Book

Destination Unknown...

Pedro de Salcedo could not have known what adventures lay ahead! His incredible voyage as ship's boy aboard Christopher Columbus' Santa Maria would bring both danger and excitement. Pedro captured his experience between the pages of a journal. If he did not return alive perhaps someone, someday would find it and learn of his incredible journey to the new world.

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.

When Steve brings home a time machine he bought for $2.50 at a garage sale, Max is suspicious. "There's no such thing as time travel. Or time machines." Then they both end up in the year 1250 in medieval England—Steve as Sir Robert Marshall and Max as his horse!—and Max must admit the machine works.

Sir Robert soon finds himself in the midst of a duel to the death with the Hampshire mauler, defending not only his honor, but his life. Can Max rescue him? Will the machine return him in time to spare his life? The 20th century never looked so good.

"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.

Fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is heading west on the Oregon Trail with his family by wagon train. When he receives a rifle for his birthday, he is thrilled that he is being treated like an adult. But Francis lags behind to practice shooting and is captured by Pawnees. It will take wild horses, hostile tribes, and a mysterious one-armed mountain man named Mr. Grimes to help Francis become the man who will be called Mr. Tucket.

It's 1816, and Remembrance Nye and her family are enduring a cold, hard summer in their new home in western New York. There's barely any food, since Papa's crops were destroyed by the late frosts. Mem's mama has never gotten used to their new home and finds it even harder to cope after she gives birth to baby Lily. Papa puts Mem in charge of caring for the baby, her younger brother, and their sick mother. Though Mem tries her best, it's hard to do the chores and watch them every moment. Then the worst happens: One stormy night Mama and Lily disappear.

Mary Marony's teacher has brought in chocolate bars for the whole class! She has hidden something inside the wrappers of five of them. Who will pick the chocolate surprises? Mary hopes not classmate Marvin Higgins—he wins everything and he's MEAN. When Mary takes the matter into her own hands, her actions reveal the biggest surprises of all.

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.

Jack Semple and E.D. Applewhite are back, in this middle-grade sequel to Stephanie S. Tolan’s Newbery Honor Book Surviving the Applewhites.

Teenager E.D., the not so artistic, not at all eccentric member of the unconventional Applewhite clan, can't believe the plan her father has hatched to save the family from financial disaster. He’s decided to transform their rural North Carolina farm into a summer camp for creative children.

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE DINOSAURS CURRICULUM KIT

Although they disappeared long ago, dinosaurs live on in children's imaginations. A young boy playfully imagines the "dinosaur who hatched in the backyard and grew to the size of the family car. . . . An appealing combination of fantasy and reality".

NEW STUDENT GETS OLD TEACHER The bad news is that Cara Landry is the new kid at Denton Elementary School. The worse news is that her teacher, Mr. Larson, would rather read the paper and drink coffee than teach his students anything. So Cara decides to give Mr. Larson something else to read -- her own newspaper, The Landry News. Before she knows it, the whole fifth-grade class is in on the project. But then the principal finds a copy of The Landry News, with unexpected results. Tomorrow's headline: Will Cara's newspaper cost Mr. Larson his job?

Spanish edition available.

When seventh grader Georges (the S is silent) moves into a Brooklyn apartment building he meets Safer, a twelve-year-old coffee-drinking loner and self-appointed spy. Georges is happy to hang out with Safer's warm, eccentric family, because lately things haven't been so easy at home: his dad lost his job, and his mom has started working extra shifts at the hospital. Life is no better at school, where Georges is the new target of Dallas, who is always on the lookout for other kids' weak spots (so he knows exactly where to hit them).

It's not like I meant for him to get hurt. . . .

After a year at the palace, Miri and her friends are ready to return home to their beloved Mount Eskel. But when the king orders Miri to start her own princess academy in a faraway swamp for three royal cousins, she is utterly dismayed. She must go on this journey alone, away from everyone she loves and everything she knows.

Miri's new students are not at all what she expected. Astrid, Felissa, and Sus are more interested in hunting, fishing, and wrestling than learning about etiquette and history, and they know next to nothing about their royal ancestry.