Every night people swarm to a theater in London to see the Elephant Man, whose real name is Joseph Merrick. They scream in terror at the sight of him. But beneath Joseph’s shocking exterior, he longs for affection and understanding. Disfigured in childhood by a rare disease, Joseph is rejected by his family, bullied in the streets, and ridiculed at his job. While touring Europe with a freak show, he’s robbed and abandoned. Joseph seems to encounter misfortune at every turn, but eventually finds friendship with a kind doctor in England.
Intermediate (ages 9-14)
Material appropriate for intermediate age groups
Blood Red Horse: Book One Of The De Granville Trilogy
A special horse named Hosanna changes the lives of two English brothers and those around them as they fight with King Richard I against Saladin’s armies during the Third Crusades.
The Beasts Of Clawstone Castle
While spending the summer with elderly relatives at Clawstone Castle in northern England, Madlyn and her brother Rollo, with the help of several ghosts, attempt to save the rare cattle that live on the castle grounds.
The Bromeliad Trilogy : Truckers, Diggers, And Wings
In a world whose seasons are defined by Christmas sales and Spring Fashions, hundreds of tiny nomes live in the corners and crannies of a human-run department store. They have made their homes beneath the floorboards for generations and no longer remember, or even believe in, life beyond the Store walls. Until the day a small band of nomes arrives at the Store from the Outside.
The Wee Free Men
A young witch-to-be named Tiffany teams up with the Wee Free Men, a clan of six-inch-high blue men, to rescue her baby brother and ward off a sinister invasion from Fairyland.
A Hat Full Of Sky
The Heroine: Tiffany Aching, incipient witch and cheese maker extraordinaire, once saved world from Queen of the Elves, and is about to discover that battling evil monarchs is child’s play compared to mortal combat with a Hiver. At eleven years old, she is boldest heroine ever to have confronted the Forces of Darkness while armed with a frying pan. The Threat: A Hiver, insidious disembodied presence drawn to powerful magic. Highly dangerous, frequently lethal. Cannot be stopped with iron or fire. Its target: Tiffany Aching.
The Illmoor Chronicles: The Ratastrophe Catastrophe (Illmoor Chronicles)
An odd assortment of bumbling humans and creatures comes together to find and free the children held by a young man who, under the influence of dark magic, spirited them away from the mismanaged town of Dullitch with his flute music.
Johnny And The Dead (Johnny Maxwell Trilogy)
After twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell suddenly starts seeing and talking to ghosts, he and his friends become involved in a battle to save the local cemetery.
Hunter
When fourteen-year-old Jordan and her younger brothers learn they’ll have to ride a rickety plane home for the holidays, they’re a little scared. But when it crashes on a wild and deserted peninsula in New Zealand, they are completely terrified.
The Grave
Thirteen-year-old Tom, an unhappy foster child in Liverpool, falls into a massive open grave and is transported to Ireland in 1847, where he finds himself in the midst of the deadly potato famine.