Asia

	RED SCARF GIRL by Ji-Li Jiang Provides the story of Ji-li Jiang a twelve-year-old girl growing up in China in 1966, the year that Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and the changes it brought to her and her family.
	SNOW FALLING IN SPRING by Moying Li. This inspiring memoir follows Moying Li from age twelve to twenty-two, illuminating a complex, dark time in China’s history as it tells the compelling story of one girl’s difficult but determined coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution.
	SOLD by Patricia McCormick. When she is tricked by her stepfather and sold into prostitution, thirteen-year-old Lakshmi becomes submerged in a nightmare where her only comfort is the friendship she forms with the other girls, which helps her survive and eventually escape.
	BOUND by Donna Jo Napoli. In a novel based on Chinese Cinderella tales, fourteen-year-old stepchild Xing-Xing endures a life of neglect and servitude, as her stepmother cruelly mutilates her own child's feet so that she alone might marry well.
	A SINGLE SHARD by Linda Sue Park. Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself.
	WHEN MY NAME WAS KEOKO by Linda Sue Park. With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
	MASTER PUPPETEER by Katherine Paterson. Jiro becomes apprenticed to a harsh puppeteer at the Hanaza Theater in Osaka, where a series of thefts become the source of excited speculation.
	SECRET KEEPER by Mitali Perkins In 1974 when her father leaves New Delhi, India, to seek a job in New York, Ashi, a tomboy at the advanced age of sixteen, feels thwarted in the home of her extended family in Calcutta where she, her mother, and sister must stay, and when her father dies before he can send for them, they must remain with their relatives and observe the old-fashioned traditions that Ashi hates.
	KEEPING CORNER by Kashmira Sheth. In India in the 1940s, thirteen-year-old Leela's happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi's social and political reforms.
	CLIMBING THE STAIRS by Padma Venkatraman In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.
	HOMELESS BIRD by Gloria Whelan. Married and promptly widowed at 13, Koly finds herself in the grim position of being cast out by a society that has no place for girls like her. With a seemingly hopeless future in India, this courageous and spirited young woman sets out to forge her own destiny.