan moves in. No one is safe, especially the two youngest, twelve-year-old Leanora, an African-American girl, and six-year-old Esther, who is Jewish. In this story of a community on the brink of disaster, told through the haunting and impassioned voices of its inhabitants, Newbery Award winner Karen Hesse takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who bear witness.

• Young Nick's Head (2001)
  Author's insights into life aboard the Endeavour during it's discoveries in the South Pacific.

• Aleutian Sparrow (2003) with Evon Zerbetz, Illustrator
  In June 1942, seven months after attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy invaded Alaska's Aleutian Islands. For nine thousand years the Aleut people had lived and thrived on these treeless, windswept lands. Within days of the first attack, the entire native population living west of Unimak Island was gathered up and evacuated to relocation centers in the dense forests of Alaska's Southeast.
  
  With resilience, compassion, and humor, the Aleuts responded to the sorrows of upheaval and dislocation. This is the story of Vera, a young Aleut caught up in the turmoil of war. It chronicles her struggles to survive and to keep community and heritage intact despite harsh conditions in an alien environment.

• The Stone Lamp: Eight Stories Of Hanukkah Through History (2003) with Brian Pinkney
  The story of Hanukkah is the story of triumph of light over darkness, of the small miracles that give hope to an entire people. In a series of eight powerful and evocative free-verse poems, award-winning author Karen Hesse captures the resilient spirit of the Jewish people through the voices of eight children at Hanukkah. The children-from Tamara in 12th-century England and Jeremie in 13th-century France to Havva in 17th-century Turkey and Ori in 20th-century Israel-have all experienced loss and hardship. But they are united by love, family, and their cherished stone lamp. The stone lamp provides each with comfort and hope, for every time its wicks are lit, the endurance of the Jewish people is re-illumined.

• The Cats in Krasinski Square (2004) with Wendy Watson, Illustrator
  When Karen Hesse came upon a short article about cats out-foxing the Gestapo at the train station in Warsaw during WWII, she couldn't get the story out of her mind. The result is this stirring account of a Jewish girl's involvement in the Resistance. At once terrifying and soulful, this fictional account, borne of meticulous research, is a testament to history and to our passionate will to survive, as only Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse can write it.

• The Young Hans Christian Andersen (2005) with Erik Blegvad, Illustrator
  Hans Christian Anderson was born in the slums of Odense, Denmark. His parents were hardworking, and Hans received little formal education, but his childhood was his opening to the world of folklore and fairy tales. Much of his work depicts characters who gain happiness in life after suffering and conflicts and many of his childhood experiences inspired his most famous tales, such as The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid. In this intimate and gripping biography of one of the world's greatest storytellers, Karen Hesse and acclaimed artist Erik Blegvad connect Hans's own experiences.

See also:

• Karen Hesse (2005) by Nzingha Clarke

• Karen Hesse (2005) by Rosemary Oliphant-Ingham
  This biocritical review focuses on Karen Hesse, whose work, Out of the Dust, won the Newbery Medal in 1998, and was awarded a Genius fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation - one of only two such fellowships ever given to writers for children or adolescents. It includes interviews with Hesse and her publisher, as well as considerable detail on how she writes, researches, creates book topics and characters, and weaves real-life experiences into all of her stories.