Constantly picked on, called names and beaten up by Dec Bowker and his gang, fifteen year-old Moo Nelson has retreated into a solitude that is punctuated only by music, food, and his nightly visits to a footbridge over the nearby A12 motorway. From that bridge, Moo watches the vehicles, observes the ebb and flow [...]
Jenny and Alexandra are best friends. They sit together on the school bus, play cards in Jenny’s tree house, spy on Alexandra’s brother, skip rope, and play Jenny Tag. Both girls are creative; Jenny makes puppets and invents games, and Alexandra draws and paints. Though the girls have had their disagreements, they [...]
Daniel is not looking forward to the class trip to a heritage farm. Small, skinny, and bucktoothed with coke-bottle glasses, he has enough problems as the bookish class runt without the added hassles of a day around pigs. Daniel’s last name is Hogg, and the class bully, Shane Coolen, has already taken great [...]
Thirteen year-old Maleeka Madison is laughed at and called names by her classmates. Tall and reed-thin and black, she is called beanpole and taunted because of her skin colour. To make matters worse, she wears clothes made by her mother, which often don’t fit properly, and she’s been a straight A student, a [...]
In their house at the end of the road down in Hog’s Hollow, that year of 1965, the River family dreams. While Flo writes her epic of life in pre-Civil War America, she dreams of fame and fortune and of moving her family to a mansion in the South. Twelve year-old Beau builds [...]
When thirteen year-old Jules makes a list of the talents of his best friend, Chris, and compares it to a list of his own abilities, the only thing he knows he excels at, by comparison with his intelligent, athletic, good-looking, quiet friend, is talking. So when he and Chris and their impulsive, wild-child sidekick, [...]
Martha Snapdragon has problems. She and her father, Luther, live in the hot and noisy boiler room of the Horace E. Bloggins, the school she attends and where her father is caretaker, and, because her father’s job pays very little, they never quite have enough to eat.
Although Martha works hard at her lessons, and [...]
Twelve year-old Maxwell Kane’s life is transformed when he meets Kevin. Despite the odds, the hulking giant who’s “never had a brain” and the fierce, mouthy genius locked in a crippled two-foot body become friends, and then more than friends. When they discover that, together they are more than the sum of their [...]
When Sarah and her best friend Ben observe the rotten Derek Henshaw getting turned into a frog right in the middle of the cornerstore while trying to shoplift, Sarah figures she has found a great topic for her science project. “Magic: Fact or Fiction,” she announces to Mr. Wyanth, the science teacher, who is [...]
