Material appropriate for intermediate age groups
While visiting a Navaho Indian reservation in New Mexico, the Aldens try to save a forest under threat of development by proving it is the site of a lost, buried village, but someone is sabotaging their dig.
When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would live in comfort-at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She invited her brother Jamie to go, too, mostly because he was a miser and would have money The two took up residence in the museum right on schedule. But once the fun of settling in was over, Claudia had two unexpected problems: She felt just the same, and she wanted to feel different; and she found a statue at the museum so beautiful she could not go home until she had discovered its maker, a question that baffled even the experts. The former owner of the statue was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and without her help Claudia might never have found a way to go home.
The story begins when Eric, Charles, and Andreas come upon the video store of their dreams, featuring a vast array of war games they’ve never even heard of (and they’ve heard of, and mastered, all of them). But there, amid the stacks of lurid boxes and scenes of cyber-carnage, is the most remarkable game of all, one pressed on them by the store’s elderly proprietor, a clever sample of computer warfare called “The Ultimate Experience.” Contained in a single diskette, without even a label, the unassuming game surpasses their wildest fantasies: the graphics are better than a movie, the simulated battlefields are historically and geologically perfect, and the action seems to put you right inside the screen. The feeling of “reality” is uncanny.But soon the three friends realize that the Game has a will of its own, and that far from being a dream, it has drawn each of them into his own personal nightmare one that they enter and exit without any control. For Charles, it means suddenly finding himself at the head of a doomed French battalion in the darkest days of World War I, forced to choose which men to send to their deaths. Eric, meanwhile, is a resistance fighter in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, on the very day in 1937 that German bombers reduced the town and its people to ashes. And Andreas, the oldest and most troubled and most vicious of the three, must face up to his own demons, discovering that, far from being terrified of the carnage around him, he revels in it. Little by little, the Game takes over their lives, leaving Eric, Charles, and their loved ones at its mercy while an increasingly violent Andreas plunges ever deeper into its seductive and deadly power. As the final showdown looms on the stage of virtual history, the three boys are inexorably drawn toward a memorable and horrifying conclusion.
It’s 1793, and there’s an invisible killer roaming the streets of Philadelphia. The city’s residents are fleeing in fear. This killer has a name–yellow fever–but everything else about it is a mystery. Its cause is unknown and there is no cure. This powerful dramatic account by award-winning author Jim Murphy traces the devastating course of the epidemic. An American Plague offers a fascinating glimpse into the conditions in American cities at the time of our nation’s birth while drawing thought-provoking parallels to modern-day epidemics.
Caddie Woodlawn is a real adventurer. She’d rather hunt than sew and plow than bake and tries to beat her brother’s dares every chance she gets. Caddie is friends with Indians, who scare most of the neighbors — neighbors who, like her mother and sisters, don’t understand her at all.
Caddie is brave, and her story is special because it’s based on the life and memories of Carol Ryrie Brink’s grandmother, the real Caddie Woodlawn. Her spirit and sense of fun have made this book a classic that readers have taken to their hearts for more than seventy years.
When he finds a lost beagle in the hills behind his West Virginia home, Marty tries to hide it from his family and the dog’s real owner, a mean-spirited man known to shoot deer out of season and to mistreat his dogs.
ses
Uses slave narratives, letters, diaries, military orders, and other documents to chronicle the various stages leading to the emancipation of slaves in the United States.
A collection of ghost stories with African American themes, designed to be told during the Dark Thirty–the half hour before sunset–when ghosts seem all too believable. With an extraordinary gift for suspense, McKissack brings us ten original spine-tingling tales inspired by African-American history and the mystery of that eerie half-hour before nightfall–the dark thirty. “The atmosphere of each selection is skillfully developed and sustained to the very end. Pinkney’s stark scratchboard illustrations evoke an eerie mood, which heightens the suspense of each tale. This is a stellar collection for both public and school libraries looking for absorbing books to hook young readers. Storytellers will also find it a goldmine.”
As a slag heap, the result of strip mining, creeps closer to his house in the Ohio hills, fifteen-year-old M.C. is torn between trying to get his family away and fighting for the home they love.
Why do the storks no longer come to the little Dutch fishing village of Shora to nest? It was Lina, one of the six schoolchildren who first asked the question, and she set the others to wondering. And sometimes when you begin to wonder, you begin to make things happen. So the children set out to bring the storks back to Shora.