ONCE UPON A CAMEL
By Kathi Appelt
Categories: Middle Grade Fiction / Historical / Friendship / Ages 8-12
Publisher: Atheneum / Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Publication Date: September 7, 2021
Pages: 336 pages
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Zada is a camel with a treasure trove of stories to tell. She’s won camel races for the royal Pasha of Smyrna, crossed treacherous oceans to new land, led army missions with her best camel friend by her side, and outsmarted a far too pompous mountain lion.
But those stories were from before. Now, Zada wanders the desert as the last camel in Texas. But she’s not alone. Two tiny kestrel chicks are nestled in the fluff of fur between her ears—kee-killy-keeing for their missing parents—and a dust storm the size of a mountain is taking Zada on one more grand adventure. And it could lead to this achy old camel’s most brilliant story yet.
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What we can say about the wind is that it is.
Neither young nor old, it comes, it goes. The same wind that crept around the massive feet of the dinosaurs now swirls around the toes of baby koalas.
It’s not like trees that grow old, or candles that flame out with time.
That breeze that looped around Zada once circled the giant Camelops of ancient Texas. It loops around you, it loops around me. It knew our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers and our great-times-a-thousand grandmothers.
It knew Zada’s ancestors too, even her prehistoric grandmother, poebrotherium, who was smaller than a coyote.
The wind. It just is.
Kathi Appelt is the author of the Newbery Honoree, National Book Award finalist, and bestselling The Underneath as well as the National Book Award Finalist The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Maybe a Fox (with Alison McGhee), Keeper, and many picture books including Counting Crows and Mogie, the Heart of the House. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband and five gifted and talented cats.
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| 9/29/21 | Book Trailer | The Clueless Gent |
| 9/29/21 | Review | StoreyBook Reviews |
| 9/30/21 | Excerpt | That’s What She’s Reading |
| 9/30/21 | Review | The Plain-Spoken Pen |
| 9/30/21 | BONUS Promo | LSBBT Blog |
| 10/1/21 | Review | Forgotten Winds |
| 10/1/21 | BONUS Review | Hall Ways Blog |
| 10/2/21 | Review | Missus Gonzo |
| 10/3/21 | Video Guest Post | All the Ups and Downs |
| 10/4/21 | Review | The Page Unbound |
| 10/5/21 | Guest Post | Chapter Break Book Blog |
| 10/5/21 | Review | Stories Under Starlight |
| 10/6/21 | Review | Julia Picks 1 |
| 10/7/21 | Scrapbook Page | The Adventures of a Travelers Wife |
| 10/7/21 | Review | Reading by Moonlight |
| 10/8/21 | Review | It’s Not All Gravy |
| 10/8/21 | Review | Book Bustle |
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