National Network for Equitable Library Service

Casey will have to do a lot of pet-sitting to earn the money she needs to buy Lightning, a beloved horse. Her hopes of buying Lightning are dashed when she learns that his owner has found a buyer and must sell the horse immediately. Across the street from Casey's house a mystery unfolds as a seldom-seen woman who seems to be able to read minds prepares to host a carnival and a yo-yo contest that boasts a $1500 prize. Casey's yo-yo is buried in her closet. She has a great talent and a greater case of stage fright.

Everything stops making sense for southpaw Travis Barkley when his parents die in a car crash and he is separated from his sister, Amanda. After years of being in the foster-care system, Travis receives a puzzling postcard from Amanda and heads to southern California to try to find her. His search is a dead-end until he meets Jesse and Ethan. With the help of his new friends, Travis continues to look for Amanda. Travis's love of baseball is rekindled when Ethan convinces him to pitch on his baseball team.

Piano tuner and jazz musician Frank Ryan is in Japan teaching bored housewives how to play piano. Then he gets a gig in a trendy underground bar and ends up ensnared with a young woman with a grudge and the crime boss who owns the bar. Drawn into Tokyo Girl’s vendetta, Frank stumbles into an underworld where transgressions are paid for by the flash of a razor-sharp cleaver. And for a pianist, that’s not a good thing. Tokyo Girl is the follow-up to Beethoven’s Tenth, featuring reluctant sleuth Frank Ryan.

Seven-year-old Ben loves pretending to be a robot, but his best friend Jessy is tired of being ordered to oil his knee joints and check his batteries. She says the robot game is boring and runs off to play with someone else. So Ben decides to build a real robot instead. He's built all kinds of things before: wind generators, solar-powered marble launchers, pinball machines. But none of his creations have ever really worked. Until now. When his robot begins talking, Ben is thrilled. However, nothing goes quite the way he thinks it will. Ben's robot is rather difficult to get along with.

The year is 1903, and Charlie Sutherland, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is on the run. Three years earlier, he was sent by Dr. Barnardo’s Home in England to work on the remote Alberta homestead of Albert and Buck Brooks. Charlie has been treated poorly by the two brothers, but he has endured. However, when Albert dies under curious circumstances, and Buck accuses him of murder, Charlie has no choice but to run. He ends up in Frank, a coal-mining town in the Rocky Mountains.

Nell makes two wishes on her birthday, but the next day they show little sign of coming true. Everyone in her household is busy and wants her out from underfoot and no one is willing to help her find her lost cat. In the end she finds more than a cat and she makes her own wishes come true with the help of a row of tall, bright, smiling sunflowers.

When the school principal announces a new uniform policy, Ian is pressured to fight the decision. His best friend Julia is determined to get him to protest the policy, but the principal is equally determined to convince Ian uniforms are a good idea. Ian wants nothing to do with the issue, at first. Then he discovers information that makes it impossible to not choose sides, no matter what the consequences might be.

Yossi Mendelsohn works hard to help his family survive after they flee Russia to find a better life in Montreal. He sells newspapers and carries bundles from the garment factory. Yossi longs to play "le hockey" with the French boys, but he has no skates. When his father falls ill and his sister and her fiancé organize a walkout at the factory, Yossi's dream of lacing on skates seems farther away than ever.

She lives in fear -- of the two-legs, of the noisy, massive trains that scream in and out of the station, of cats and rats and dogs and the dark of the tunnels. She lives in the subway, where the hard shoes kick her ribs, where shrill voices beat her ears, where she subsists on the garbage of the humans. But the little cat walks alone. Until she meets Candlewax, a street kid exiled from the subway tunnels, and Katherine, a student photographer who loves her on sight. From these two she learns that trust can banish fear and love provides a home wherever you are.

The "summer of love" is a time of idealistic freedom and experimentation for Emma, her cousin Megan, and the young people of Pike Creek. While her brother Eric's band practices in what Uncle Pat has dubbed the Hippie House, the girls suntan on their small lake and hitchhike into town to hang around the Drop-In Center. They find the growing crowd of long-haired musicians and hangers-on that begin to show up at the farm both enticing and a bit scary. The beginning of the school year brings excitement and change for Emma.