Fiction

Spring has arrived in Camden Falls, and with it have come many joys and challenges. As Flora and Ruby near the first anniversary of their arrival in town, Flora prepares for a visit from her old best friend, Annika.

Tess McAlister truly believes in magic and is convinced that this is the year she will finally meet Santa Claus. Tess has many Christmas wishes, but her most fervent is not for herself, but for a friend. Her faith in the season results in a Christmas Eve so wondrous, so sparkling, that listeners won't be able to help but feel transformed.

The 100-year-old Doll family, beautifully crafted china dolls passed down through four generations of girls in one American family, meet their new neighbors, the Funcrafts, a doll family made completely of plastic and delivered straight from the factory shelves.

Best friends Annabelle Doll and Tiffany Funcraft have stumbled upon an unexpected visitor, a new doll named Tilly May. She arrived in a mysterious package, but she looks so familiar. Could she be Annabelle's long-lost baby sister? It'll take a runaway adventure to find out for sure. Are the dolls ready for life on the road?

When her best friend's family is evicted from their apartment, a nine-year-old black girl decides to do something about the situation.

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.

Kevin is trying to remember what he's supposed to do if there's an intruder in the house: stay calm, don't look scared, call 911. At the same time, he's doing his best to figure out how the heck some guy with a bow and arrow got into the room. The archer's explanation - "I lost my balance, fell off the tiger, and landed here" - just adds to Kevin's bewilderment.

A secret world of their own Jess Aaron's greatest ambition is to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. He's been practicing all summer and can't wait to see his classmates' faces when he beats them all. But on the first day of school, a new kid, a new girl, boldly crosses over to the boy's side of the playground and outruns everyone.

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.

The Captive is the first volume of the Seven Serpents Trilogy. Julian Escobar, a young Jesuit seminarian who travels to the New World, is the only human survivor when a hurricane sinks a ship laden with gold. He struggles ashore, where he meets a Mayan girl. She teaches him about Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, a fair-skinned Mayan god, who sailed away centuries before.

A young Spanish seminarian, whom the Mayas believe is their powerful god, Kukulcán, witnesses the coming of Cortés and the capture of the magnificent Aztec city, Tenochtitlan.

A 16-year-old boy sails from 19th-century Nantucket to a remote California bay with his two older brothers and finds himself in mysterious circumstances involving the death of one brother and the strange obsession of the other.

Spanish seminarian Julián Escobar, known to the Mayas as Lord Kukulcán and worshipped as a god, witnesses the fall of the Mayan and Incan civilizations with the coming of Cortés and Pizarro.