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Content Warning: This story includes depression, depiction of war, mentions of assault   It’s 1940, and Jody is moving with her military family yet again. This time, to a small naval base in Pearl Harbor. She’s always created a “top ten” list for each new home to help her adjust, and with Hawaii being so […]

Advanced Middle School and Up

Ava Baldwin is ready for her second year at the Accademia del Forte. Now that she knows that her fellow classmates, descendants of the so-called Greek monsters, have been lied to by the Olympians, she’s ready to help them uncover their ancestors’ true stories—if only she can stay out of the way of the new […]

Middle School

Ava Baldwin has always tried to keep her anger in check, just like her mom taught her. But when know-it-all classmate Owen King tries to speak over her yet again, Ava explodes and Owen freezes, becoming unresponsive. Although Owen recovers, Ava’s parents whisk her off to her mother’s alma mater, the Accademia del Forte, a […]

Middle School

Alex is twelve, and he did something terrible. A judge sentences him to spend his summer volunteering at a retirement home, where he’s bossed around by an annoying and self-important do-gooder named Maya-Jade. He hasn’t seen his mom in a year, his aunt and uncle don’t want him, and Shady Glen’s geriatric residents seem like […]

Advanced Middle School and Up

HAPPY 550TH BOOK REVIEW! To celebrate this momentous occasion, I present to you the thrilling conclusion to Margaret Peterson Haddix’s “Mysteries of Trash & Treasure” series. WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! Read Books 1 and 2 before reading Book 3   Colin has spent all summer solving mysteries with his friend Nevaeh. But they’ve only ever dealt […]

5th Grade and Up

Ratty Barclay wasn’t supposed to be born a four-foot-tall, walking, talking rodent, but thanks to the Barclay family curse, he’s had to live in hiding from the rest of the world. All he wants for his thirteenth birthday is to return to his family’s abandoned estate on Fairweather Island to somehow break the curse. Then […]

5th Grade and Up

Wizard West was dead for nearly an entire day before he noticed. And it is up to Faye, the daughter of West’s groundskeeper, to inform the wizard that he is a ghost who has lost all of his magical powers. (But not before the wizard tries transforming her into a cat!) To make matters worse, […]

Middle School

Sally Ride was the first American female astronaut on the Space Shuttle Challenger. She explored the universe of possibilities.   Sally Ride is the second astronaut to be featured in this series. The first was Neil Armstrong.   Sally Ride was a wild child. She would have been friends with Amelia Earhart, who also had […]

Kindergarten and Up

Yash is the best athlete at Robinette Middle School. He’s so good, in fact, that he’s already been playing on the high school’s JV sports teams. Imagine his shock when he learns that his JV practices have kept him from earning a state-mandated credit for eighth-grade PE. To graduate, he has to take Physical Education […]

5th Grade and Up

Ever since her dad died, eleven-year-old Jerry Blum and her mom have bounced around dead-end towns, staying in a series of rundown motels where her mother picks up housekeeping work and Jerry can get around in her wheelchair.  But the Slumbering Giant motel is different. Lights blink on and off in the surrounding trees, and people […]

Middle School