Magic

Cindy Ella

Prom fever has infected LA especially Cindys two annoying stepsisters, and her overly Botoxed stepmother. Cindy seems to be the only one immune to it all. But her anti-prom letter in the school newspaper does more to turn Cindy into Queen of the Freaks than close the gap between the popular kids and the rest of the students. Everyone thinks shes committed social suicide, except for her two best friends, the yoga goddess India and John Hughes worshipping Malcolm, and shockingly, the most popular senior at Castle Heights High and Cindys crush, Adam Silver. Suddenly Cindy starts to think that maybe her social life could have a happily ever after. But there’s still the rest of the school to deal with. With a little bit of help from an unexpected source and a fabulous pair of heels, Cindy realizes that she still has a chance at a happily ever after.

Breath

Elaborates on the tale of “The Pied Piper,” told from the point of view of a boy who is too ill to keep up when a piper spirits away the healthy children of a plague-ridden town after being cheated out of full payment for ridding Hamelein of rats.

Seven Sorcerers

“Nin had never liked Wednesdays, but this one took the cake. On this Wednesday she woke up to find that it was raining buckets and that her little brother had ceased to exist.” Nin Redfern wakes up one Wednesday to discover that her little brother, Toby, has vanished and no one — not her mother, not her grandparents — can remember him. Only Nin can, and she’s going to get him back. But when Bogeyman Skerridge (who always gets his child) comes for Nin too, she realizes that finding Toby is going to be a lot harder then she thought. Toby is trapped in the House of Strood, which is located in another land called The Drift, and Skerridge can’t — or won’t — help her find him. Left with no choice, Nin heads into The Drift with her new friend Jonas. The Drift is filled with the fabulous and the terrible, but a plague is slowly killing all the magical things. The Seven Sorcerers who ruled there might have been able to prevent it, but in the end, even they have succumbed. Can Nin find Toby before he falls victim to a terrible fate in the House of Strood and before the plague makes it impossible for them to get home? Can she and Jonas avoid the tombfolk, mud men, and various creatures who want to stop them? And what is the secret of the Seven Sorcerers?

Chinye: A West African Folk Tale

Poor Chinye! Back and forth through the dark forest she goes, fetching and carrying for her cruel stepmother and lazy stepsister. Terror lurks behind every tree, and ghostly figures cross her path–but strange powers are watching over her, and waiting somewhere in the moonlight is a hut piled high with magic gourds.

The Painted Wall And Other Strange Tales (Aesop Accolades (Awards))

Honor Book for the Society of School Librarians International’s Best Book Award – Language Arts, Grades K-6 Novels. Selected as one of four recipients of the 2004 Aesop Accolade. Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Fiction Titles 2003. At about the time the Grimm Brothers were gathering their famous collection of folk stories and fairy tales in Europe, in China a similar collection of almost five hundred stories had just been compiled by the scholar Pu Sing-ling. Drawing on oral and written sources, he called his collection of the strange and wondrous Strange Tales from a Studio of Leisure. The fruits of his life’s work become immensely popular with storytellers who performed the stories in teahouses, where rapt audiences would sit for half a day drinking tea and listening to tales of ghosts, fox fairies, and other wonders. Almost unknown in the West, the stories are given new life in this important work by the masterful Michael Bedard.

Grandma Chickenlegs

In this variation of the traditional Baba Yaga story, a young girl must rely on the advice of her dead mother and her special doll when her wicked stepmother sends her to get a needle from Grandma Chickenlegs.