2016 Young Author's Award — ShortlistedCCBC's Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2015) - CommendedInstead of writing in a diary, twelve-year-old Jo Waller secretly edits Wikipedia entries to cope with the worst year of her life.Jo Waller has three brainy friends, two mostly harmless parents, and one deep, dark secret: she edits Wikipedia for fun. But when her twenty-four-year-old brother moves back home with his pregnant girlfriend, Jo is for...

2016 Junior Library Guild Selection2016 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction SelectionCCBC’s Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2016) — CommendedShe’s with the band, whether she likes it or not.Victoria Mahler is the sixteen-year-old only daughter of rocker Micky Wayne, whose band, Dusty Moon, took the world by storm when Micky was just a teenager. The band broke up under mysterious circumstances, but, after years spent off the road being a mom, Mic...

★**“Funny and very readable. Young readers who are drawn to silly, scary stories are going to love this sequel. A recommended purchase for young readers.” — School Library Journal (SLJ), starred review**Once Lou found out he was a werewolf, he thought things would get easier…But his parents decided his older brothers should be the ones to train him, and of course they're up to their usual pranks. When his parents announce they're going away unexpectedly and that th...

Lou Chandra-Pine is tired of being teased by his older brothers and getting lectured for what his parents call "bad choices."When his birthday comes and all he gets is a dusty old book and a card with his name spelled wrong, Lou makes a secret wish as he blows out his birthday candles: to be a huge beast. That way, his family would treat him with more respect.Soon afterwards, though, his body starts doing weird things—like growing hair on his feet, sproutin...

Just how intense are the Massey Obstacle Olympics?When Max tells Jordan that their school's end-of-year carnival will include the Massey Obstacle Olympics, Jordan is super excited. He's been jogging with his grandmother and dreaming of the chance to be in a real race. Even though chatter at school does make the obstacle course sound intimidating, and the new kid, Ivan, is trying to scare him off, Jordan knows that, with Max as his coach, he's ready for anything.

The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explores how a new kind of international military figure emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. In the era of the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Their careers reveal the ro...

Jordan had a tough time with the other kids at his old school.So, on his first day at Massey Elementary, he has a plan: to be absolutely invisible. His new classmates don't need to know that his grandmother is his best friend or that they put on shows together dressing up in elaborate costumes each night in their apartment. When he's forced to pair up with Max, a loud-mouthed loner with a love for Hawaiian shirts, Jordan's cover of invisibility threatens to be blow...

It’s everyone’s favorite day of winter semester: the class field trip to the museum!Jordan is excited to see the mummies and Max can’t wait for his first trip to the big city without his big sisters watching over him. But when Jordan gets distracted by an extraordinary costume display and Max flies off to the depths of the Bat Cave, the group carries on to lunch without them. Before the two friends know it, their class has left the museum and they’re all alone down...

The Renaissance of Letters traces the multiplication of letter-writing practices between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Italian peninsula and beyond to explore the importance of letters as a crucial document for understanding the Italian Renaissance.This edited collection contains case studies, ranging from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing to the mid-seventeenth century, that offer a comprehensive analysis of the different dimensions of lat...

CCBC's Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2015) - CommendedThe life story of a painted mustang set against the backdrop of America’s Great Plains in the late 1800s.It’s the late 1800s. A Lakota boy finds an orphaned mustang foal and brings her back to his family’s camp, naming her Paint for her black-and-white markings. Boy and horse soon become inseparable. Together they learn to hunt buffalo, their fear of the massive beasts tempered by a growing ...

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery, which just happens to border her backyard. And that backyard just happens to be the home of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past: there’s the dead United Empire Loyalist! The dead escaped slave who made her way north via the Underground Railroad! The dead quintuplet!Soo...

CCBC's Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2015) — CommendedWhen Dani sets out to uncover her father’s past, she also discovers her own future.Raised by her mother, eighteen-year-old Dani Lancaster only had six weeks to get to know her father, Sam, before he lost his battle with cancer. It was long enough to love him, but not long enough to get to know him — especially since Sam didn't even know himself.Left on the doorstep of an elderly coup...