When Mr. Cheeseman and his three "smart, polite, and relatively odor-free" children journey to the not-so-distant past, they meet something utterly surprising--the alternate versions of themselves.

"A retelling of Cinderella about an indomitable inventor-mechanic who finds her prince but realizes she doesn't want a fairy tale happy ending after all"--

A twelve-year-old boy, worried that his parents may divorce, discovers that an island in the middle of the lake where he is spending the summer is the testing grounds of the mysterious Dr. Libris, who may have invented a way to make the characters in books come alive.

In 1852, when seventeen-year-old Katharine is sent to her family's estate to prove that her uncle is insane, she finds he is an inventor whose work creating ingenious clockwork figures supports hundreds of families, but strange occurences soon have her doubting her own sanity.

You can't just ask for the chance to fly . . .

When his dad announced they were moving to Iowa, Brian looked forward to making some new friends. But on his first day there he makes an enemy instead — Frankie Heller, the meanest kid in town. Brian needs to hang out with someone cool to get back on track. . . .Alex has always been the coolest guy around, and good with money, just like his dad. But now the family is struggling, and he needs...

Picked on, overweight genius Owen tries to invent a television that can see the past to find out what happened the day his parents were killed.

Neglected by her father who spends all of his time building the ghost machine to bring her mother back from the dead, twelve-year-old Emmaline decides that the only way to bring her father back will be to make the ghost machine work, or destroy it forever.

As the new computer lab teacher tries to bring Ella Mentry School into the twenty-first century with her peculiar inventions, second-grader A.J. struggles to survive without sugary snacks when principal Klutz bans junk food.

When Pappy bumps his head before bedtime, Olie cheers him up by inventing a super silly ray, and then they both become happy, sleepy robots.

Harold Fuzzwonker works with his parents to protect the family's top-secret recipe for the world's greatest soda pop from the evil Snood candy factory, but his best fizzy friend Floyd makes keeping the secret hard when he escapes from Harold's backpack.