The Year the Gypsies Came

Set in apartheid 1960s South Africa, twelve-year-old Emily Iris explains that her mother and father have always been eager to take in travelers and vagabonds, relying on the presence of outsiders to ease the tension between them. Emily has her gentle older sister, Sarah, and Buza, the old Zulu nightwatchman, for company and comfort. But her parents’ continuing discontent leads them to welcome some peculiar strangers.  One spring, a family of wanderers—a wildlife photographer, his wife, and two boys—comes to stay, and their strange, compelling, and dangerous presence will leave the Iris family infinitely changed.

The Waorani: People of the Ecuadoran Rain Forest (Global Villages)

Describes the culture and plight of the Waorani, an indigenous tribe of the Ecuadoran rain forest whose environment and way of life are threatened by the encroachment of the industrial world.

Magic’s Child

The people Reason Cansino loves most are all in danger. Reason’s mother, Sarafina, has disappeared from the mental hospital in Sydney with Reason’s evil grandfather, Jason Blake. Jay-Tee, the closest thing Reason has to a best friend, has used all of her magic and faces death at any moment. Only Reason can find the answers within her family’s magic to save everyone who matters most to her.

Journey to the River Sea

This hair-raising novel, set in turn-of-the-last-century Brazil, introduces Maia, an orphan, sent from England to live with unfamiliar cousins on a rubber plantation. As Maia and her kind governess arrive in their new home, they each have secret hopes of adventure–which are immediately quashed by the Carters, who hate their adopted land are obsessed with re-creating England in the forest, right down to the watery puddings.

Silent in an Evil Time: The Brave War of Edith Cavell

Dutiful nurse, hospital matron, courageous resistance fighter, Edith Cavell was all of these. A British citizen, the forty-eight-year-old Cavell was matron of an institute for nurses in the suburbs of Brussels at the outbreak of World War I. Dedicated to the methods of Florence Nightingale, her intelligence and ferocious sense of duty had transformed the institute into a leading training center.When the Germans captured Belgium in the fall of 1914, an organization was formed to assist British and French soldiers trapped behind German lines. Edith was asked to help and she didn’t hesitate. From that moment forward, Edith sheltered escaping soldiers in her hospital, using trickery to keep the suspicious Germans from discovering them. She helped arrange a secret route to neutral Holland and back to England at great personal risk, enabling soldiers of all ranks to slip through German lines. Using the institute as part of an elaborate Allied escape route, Edith Cavell was responsible for one thousand soldiers eventually making their way home.But Cavell’s role was discovered and a German military court put her on trial in Brussels, where she was sentenced to be executed by firing squad. On October 12, 1915, she put on her nurse’s uniform and met her fate, immediately becoming a worldwide martyr and rallying point for the British in their war against Germany.

Dreamrider

Michael Terny is at his seventh school in four years and he knows that whatever he does, he will be ridiculed and pushed around. Michael is the fat kid. But Michael is also a lucid dreamer–he can recognize when he is dreaming and make the dream unfold exactly as he wants. Here he is safe and completely in control. Safe that is, until he finds the dream world and real world colliding, and a passage between the two promises more power than he has ever imagined. With the help of an unexpected friend at his new school, Michael plans how to use his power–to reward the good and wreak vengeance on the wicked.

A Hand Full of Stars

A teenager who wants to be a journalist in a suppressed society describes to his diary his daily life in his hometown of Damascus, Syria.

Carpe Diem

16-year-old overachiever Vassar Spore, daughter of overachiever parents, who in true overachiever fashion named her after an elite women’s college. Vassar expects her sophomore summer to include AP and AAP (Advanced Advanced Placement) classes. Enter a world-traveling relative who sends her plans into a tailspin when she blackmails Vassar’s parents into forcing their only child to backpack with her through Southeast Asia. On a journey from Malaysia to Cambodia to the remote jungles of Laos, Vassar sweats, falls in love, and uncovers a family secret that turns her whole world upside-down.

Pirate Wars

Jolly, Griffin, and their pirate friends are back, battling to save the world from the evil Maelstrom. Griffin leaves his magic room in the belly of a giant whale to take on the lord of the kobalins. Princess Sole dad fights to protect the sea star city and encounters an awe-inspiring serpent god. Together, Jolly and Munk make their way underwater to reach the center of the Maelstrom. There they meet the beautiful Aina, who is a polliwog like themselves but from an ancient time. Is she a girl or a ghost? A friend or an enemy?While the battle for the sea star city is raging, Jolly learns the shocking truth about Aina. As Jolly begins to understand the past, she realizes what she must do to save the whole Caribbean.

Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code

Sequel to Artemis Fowl, the Arctic incident. After Artemis uses stolen fairy technology to create a powerful microcomputer and it is snatched by a dangerous American businessman, Artemis, Juliet, Mulch, and the fairies join forces to try to retrieve it.