"I love being on this bus with all these girls who play sports, even if Sally Fontineau, who wants to ruin my life, is half a bus in front of me. It’s not like every girl is my best friend. It’s just a thing I feel a part of. It makes everything different."
No one asks Ella how she feels about moving halfway across the country in the middle of her sophomore year. But she ends up in Texas anyway, without plans for the weekend or friends to guide her through the alien campus of her new private school. So she decides to try out for the softball team—and she makes it! Now if only she knew how to throw, hit, and field the ball. "This is the part you can’t read in a book. You just have to do it." Ella has a lot to learn—on and off the field.
Softball changes Ella’s life, for better and for worse. She discovers a confidence she never knew she had and makes new friends—and enemies. When Ella falls for her snotty teammate’s gorgeous brother, suddenly she isn’t just fielding balls, she’s also dodging evil glares from girls in class and on the team.
If Ella’s going to survive this year, she’ll have to set some ground rules and learn to stand up for herself—in the game and in her life.
When Silas Heap unSeals a forgotten room in the Palace, he releases the ghost of a Queen who lived five hundred years earlier. Queen Etheldredda is as awful in death as she was in life, and she's still up to no good. Her diabolical plan to give herself everlasting life requires Jenna's compliance, Septimus's disappearance, and the talents of her son, Marcellus Pye, a famous Alchemist and Physician. And if Queen Etheldredda's plot involves Jenna and Septimus, then it will surely involve Nicko, Alther Mella, Marcia Overstrand, Beetle, Stanley, Sarah, Silas, Spit Fyre, Aunt Zelda, and all of the other wacky, wonderful characters that made magyk and flyte so memorable.
With heart-stopping action and a dash of humor, Angie Sage continues the fantastical journey of Septimus Heap.
They are America’s ultimate weapon in the war on terror. On the sea, in the air, or over land, they go where no one else will go, and do what no one else can do
Brannigan’s Brigands are billeted aboard the attack ship USS Daley in the Arabian Sea when they are handed a mission: patrol a sector of Afghanistan near the Iranian border. But the routine assignment puts them dangerously close to a large, mobile corps of Iranian Special Forces who have their own agenda. They plan to organize the scattered jihadists across the Middle East into a giant, cohesive armystarting with a rebel force already in the Afghanistan highlands.
Now, Brannigan and his SEALs are targeted to be the first infidels to die in the terrorists’ quest to establish no less than a modern day Persian Empire...
But when things start to fall apart, Cynnie needs a way to dull the pain.
Never say never.
This unflinching look at the power of addiction is the story of one girl's fall into darkness—and the strength, trust, and forgiveness it takes to climb back out again.
Set in the years after Lord of the Libraries, young halfer Juhg is still growing into his job as Grandmagister when an ally from the past, the wizened wizard Craugh returns with warnings of an ancient threat that may resurface--the so-called "Kharrion's Wrath" which endangers the existence of the world. Juhg must now unlock the secrets contained in the journals of his now absent mentor Wick, the former Grandmagister and legendary hero known as "The Rover." He must also continue his documented but clandestine search for a trilogy of books, which brings him through many different realms of their very dangerous world…and into conflict and contact with other races (elves, dwarves, and men) whose fates are all intertwined among the pages of the great book of Time. The Quest for the Trilogy weaves three separate quests into one as the young historian races against the clock to protect not just his world, but all others as well.
Everyone expected fifteen-year-old Matt Shaw to be Jeffords Junior High's star basketball player. But Matt never went out for the team. He won't even touch a ball anymore, and he hardly talks to anyone. No one understands why he's changed, but Matt knows that it's his "golden child" older brother who's really been doing all the changing. Matt can't imagine what would happen to his family if word got out about Neal's drug habit and the strung-out strangers he's seen coming and going from the house when their parents aren't home. Matt can't tell anyone what he knows - not his parents, not the police detective who refuses to leave him alone, not even Katie, the one girl he's ever really had feelings for. But even Matt has to wonder eventually if he's holding on to someone he may already have lost.
With his unparalleled ear for teen dialogue and emotions, Doug Wilhelm's new novel is a captivating look at falling apart, falling in love, and all the falling in between.
Half of me was thinking, Georgina, don't do this. Stealing a dog is just plain wrong. The other half of me was thinking, Georgina, you're in a bad fix and you got to do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.
Georgina Hayes is desperate. Ever since her father left and they were evicted from their apartment, her family has been living in their car. With her mama juggling two jobs and trying to make enough money to find a place to live, Georgina is stuck looking after her younger brother, Toby. And she has her heart set on improving their situation. When Georgina spots a missing-dog poster with a reward of five hundred dollars, the solution to all her problems suddenly seems within reach. All she has to do is "borrow" the right dog and its owners are sure to offer a reward. What happens next is the last thing she expected.
With unmistakable sympathy, Barbara O'Connor tells the story of a young girl struggling to see what's right when everything else seems wrong.
How to Steal a Dog is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
