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
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
It's Michael K.'s first day in a new school, P.S. 868, in a new city, Brooklyn, New York, and though he's only been there for twenty minutes, it's already seriously weird. His new teacher, Mrs. Halley, has put him in the slow group with two strange new kids. How strange?... Read More
“I’m not exactly in the Lake District.” Far from it. I mean, really far from it. Outer-space-far-from-it, in fact. For as this enormously entertaining tale begins, almost-twelve-year-old Liam is using his cell phone to record an explanation to his father about how exactly he ended up on a rocket to... 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
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
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
This fierce and engaging series introduces a world of wild, brave cats fighting for survival. Clans of cats roam forests and marshlands, battling enemy clans for control over their scarce prey. When Rusty, a kittypet, owned by a pair of Twolegs and living on bland kitty food, ventures into the... 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
"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
In Christopher Bing's brilliant, Caldecott Honor-winning interpretation of Thayer's classic 1888 narrative poem, we are astonished, amazed, and awestruck at his multilayered, wondrous scrapbook, set up like an old 1888 newspaper. Baseball lovers of all ages will spend hours poring over the tickets, newspaper clippings, old baseball cards, a stereoscope... Read More
Raven-haired Persephone is gathering spring flowers in the fields when the ground opens up, and Hades, King of the Underworld, ascends in his chariot and abducts her. "You will be Queen and light up my kingdom," he declares imperiously. Into the Underworld they race, while Persephone's friends race to tell... Read More
"On Career Day Lily visited her dad's work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation." Isn't that just the best first line? This is one of those high-powered Kids Save the World types of book, a postmodern... 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
“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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
This first book in the Tomorrow Girls series is the perfect book for a summer camping trip! Although it is set in a futuristic world in the middle of a war, much of the content has more of an old-fashioned feel. Best friends Louisa and Maddie are sent off to... Read More
Many kids daydream about having wings and being able to soar across the sky. Be careful what you wish for. For the narrator, 14-year-old Max, it’s no dream. “Welcome to our nightmare,” she says in her Prologue to the first book in the electric Maximum Ride series. Maximum Ride is... 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
