After something strange happens during a camping trip, twelve-year-old alien-obsessed Simon suspects he has been abducted, but was it real or just his overactive imagination?

Who was Ruth McBride Jordan? Not even her son knew the answer to that question until he embarked on a twelve-year journey that changed himself and his family forever. Born Rachel Deborah Shilsky, she began life as the daughter of an angry, failed orthodox Jewish rabbi in the South. To escape her unhappy childhood, Ruth ran away to Harlem, married a black man, became Baptist and started an all-black church. Her son James tells of growing up with

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Joyful young narrators celebrate feeling at home in one's own skin.

Overview: Every spring, Little Leaguers across the country mimic his stance and squabble over the right to wear his number, 2, the next number to be retired by the world's most famous ball team. Derek Jeter is their hero. He walks in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, and someday his shadow will loom just as large. Yet he has never been the best player in baseball. In fact, he hasn't always been the best player on his team. But...

Magician Danny and dwarf strongman Zamora try to find the connection between the end of the circus Mysterium, where Danny's parents were killed, and the disappearance of his guardian aunt, who is investigating gangs in Hong Kong.

During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.

After waking in a shallow grave, Breezy, a high school senior, crosses the country seeking answers about her death and resurrection, discovering along the way a host of supernatural creatures, as well as a human cult determined to "free" them at any cost.

"[I]n New York ... Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance"--Container....

Sophie is not happy to be back in the Congo for the summer, but when she rescues an abused baby bonobo she becomes more involved in her mother's sanctuary--and when fighting breaks out and the sanctuary is attacked, it is up to Sophie to rescue the apes and somehow survive in the jungle.

In the early 1700s, twelve-year-old Suzette, an Ojibwa-French girl, hopes that her father will win the fur-trapping contest so that he can quit being a voyageur and stay with his family year-round, but when he is accused of stealing, Suzette must use her knowledge of both French and Ojibwa ways to find the real thief.