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Whether it's waking up to find toads in their shoes, becoming trapped on the roof, or searching for cheese when their cow only makes lemonade, the Pepin family always seems to get into the most bizarre scrapes. Lucky for them, they have an author with large psychic antennae and great problem-solving listeners who can join the Pepins on their hilarious adventures.

From the moment he's left as a foundling in a lambing-pen on Outoverdown Farm, Spider Sparrow is surrounded by animals. Adopted by the kindly shepherd and his wife, Spider comes to know all the farm creatures, including the crows he must scare away from the wheat. Every animal he meets trusts him, and Spider loves them all.

Hattie Owen prefers to be steeped in the familiarity of her small-town life than to think about the vast world beyond her own. Her family's boarding house is where she feels most at home, with its eccentric tenants and predictable routines, so different from the controlling and repressive home of her well-to-do grandparents who live nearby.

Flora, Ruby, Olivia, and Nikki don't understand it. Someone - they don't know who - is leaving books on their doorstep. Each comes with a mysterious message asking them to read the book and do something new. Before they know it, the four friends have a secret, girls-only book club...and are finding out new things about themselves and one another.

In 1963, Eleanor Roosevelt Dingman's mother was crowned the Bosetti Beauty of Spectacle, New York, Ellie's classmates decided she was invisible, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

It was the year Ellie discovered that in trying to keep her life together, she had to let pieces of it go.

In 1918 Wisconsin, 11-year-old Sterling North has an almost perfect life. He keeps skunks in the backyard, goes everywhere with his enormous Saint Bernard, and is building a canoe in the living room. The only trouble is life gets a little lonely for him and his father since his mother died. While scouting around the woods one afternoon, he discovers an abandoned, month-old raccoon.

Julia Song and her friend Patrick want to team up to win a blue ribbon at the state fair, but they can't agree on the perfect project. Then Julia's mother suggests they raise silkworms, as she did years ago in Korea. The optimistic twosome quickly realizes that raising silkworms is a lot tougher than they thought.

Both Maggie Fortini and her brother, Joey-Mick, were named for baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Unlike Joey-Mick, Maggie doesn't play baseball - but at almost 10 years old, she is a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Maggie can recite all the players' statistics and understands the subtleties of the game.

Foraging in fields and on rubbish heaps, and sharing food with his friend Crane-man, used to be enough to fill Tree-ear's days. But now all Tree-ear wants to do is watch master potter Min at work.

When Ramón Salazar swims into an underwater cave in a deserted lagoon, he discovers the black pearl, the Great Pearl of Heaven. As the son of a pearl merchant, Ramón knows that this is the rarest and most valuable pearl in the world. He quickly scoops it up and brings it home to his father.

The Spanish slavers were an ever-present threat to the Navajo way of life.This historical novel is about a young Navajo girl who is kidnapped and enslaved by Spaniards and then rescued by her husband-to-be.

While awaiting trial for murder and withholding from the king the obligatory fifth of the gold found in Cibola, Esteban, a 17-year-old cartographer, recalls his adventures with a band of conquistadors.

The fate of Karana, heroine of Island of the Blue Dolphins, is revealed in this moving story of her niece, Zia. Finding her aunt is the strongest force in Zia's life, and in the hope of doing so, Zia moves to the Santa Barbara Mission, where she plans to go the Island where someone has seen her aunt - still alive after 18 years.

A young Eskimo girl encounters frightening obstacles when she takes her father's place in the Iditarod, the annual 1,172-mile dogsled race in Alaska.

No woman in all of our history has captured the imagination like the young Shoshone girl Sacagawea, who served as in interpreter and often as a guide for Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition into our uncharted West.