For girls who are fans of Harry Potter and have outgrown the Disney Fairies series and the American Girl books, the Fairy Godmother Academy is the perfect series—fantasy books filled with magic and adventure but grounded by contemporary girls and issues.The series boasts an amazing Web site that allows girls to enter the world they visit in the books. There they can do activities both on- and offline, vote for things they'd like to see in the books, and connect with other Fairy Godmother Academy fans.Kerka Laine is not one to sit around and let things happen to her. She knows from her adventure with her friend Birdie that she comes from a long line of fairy godmothers and that she's destined to start training as a fairy godmother herself. She just hates waiting for the training to begin! When her dreams take her to Aventurine, the place where girls go to unlock their own special kind of magic, Kerka is more than ready. What she is not prepared for is the quest that the fairies give her: She must find her younger sister's voice before the sun rises on a mountain range called the Three Queens.Kerka loves a challenge, but how can she find something that is invisible? In this second Fairy Godmother Academy book, Kerka begins the dangerous journey that will determine not only her future as a fairy godmother but also the fate of her sisters.Join the Fairy Godmother Academy!Visit the Web site for games, activities, and networking with friends!www.fairygodmotheracademy.com

Product Description Nonfiction master Russell Freedman illuminates for young readers the complex and rarely discussed subject of World War I. The tangled relationships and alliances of many nations, the introduction of modern weaponry, and top-level military decisions that resulted in thousands upon thousands of casualties all contributed to the "great war," which people hoped and believed would be the only conflict of its kind. In this clear and authoritative account, the author shows the ways in which the seeds of a second world war were sown in the first. Numerous archival photographs give the often disturbing subject matter a moving visual counterpart. Includes source notes, a bibliography, and an index. Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Russell Freedman, Author of The War to End All Wars Dear Amazon Readers, About three years ago, I attended the Broadway revival of R.C. Sheriff's heartbreaking World War I drama, Journey's End, first staged in London in 1928. As I watched the play, I was reminded that World War I was my father's war, and when I left the theater that evening, I had decided to write The War to End All Wars. In 1916, my father ran away from home, changed his name, lied about his age, and joined the United States army. He was 14 years old. Back then, before social security numbers and computerized record keeping, it wasn't difficult to take on a new identity, and that's exactly what my father did. To begin with, he was sent to the Mexican border to fight Pancho Villa under General John J. Pershing. And when the United States entered World War I, he sailed to France with the 7th Infantry Division. In the fall of 1918, he was shot and gassed, and he spent several months recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. My father was proud of his service to America, and I grew up hearing nostalgic stories of his adventures as a teenage soldier. But as I eventually learned, the war's reality presented quite a different tale. This was the first global conflict to employ modern weapons--long-range artillery, rapid-fire machine guns, poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, and airplanes that bombed and strafed--the first war in which modern weapons inflicted mass slaughter, introducing new kinds of terror and record levels of suffering and death. It was now possible to kill your enemy at distance, without seeing him. Called the Great War at first, because of its massive and unprecedented scale, the conflict later was known as the War to End All Wars, because it was unthinkable, unimaginable, that humanity would allow such carnage to be repeated ever again. While I was working on my book, I spent a sunny autumn morning at the Meuse-Argonne American cemetery in France, the burial place of some 14,000 war dead, most of whom fell during the U.S. Army's Argonne Forest offensive in the fall of 1918. The graves are still visited, often by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men buried there. Scattered among the long rows of crosses and occasional stars of David, bouquets of fresh flowers and notes of remembrance pay tribute to those who gave their lives nearly a century ago. As I read the names on some of the headstones, I was uncomfortably aware that if my wounded father had ended up in that cemetery, I never would have existed. Some distance away, near Verdun, I visited a burial place of quite a different kind. During the year-long Battle of Verdun, a group of French soldiers in a trench were buried alive when a German artillery shell exploded nearby. Those men have never been disinterred. Today, the earthen mound covering their remains is a lovingly tended shrine. Rising from the mound, pointing skyward and glinting in the sunlight, the tips of the dead soldiers' bayonets can still be seen. It was said at the time that if the war could just once be described in honest and accurate language, people everywhere would demand that the fighting be stopped. That challenge was taken up by many ordinary soldiers of World War I, the men in the trenches, who recorded their experiences under fire in letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs that provide us today with eyewitness accounts of what it was like to fight in the War to End All Wars. Sincerely, Russell Freedman (Photo © Evans Chan)

When Will and Bet were four, tragic circumstances brought them to the same house, to be raised by a wealthy gentleman as brother and sister. Now sixteen, they’ve both enjoyed a privileged upbringing thus far. But not all is well in their household. Because she’s a girl, Bet’s world is contained within the walls of their grand home, her education limited to the rudiments of reading, writing, arithmetic, and sewing. Will’s world is much larger. He is allowed—forced, in his case—to go to school. Neither is happy. So Bet comes up with a plan and persuades Will to give it a try: They’ll switch places. She’ll go to school as Will. Will can live as he chooses. But once Bet gets to school, she soon realizes living as a boy is going to be much more difficult than she imagined.

The thirty-two stories in this collection imaginatively take us far across the universe, into the very core of our beings, to the realm of the gods, and the moment just after now. Included here are the works of masters of the form and of bright new talents, including:John Barnes, Elizabeth Bear, Damien Broderick, Karl Bunker, Paul Cornell, Albert E. Cowdrey, Ian Creasey, Steven Gould, Dominic Green, Nicola Griffith, Alexander Irvine, John Kessel, Ted Kosmatka, Nancy Kress, Jay Lake, Rand B. Lee, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald, Maureen F. McHugh, Sarah Monette, Michael Poore, Robert Reed, Adam Roberts, Chris Roberson, Mary Rosenblum, Geoff Ryman, Vandana Singh, Bruce Sterling, Lavie Tidhar, James Van Pelt, Jo Walton, Peter Watts, Robert Charles Wilson, and John C. Wright. Supplementing the stories are the editor's insightful summation of the year's events and a lengthy list of honorable mentions, making this book both a valuable resource and the single best place in the universe to find stories that stir the imagination, and the heart.