In SURVIVORS, Erin Hunter, creator of the popular WARRIORS series, introduces us to a world of dogs rather than cats. Readers will find it as compelling, eye-opening and exciting as its feline counterpart.Lucky, a sheltie-retriever mix, wakes from a dream of his mother telling him the story of one of... Read More
The Dark Unwinding will wind readers up in deliciously complicated knots. Nothing is quite as it seems … until all is explained at the end with total satisfaction. This “dark and stormy night” sort of gothic tale is made even more captivating with its totally original premise.Katherine Tulman’s wicked, money-grubbing... Read More
Joshua Dread is having a rough year in middle school. Bullies pick on him, and he seems to be causing pencils to explode, leaving burning handprints in his wake. To top it off? The supervillains – The Dread Duo – are his parents, and they're trying to destroy the world.... Read More
When last we heard from Snicket, narrator of the painfully sad but immensely popular stories about the miserable Baudelaire orphans, many mysteries had been left unresolved, chief among them, perhaps, what the heck was the VFD? Now Snicket returns with this first in a projected four-volume autobiographical account of his... Read More
On the American Library Association's list of the 100 most-challenged books of the 1990's, Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is number one with a bullet. The first volume in Schwartz's three-part Scary Stories series is, in film terms, the Citizen Kane of books that... Read More
Award-winning author Polly Horvath sets up a perfectly preposterous premise and a romping pace that will keep readers hooked. Madeline, a human child, finds her ordinary world intertwining with the local animal societies when she... Read More
“He looked into [the mirror] and saw the face of a brown-haired, unremarkable, somewhat tubby human child of about twelve years of age. He couldn’t bear the sight – where were his majestic horns, great canine fangs, and... Read More
The opening spread of THE TEMPLETON TWINS HAVE AN IDEA features a prologue that reads, in a sweeping script, “The End.”Lest we be fooled, the cantankerous narrator follows up with a question: “Did you enjoy the... Read More
There’s plenty of buzz at the café when Tupelo Landing has its very first murder: Who would kill Mr. Jesse? Recounted in Mo’s colorful voice and with plot twists galore, the story gathers speed like a hurricane.Mo (Moses) floated into Tupelo Landing as an infant, carried by hurricane flood waters. ... Read More
"In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work... Read More
Sixteen confused people with little in common arrive at Sunset Towers, a sleek apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan in fictional Westingtown, WI. They are here because the will of paper magnate Sam Westing is about to be read. The group is diverse in the extreme: their professions include doctor, judge,... Read More
“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away . . . Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a... Read More
Nicknamed "Qwerty" after the six letters on the top left side of a keyboard, 13-year-old Robert Edward Stevens, a computer-loving boy, digs up a mysterious box labeled "Thomas A. Edison" in his West Orange, New Jersey back yard. Inside is an unusual machine which appears to have been buried for... Read More
Shari, Michael, Bird and Greg have nothing to do in the boring, remote town of Pitts Landing, and decide to explore the creepy ramshackle Coffman house down their street. After pillaging the basement, they find old treasures: boas, old coats, and even a working automatic camera. Greg takes a photo... Read More
I've been a Pinkwater fan forever. Or at least since the 1970s when he started publishing bizarrely comical children's fiction books like Lizard Music and Fat Men from Space and one near and dear to New Jersey's little heart, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Who... Read More
It's been more than two centuries since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark undertook their famed expedition with the Corps of Discovery to chart the lands west of the Mississippi in 1803. They spent two and a half years, journeying 7,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back. Along with their... Read More
Iliona is starting a new diary on the advent of her family's journey from their home on the Greek island of Mytilini, and across the Aegean Sea to Alexandria, Egypt. It is Year 3 of the 221st Olympiad (or what we would call AD 107), and while she is excited... Read More
Along with her new governess, Miss Minton, orphaned Maia Fielding is sent from her posh London boarding school in 1910 to live with her aunt and uncle and twin cousins on the Amazon River (the "River Sea" of the title), near the city of Manaus, in Brazil. On board their... Read More
With the assistance of the Underground Railroad, eight-year-old Sadie Crosswhite and her family make it from Kentucky, across the Ohio River, and travel for days until they reach Marshall, Michigan, a place where they should be safe. Sixty of the 2,000 residents are Negroes, but the family is warned never... Read More
“Have you ever been thrown out of an airplane and fallen over a waterfall and been chased by angry warriors and poisoned by witches and rescued by weirdo guides disguised as little monk children?” exclaims Celia after returning from one of many family adventures. In the first installment of this... Read More
CJ, Brid, and Patrick Smithfork (ages twelve, nine, and six) are unhappy with the move from their love-worn Brooklyn home to a lavish Upper East Side apartment. This is the fruit of their father’s labor as a video-game inventor, but it is a world with which they are unfamiliar, and... Read More
Is there any boy who hasn’t imagined himself as a superhero? Or wished that his dad had superpowers? Here is the novel to give to a boy, ages 8-12, who wants a change of pace: a book that’s exciting, fast-paced, and imaginative and not about sports or wizards. Fourteen-... Read More
If your kiddo has ever felt the pressure of overwhelming responsibility, a sense of being alone in an endeavor, or even just the strain of trying to make a few bucks, he or she will easily relate to the characters in this book. Add a touch of romance (not too... Read More
Don’t judge this book by its width. Wonderstruck may be 600-plus pages, but it’s very reader friendly, because far more than half the novel is told in pictures. Selznick interweaves text and illustrations to actually tell two stories about a pair of hearing-impaired children, growing up half a continent and... Read More
In Book the Fifth of the melodramatic but farcical and vocabulary-enhancing saga of the unremittingly unfortunate Baudelaire siblings, "A Series of Unfortunate Events,” the three orphans are sent to Prufrock Prep, a dreadful boarding school whose uplifting motto is "Memento Mori" (Latin for “remember you will die”).On the back cover... Read More
Fergal Banfield's reputation for being clever weighs heavily on him. It makes him want to hide from the world. The boy looks like an eccentric genius, with his untamable hair sticking up in clumps, and glasses that make his eyes look big. And then one day, at the market with... Read More
Noah's idealistic dad is spending Father's Day in a holding cell in their little Florida Keys town and he doesn't want to get bailed out just yet. Dad admits he went a little overboard this time, though he's not at all sorry he sank Dusty Muleman's 73-foot gambling boat, the... Read More
Starting with a stern statement from the Grand Canyon, Arizona Police Chief Rebecca Fish, meet four fifth graders in big trouble. There's long-haired, rebellious, cool guy Sam Dawkins; fun-loving, unacademic, pink-haired Kelsey Donnelly, African American grind Judy Douglas, and friendless genius Brenton Damagatchi. The whole thing starts because Sam is... Read More
Brian Selznick, who won a Caldecott Honor for his spectacular illustrations in Barbara Kerley's extraordinary biography, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, has written and illustrated a wholly original, innovative and breathtaking masterpiece that bends all the rules of novel writing and illustrated stories. And it was just awarded... Read More
Camping with his Boy Scout troop on a remote beach on the Big Island of Hawaii on November 29, 1975, Graham Salisbury's cousin, then 13, survived a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami. Now the author has retooled that momentous experience into a fine and thrilling adventure novel narrated by... Read More
At thirteen, twins Florida and Dallas are the oldest kids in the ramshackle Boxton Creek Home for Children, a place where rules are king. The two siblings—daydreamy Dallas and his spitfire of a sister, Florida—have broken all those rules many times, spending untold hours in the damp, dark, cobwebby basement... Read More
