A young girl eagerly awaits the birth of her baby cousin, while growing more and more confused by the way her relatives answer her questions.
Europe
Materials from Europe
Cat and Mouse
Mother mouse and mother cat taught their children about the world but one little cat and one little mouse weren’t paying attention. The cat and the mouse become friends and their siblings join them.
The Blood Confession
Cursed at birth, the beautiful and ruthless young Erzebet Bathory becomes obsessed with achieving eternal youth and begins to bathe in the blood of virgin girls to preserve her beauty. Based on the life of the “Blood Countess,” who lived in Hungary in the 1500s.
Don Quixote and the Windmills
Immersed in tales of knights and dragons and sorcerers and damsels in distress, Senor Quexada proclaims himself a knight and sets out on his first adventure against some nearby windmills that he thinks are giants.
Milkweed
The hardship and cruelty of life in the ghettos of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation of World War II is captured through the eyes of a young Jewish orphan who must use all his wits and courage to survive unimaginable events and circumstances.
The Hidden Children
Twenty-five Holocaust survivors who spent the war years as children hiding from the Nazis–from those shielded by courageous strangers to those given refuge in convents and orphanages–share their memories.
A Tale of Tulips, A Tale of Onions
Amid the tulipomania craze in seventeenth-century Holland, gardener Ed Vard Grooter’s love of tulips and sea captain Drooter Van Zooter’s love of onions almost bring them to blows.
Nory Ryan’s Song
When a terrible blight attacks Ireland’s potato crop in 1845, twelve-year-old Nory Ryan’s courage and ingenuity help her family and neighbors survive.
Montmorency And The Assassins
After twenty years as a gentleman, Montmorency is glad to be free of Scarper, his wretched alter-ego, but when a young friend is caught in the middle of a murderous political plot, Montmorency may have no choice but to call upon Scarper for help.
Anne Frank: A Hidden Life
Describes the background in which Anne Frank’s life and diary were set as she hid in an attic in Nazi-occupied Holland for two years.