Middle

For Elise, nothing has seemed right since middle school started. She gets tortured by her locker partner and can't get her homework done. A new baby moves into her house, interrupting her wonderful life with Uncle Hugh and Aunt Bessie. Worst of all, things with her best friend, Franklin, are just not the same as they used to be.

A year after Stephie Steiner and her younger sister, Nellie, left Nazi-occupied Vienna, Stephie has finally adapted to life on the rugged Swedish island where she now lives. But more change awaits Stephie: her foster parents have allowed her to enroll in school on the mainland, in Goteberg. Stephie is eager to go. Not only will she be pursuing her studies, she'll be living in a cultured city again—under the same roof as Sven, the son of the lodgers who rented her foster parents' cottage for the summer.

Hiding is Roo Fanshaw’s special skill. Living in a frighteningly unstable family, she often needs to disappear at a moment’s notice. When her parents are murdered, it’s her special hiding place under the trailer that saves her life.

In Caddy's world, things are always changing. People vanish for days, come to live in your bedroom, hide under tables for hours and hours, count pennies in jam jars until they have enough to buy bread, and then the next day gild halos for the school play with real gold leaf. Caddy's home is a turmoil of piled possessions, lost belongings, and unexpected adventures. Her one constant is her three best friends, a charmed circle that she never wants to leave.

A year they'll never forget...

Ten-year-old Frederika (Fred for short) doesn't have much faith that the new teacher in town will last very long. After all, they never do. Most teachers who come to their one-room schoolhouse in remote, Alaska leave at the first smell of fish, claiming that life there is just too hard.

A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better - playing the piano - is impossible with her wounded hands.

To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. While other flee from the dust bowl, Billie Jo is left to find peace in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma - and in the surprising landscape of her own heart.

He came into this world named Jeffrey Lionel Magee, but when his parents died, his life changed and so did his name.

And Maniac Magee became a legend.

Even today kids talk about how fast he could run, about how he hit an inside-the-park "frog" homer, and about how no knot, no matter how snarled, would stay that way once he began to untie it.

"Did Mama sing every day?" Caleb asks his sister Anna.
"Every-single-day," she answers. "Papa sang, too." Their mother died the day after Caleb was born. Their house on the prairie is quiet now, and Papa doesn't sing anymore.

Then Papa puts an ad in the paper, asking for a wife, and he receives a letter from on Sarah Elisabeth Wheaton, of Maine. Papa, Anna, and Caleb write back. Caleb asks if she sings.

Hordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farley Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their ways. Contact with his quarry comes quickly and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young.

Until the day his father returns to their cabin in the Maine wilderness, twelve-year-old Matt must try to survive on his own. Although Matt is brave, he's not prepared for an attack by swarming bees, and he's astonished when he's rescued by an Indian chief and his grandson, Attean.

There's nothing eleven-year-old Marty Preston enjoys more than spending time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia.

But this time is different. This time Marty sees a young beagle on the road past the old Shiloh schoolhouse.

Marty feels sure the dog is being abused by his owner. When the dog runs away to Marty's house, his parents say he must bring him back. But it hurts Marty to return the runaway dot to his cruel master.

That's when Marty secretly decides he'll do anything to save the dog he names Shiloh.

This book chronicles the unforgettable account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games--games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."