National Network for Equitable Library Service

Emery’s neighbor, Richard, is the kind of kid who gets under your skin. When Richard suggests a game of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors, Emery can’t come up with a good excuse not to play. Using chocolate bars as “stunt poo,” the boys play the classic prank of the burning bag on the doorstep, but this game has a modern twist. They videotape their neighbor’s reactions. At first the stunts are pure comedy, but the game gets serious and their harmless stunts are causing major harm, to Emery and his friends most of all.

At age twenty, Leena O'Neil walked away from her old life. Anything to avoid becoming a lawyer like her mother and older sister, Georgia. Three years later, Georgia contacts her, convinced that her husband is trying to kill her rather than divorce her. Reluctantly, Leena agrees to help. But the stakes go up when Georgia's husband, Mark, is murdered. Now she wonders if the person who killed Mark is out to get Georgia as well.

Several years earlier Nellie and her mother fled the Interior and its hated security police for the Outbacks, a loose-knit resistance of small cities, towns and rural areas. Since then her mother has disappeared and twelve-year-old Nellie is on her own, scrounging a living where she can find it. When loneliness opens her mind to flux, the ability to alter her vibratory state in the molecular field, she learns to travel to other levels of reality.

Dex Pratt’s life has been turned upside down. His parents have divorced and his mother has remarried. When his father attempts suicide and fails, Dex returns to their small town to care for him. But he’s not prepared for how much everything has changed. Gone are the nice house, new cars, fancy bikes and other toys. Now he and his wheelchair-bound dad live in a rotting rented house at the back of a cornfield. And, worse, his father has given up defending marijuana growers in his law practice and has become one himself. Unable to cope, Dex begins smoking himself into a state of surrealism.

Chloe McBride has some reservations about accepting her elderly great-aunts' invitation to spend part of the summer with them in Little Venice, but her initial reluctance is outweighed by her curiosity about the mysterious key that came with her aunts' note. She's also anxious to put the humiliating memory of a disastrous piano recital as far behind her as possible. Chloe's great-aunts tell her the legend of her great-grandfather, Dante Magnus, an ambitious magician who vanished without a trace almost a century earlier, and Chloe begins to search for clues to his disappearance.

Set during the last year of the American Civil War, this grim portrayal of the brutality of war through the eyes of a young soldier, Jake Clay as he joins the Union Army in the spring of 1864, determined to make his parents proud. His dreams of glory vanish, however, when he is wounded and taken prisoner in his first battle at Cold Harbor, Virginia, and confined to the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, where 30,000 soldiers face violence, disease and starvation.

Nick, Kia and their basketball-playing pals are back in this sequel to Eric Walters' very successful Three on Three. With the three-on-three tournament over, it's now time for tryouts for the school rep team. The question is will grade three students Nick and Kia have any chance to make the team? After all the rep team is normally made up only of grade five players. When Nick and Kia decide that they will try out for the team, they find they get a chilly and somewhat hostile reception from the older students. Even the coach seems to give them little hope of making the team.

When her mother died two years earlier, Izzy thought the world would change in some identifiable way, but it didn't. It didn't even slow down. Along with constantly watching her brother, Jason, to ensure he didn't repeat his involvement with drugs, Izzy has managed to get through school and the rest of her life using her mother's endless "rules" as guidance, even making up some of her own as she goes along. When her father starts dating again and then decides to get married, Izzy is unprepared.

Lucas has dinosaurs on the brain, but he's a little short on friends. When he gets a new book on how to make model dinosaurs, he's inspired to make one immediately. He's not so inspired by his new dinosaur-making kit: all the box contains is a test tube of clear liquid and a few instructions. But when he mixes the liquid into his papier-mâché goop, he gets much more than he bargained for, including the most unlikely friend.

Sixteen-year-old Spencer loves his job at the local racing stable, but when he becomes convinced that someone is drugging the racehorse Lord of the Flies, no one believes him. In an effort to find out who is behind a dangerous race-fixing scheme, he takes on some of the most unsavory members of the track community. By refusing to turn a blind eye, Spencer risks losing those he cares most about, including Em, the stableowner's niece.