From award-winning Norwegian author Arne Svingen comes "an uplifting coming-of-age story" (The Wall Street Journal) about a relentlessly positive teenager who uses his love of opera to cope with his less-than-perfect home life.

Bart is an eternal optimist. At thirteen years old, he's had a hard life. But Bart knows that things won't get any better if you have a negative attitude. His mother has pushed him into boxing lessons so that Bart can protect himself, but Bart already has defense mechanisms: he is relentlessly positive...and he loves opera.

Listening to--and singing--opera is Bart's greatest escape, but he's too shy to share this with anyone. Then popular Ada befriends him and encourages him to perform at the school talent show. Ada can't keep a secret to save her life, but Bart bonds with her anyway, and her openness helps him realize that his troubles are not burdens that he must bear alone.

The Ballad of a Broken Nose is a sweet story about bravery, fear, bullying, sports, and music. But most of all it is about the important days of your life, days when everything seems to happen at once and nothing will ever be the same again.

 

This book has been graded for interest at 10+ years.

There are 224 pages in this book. This book was published 2017 by Simon & Schuster .

Arne Svingen is one of Norway's most prominent writers for children and young adults. He has also written several novels for adults, radio plays for NRK, and graphic novels. The Ballad of a Broken Nose has been translated into eight other languages, and was awarded the Norwegian Ministry of Culture's Best Young Adult Fiction Award. Brown was Hakon Ovrea s' first book for children and received numerous awards, including the Norwegian Ministry of Culture's Literature Prize in 2013. The translation rights for Brown have been sold to 30 languages. He has also written several collections of poetry for adults. Oyvind Torseter is an artist and one of Norway's most acclaimed illustrators. He employs both traditional and digital picture techniques and has created six picture books on his own and many others with different authors. Torseter has received numerous prizes for his books, which have been translated into many languages. My Father's Arms Are A Boat (Enchanted Lion Books, 2012) was his first book to be published in the United States. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Kari Dickson grew up bilingually, as her mother is Norwegian and her grandparents could not speak English. She holds a B. A. in Scandinavian studies and an M. A. in translation.