After a year in Balgownie, a small town in the highlands, soon-to-be thirteen-year old Laurel “Lemmie” Ferguson is still haunted by what happened in Edinburgh before she and her parents moved away. Ridiculed for her highly artistic approach to dressing, and her unusual, exuberant and sometimes clumsy behaviour, by the time Laurel left her private [...]
Raised by a god-fearing, and embittered father, and a mother who has quietly stopped practising her women’s magic because of her husband’s disapproval, Jack has been accustomed to sorrow and disappointment, and to working hard from dawn to dusk tending the sheep and the crops, gathering firewood, hauling water, and carrying food to the village [...]
Fifteen-year old Ned Marriner wanders the deserted chapels and aisles of the ancient cathedral at Aix-en-Provence, passing the time while his famous photographer father sets up his photo shoot outside. Though he is glad to be out of school two months early, and enjoys watching his father and his team of assistants plan the pictures [...]
The Once Upon a TIMES reports that Princess Vera is deathly ill, and that her father, the King, is frantic. Fortunately, Libby Gaberchik, fairy and healer, knows just what is wrong with the dear girl. Love. The princess is starved for it.
So Libby tells the king that Vera must eat three perfect peaches and marry [...]
Following the death of their mother, fifteen-year old Prosper takes his five-year old brother, Bo, and sneaks onto a train bound for Venice, a place neither boy has ever visited but that looms large in both their imaginations because of their mother’s stories. He is desperate to get them far from Germany and their aunt [...]
Emily Bing is happy to meet Matt Martinez, the boy who walks up her front walk to say hello soon after she and her family move into her Great-Aunt Miranda’s old house. Matt wants to know if the house is haunted, which it isn’t, but it does contain an odd little room at the top [...]
While the other people in their village celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, Tara and her seven-year old brother Suraj sit watching from the front step of the family hut, mourning the anniversary of their mother’s disappearance. One year earlier, the kind and beautiful Parvati had crept to Tara before dawn and told her that [...]
The daughter of a Yorkshire weaver, Meg Lumb has learned to wash and dye and spin wool, and help her mother with her younger brother, but from her father she has also learned to carve wood. She creeps away to the churchyard during quiet moments to play with Dilly-Lal and Drum-a-Drum, two peg dolls [...]
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 [...]
