Intermediate (ages 9-14)

Material appropriate for intermediate age groups

Strange Objects

During a school field trip, Steven discovers some gruesome relics from a seventeenth-century shipwreck and massacre–including the diary of a convicted murderer–and soon becomes obsessed with the past.

The Time Book: A Brief History from Lunar Calendars to Atomic Clocks

This book explores many other timely questions, such as how the first calendars and clocks were invented, why February is such an odd month, and what strange and wonderful things Einstein discovered about the nature of time itself.

The Bag Of Bones: The Second Tale From The Five Kingdoms

The good witches of Wadingburn are worried – there’s a new witch in town with a bag of magic bones, and she’s so evil she makes their toes ache…This is another fun-filled fantasy in the “Tales from the Five Kingdoms” stories that started with “The Robe of Skulls”.Truda Hangnail is a very wicked witch, banned from the Five Kingdoms because of her use of deep magic. Then she comes up with a fiendish plan to restore evil to the Five Kingdoms, transforming the good witches of Waddingburn into shrivelled, wicked old witches who will help her take over King Frank’s kingdom on his fiftieth birthday. Luckily, a sweet-natured half-human, half-elf named Loobly is witness to Truda’s evil spell and sets off to fetch help. As the birthday party looms and Truda’s evil gathers strength, Loobly enlists the help of Prince Marcus of Gorebreath and Gracie Gillypot, as well as old friends Gubble the troll and Marlon and Alf the bats, to stop Truda and send her packing to the house of the Ancient Crones to face her just deserts.

Children Save the Rain Forest

A profile of the International Children’s Rain Forest describes the lush beauty of the plants and animals that live there and considers the work and contributions by children all over the world to keep the area preserved.

Flight to Freedom

In Flight to Freedom, Anna Veciana-Suarez brings us Yara, an eighth-grader who lives in a middle-class neighborhood of 1967 Havana, Cuba. Her parents, who do not share the political beliefs of the Communist party, finally are forces to flee Cuba with their children to Miami, Florida. There, Yara records in her diary the difficulties she encounters in a strange land with foreign customs. She must learn English and go to school with new children. Her parents also adjust to the new country differently, and Yara’s father grows frustrated with her mother when she becomes more independent.

Pharaoh’s Boat

The author tells the story of how one of the greatest boats of ancient Egypt came to be built—and built again. In the shadow of the Great Pyramid at Giza, the most skilled shipwrights in all of Egypt are building an enormous vessel that will transport Cheops, the mighty pharaoh, across the winding waterway and into a new world.

There the ships lie until they are discovered by accident in 1954, carefully unearthed, and reconstructed under the direction of the chief of the Restoration Department of Egyptian Antiquities with the help of Nile boat builders.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote has forever memorialized the story of a Spanish gentleman who reads so many books about chivalric knighthood that he is convinced his own destiny is to become a knight-errant. And so he embarks upon a series of fantastical adventures across sixteenth-century Spain, accompanied by his faithful and philosophical squire, Sancho Panza.

Wicked Will: A Mystery of Young William Shakespeare

To the outside world, Tom Pryne is an orphan traveling Elizabethan England with his uncle-s theater troupe. In actuality, -Tom- is Viola, in disguise because her parents- Catholic sympathies have put them at odds with the law and forced them into hiding. When the troupe arrives in the sleepy little town of Stratford-on-Avon, Viola-s uncle is arrested for murder, and she joins forces with young Will Shakespeare, a local boy with a penchant for trouble and a smart turn of phrase, to uncover the real culprit.