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Down the Rabbit Hole : An Echo Falls Mystery
Peter Abrahams
When the director of her school play suddenly has an accident, her shoes go missing, and things in town start becoming more strange with every passing moment, Ingrid must find a way to get to the bottom of the matter in order to set things right in her small community of Echo Falls once again.
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The Thief and the Beanstalk
P. W. Catanese
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the beanstalk. Everyone also knows that Jack's little adventure made him a very rich man. But what they don't know is what happened a long time after Jack.... That's where Nick comes in. Orphaned and desperate, Nick joins a rugged band of thieves in hopes of a warm meal and a little protection. In exchange Nick must help them break into the lavish white castle rumored to belong to an old man named Jack. Legend says it's full of riches from Jack's quest up a magical beanstalk decades ago. When Nick's dangerous mission leads him straight to Jack, he sees a chance to climb the famed beanstalk himself. But what Nick doesn't know is that things are different from when Jack made his climb. There are new foes at the top now. Ones with cruel weapons and foul plans -- plans that could destroy the world as Nick knows it. Will Nick come down the beanstalk a hero? Will he come down at all?
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The Witch's Boy
Michael Gruber
A wondrous journey through the realms of magicThey call him Lump. Ugly, misshapen -- more goblin than human child -- abandoned as an infant and taken in by a witch, he is nursed by a bear, tutored by a djinn; his only playmates are the creatures of the forest, whose language he learns to speak.But when Lump inevitably stumbles into the human world, his innocence is no match for the depths of people's cruelty, which turns his heart to stone, and fuels a vengeance that places him and his witch mother in deadly peril. Yet these disasters also send Lump on a journey of self-discovery, to realms deep within the earth and far beyond mortal imagination.In this stunning fantasy debut, Michael Gruber has created a world that is at once deceptively familiar and stunningly original, a world of cruelty, beauty, legend, truth, and above all, wonder. Readers will delight in the author's ingenious retelling of classic fairy tales and will marvel at the stunning new tale of a boy raised by a witch, a cat, a bear, and a demon.
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Girls Dinner Club
Jessie Elliot
The love of Junie's life for the past year is suddenly acting like a crazed puppy. Celia's dad has found the most ridiculous woman in all of Manhattan—and decided, after fifteen years of being single, to date her. Danielle's hot-guy-in-a-band ex-boyfriend is trying to convince her that he's "changed." Sometimes living life is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes, girls just have to make their own recipes.
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Forest Of The Pygmies
Margaret Sayers Peden, Isabel Allende
Alexander Cold knows all too well his grandmother Kate is never far from an adventure. When International Geographic commissions her to write an article about the first elephant-led safaris in Africa, they head -- with Nadia Santos and the magazine's photography crew -- to the blazing, red plains of Kenya. Days into the tour, a Catholic missionary approaches their camp in search of his companions who have mysteriously disappeared. Kate, Alexander, Nadia, and their team, agreeing to aid the rescue, enlist the help of a local pilot to lead them to the swampy forests of Ngoubé. There they discover a clan of Pygmies who unveil a harsh and surprising world of corruption, slavery, and poaching.Alexander and Nadia, entrusting the magical strengths of Jaguar and Eagle, their totemic animal spirits, launch a spectacular and precarious struggle to restore freedom and return leadership to its rightful hands.The final installment of Isabel Allende's celebrated trilogy of the journeys of Jaguar and Eagle soars with radiant settings, spirits, beings -- and the transformation of an extraordinary friendship.
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The Sledding Hill
Chris Crutcher
Billy Bartholomew has an audacious soul, and he knows it. Why? Because it's all he has left. He's dead.Eddie Proffit has an equally audacious soul, but he doesn't know it. He's still alive.These days, Billy and Eddie meet on the sledding hill, where they used to spend countless hours -- until Billy kicked a stack of Sheetrock over on himself, breaking his neck and effectively hitting tilt on his Earthgame. The two were inseparable friends. They still are. And Billy is not about to let a little thing like death stop him from hanging in there with Eddie in his epic struggle to get his life back on track.
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Ariel
Grace Tiffany
Ariel is beautiful and magical, a creator of dreams and of mischief. Sprung from the mind of a dazed sailor shipwrecked in the Bermuda Triangle, she rules half of her enchanted isle, dreaming of the savior from the east who will help her conquer all. When Prospero, a lost mariner, appears on the beach, his young daughter, Miranda, in tow, Ariel entices him with her visions of conquest. Together, she promises, they will defeat the mysterious tribe whose drums beat beyond the island's rain forest. The homesick Prospero struggles to resist Ariel's charms, but he almost falls under her spell when Miranda falls in love with their servant, the island boy Caliban. Ariel wants to march west, Prospero wants to sail east, and daughter Miranda wants to play on the beach with her boyfriend. Their clash comes to a head when Ariel, summoning her full powers, creates a cataclysmic storm that will change their lives and the island forever.Shakespeare scholar Grace Tiffany looks at the dark side of Shakespeare's The Tempest, investing a female Ariel with tremendous strength. The Tempest takes on new meaning for new readers, as Tiffany explores the imagination's power to transform grief into dangerous dreams. A tour de force by the author of My Father Had a Daughter and Will.
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Cubanita
Gaby Triana
Summer just started, and already I can't wait to get out of here to begin my mother-free life at the University of Michigan in August. But until that happens, I'll be teaching art at Camp Anhinga, same as last year. I start tomorrow, and Mom is anything but thrilled. Surprise, surprise. If it weren't for my father, I'd never get to experience college away from home. I'd be stuck, taking classes locally, learning to cook and sew the holes in my brother's underwear on the side, cultivating my domestic skills as a back-up career. Because that's what a good cubanita does, you know, thinks of nothing but home. Yeah. Okay.This is the story of Isabel Díaz, a Cuban-American who would rather just be an American, period. A funny and romantic summer read, as well as a touching story about discovering your roots, cubanita proves we all have room in us to become more than who we think we are.
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Autobiography of my Dead Brother
Christopher Myers, Walter Dean Myers
The thing was that me and Rise were blood brothers, but sometimes I really didn't know him. . . . And so Jesse fills his sketchbook with drawings and portraits of his blood brother, Rise, and his comic strip, Spodi Roti and Wise, as he makes sense of the complexities of friendship, loyalty, and loss in a neighborhood where drive–bys, vicious gangs, and abusive cops are everyday realities. Printz Award winner Walter Dean Myers delivers an unforgettable novel about life's hardest lessons, illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Christopher Myers.
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Moccasin Thunder:American Indian Stories for Today
Lori Marie Carlson
The ten stories that make up this collection are raw, original, and fresh. Although they are all about American Indians, they are as different from one another as they are from anything you've read before.A supermarket checkout line, a rowboat on a freezing lake at dawn, a drunken dance in the gym, an ice hockey game on public-access TV. These are some of the backgrounds against which ten outstanding authors have created their memorable characters. Their work -- both poignant and funny, sarcastic and serious -- reminds us that the American Indian story is far from over -- it's being written every day.