When Sam realizes his interfaith parents can't figure out how to celebrate the holidays, he turns to God for answers.Twelve-year-old Sam Goodman knows the holidays are going to be difficult when his dog knocks over the Hanukkah bush/Christmas tree. His Jewish father and Christian mother have never quite figured out how to celebrate both holidays, and when the tree goes down, their resentments, simmering for so long, boil over. His older sister and younger brother don't seem to have any solutions for the family's predicament; his best friend Avi seems to know who he is as he prepares for his Bar Mitzvah; his secret crush, Heather, knows who she is and who she wants to associate with.

When sixteen-year-old Robbie Daniels leaves Port Protection, Alaska, for the nearby fishing town of Craig, king salmon season is less than forty-eight hours away from starting without him. The few salmon fishermen who can afford to hire help have already found their deckhands, and time is running out on Robbie's dream of fishing the open ocean for kings.A tip from a teacher puts Robbie on the trail of a legendary captain named Tor Torsen, but when Robbie boards Tor's fishing troller without permission, he happens upon a piece of Russian history that Tor would do just about anything to hide. Then Tor surprises Robbie by hiring him on, but for reasons darker than Robbie ever could guess.Catching king salmon from dawn till dusk, Robbie thinks himself lucky -- until he discovers his captain's true intentions. Tor is searching along the coastline for historic metal plaques buried by early Russian explorers laying claim to Alaska. When Robbie finds out how valuable these possession plaques are, he fears he may know too much to survive. Tor's wrath and a violent storm at sea put Robbie's courage and wits to the ultimate test.

A Maori boy with the gift of sight in 1803--a slave to Maori warriors hunting for the Moa bird--and fourteen-year-old Jordan--a plane crash survivor marooned on a deserted New Zealand island in the present day--experience interconnecting visions.

"If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it," begins Richard Peck's latest novel, a book full of his signature wit and sass. Russell Culver is fifteen in 1904, and he's raring to leave his tiny Indiana farm town for the endless sky of the Dakotas. To him, school has been nothing but a chain holding him back from his dreams. Maybe now that his teacher has passed on, they'll shut the school down entirely and leave him free to roam. No such luck. Russell has a particularly eventful season of schooling ahead of him, led by a teacher he never could have predicted--perhaps the only teacher equipped to control the likes of him: his sister Tansy. Despite stolen supplies, a privy fire, and more than any classroom's share of snakes, Tansy will manage to keep that school alive and maybe, just maybe, set her brother on a new, wiser course. As he did in A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, Richard Peck creates a whole world of folksy, one-of-a-kind characters here--the enviable and the laughable, the adorably meek and the deliciously terrifying. There will be no forgetting Russell, Tansy, and all the rest who populate this hilarious, shrewd, and thoroughly enchanting novel.