It’s been more than two centuries since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark undertook their famed expedition with the Corps of Discovery to chart the lands west of the Mississippi in 1803. They spent two and a half years, journeying 7,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back. Along with their… Read More

"On Career Day Lily visited her dad’s work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation." Isn’t that just the best first line? This is one of those high-powered Kids Save the World types of book, a postmodern… Read More

In Christopher Bing’s brilliant, Caldecott Honor-winning interpretation of Thayer’s classic 1888 narrative poem, we are astonished, amazed, and awestruck at his multilayered, wondrous scrapbook, set up like an old 1888 newspaper. Baseball lovers of all ages will spend hours poring over the tickets, newspaper clippings, old baseball cards, a stereoscope… Read More

I’ve been a Pinkwater fan forever. Or at least since the 1970s when he started publishing bizarrely comical children’s fiction books like Lizard Music and Fat Men from Space and one near and dear to New Jersey’s little heart, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Who… Read More

On the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most-challenged books of the 1990′s, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is number one with a bullet. The first volume in Schwartz’s three-part Scary Stories series is, in film terms, the Citizen Kane of books that… Read More

Shari, Michael, Bird and Greg have nothing to do in the boring, remote town of Pitts Landing, and decide to explore the creepy ramshackle Coffman house down their street. After pillaging the basement, they find old treasures: boas, old coats, and even a working automatic camera. Greg takes a photo… Read More

Nicknamed "Qwerty" after the six letters on the top left side of a keyboard, 13-year-old Robert Edward Stevens, a computer-loving boy, digs up a mysterious box labeled "Thomas A. Edison" in his West Orange, New Jersey back yard. Inside is an unusual machine which appears to have been buried for… Read More

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away . . . Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a… Read More

Sixteen confused people with little in common arrive at Sunset Towers, a sleek apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan in fictional Westingtown, WI. They are here because the will of paper magnate Sam Westing is about to be read. The group is diverse in the extreme: their professions include doctor, judge,… Read More

"In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work… Read More

Many kids daydream about having wings and being able to soar across the sky. Be careful what you wish for. For the narrator, 14-year-old Max, it’s no dream. “Welcome to our nightmare,” she says in her Prologue to the first book in the electric Maximum Ride series. Maximum Ride is… Read More

In Book the Fifth of the melodramatic but farcical and vocabulary-enhancing saga of the unremittingly unfortunate Beaudelaire siblings, "A Series of Unfortunate Events,” the three orphans are sent to Prufrock Prep, a dreadful boarding school whose uplifting motto is "Memento Mori" (Latin for “remember you will die”).On the back cover… Read More

Fergal Banfield’s reputation for being clever weighs heavily on him. It makes him want to hide from the world. The boy looks like an eccentric genius, with his untamable hair sticking up in clumps, and glasses that make his eyes look big. And then one day, at the market with… Read More

Noah’s idealistic dad is spending Father’s Day in a holding cell in their little Florida Keys town and he doesn’t want to get bailed out just yet. Dad admits he went a little overboard this time, though he’s not at all sorry he sank Dusty Muleman’s 73-foot gambling boat, the… Read More

Starting with a stern statement from the Grand Canyon, Arizona Police Chief Rebecca Fish, meet four fifth graders in big trouble. There’s long-haired, rebellious, cool guy Sam Dawkins; fun-loving, unacademic, pink-haired Kelsey Donnelly, African American grind Judy Douglas, and friendless genius Brenton Damagatchi. The whole thing starts because Sam is… Read More

Brian Selznick, who won a Caldecott Honor for his spectacular illustrations in Barbara Kerley’s extraordinary biography, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, has written and illustrated a wholly original, innovative and breathtaking masterpiece that bends all the rules of novel writing and illustrated stories. And it was just awarded… Read More

Camping with his Boy Scout troop on a remote beach on the Big Island of Hawaii on November 29, 1975, Graham Salisbury’s cousin, then 13, survived a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami. Now the author has retooled that momentous experience into a fine and thrilling adventure novel narrated by… Read More

At thirteen, twins Florida and Dallas are the oldest kids in the ramshackle Boxton Creek Home for Children, a place where rules are king. The two siblings—daydreamy Dallas and his spitfire of a sister, Florida—have broken all those rules many times, spending untold hours in the damp, dark, cobwebby basement… Read More

Sixth grader Griffin Bing is known as the Man with the Plan. But out of the 29 kids he invited to his secret sleepover at the old Rockford house the night before it is to be torn down, only Griffin and his best friend Ben Slovak show up. Just because… Read More