During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.

Sixth-grader Carter must adjust to the unwelcome presence of a know-it-all butler who is determined to help him become a gentleman, and also to deal with burdens from the past.

"He lands there in the summer of 1968, when the Apollo space missions are under way, Joe Pepitone is slugging for the New York Yankees, and the Vietnam War is raging. At home he lives with a father who has lost his way and a brother accused of robbery. And Doug's oldest brother is returning from Vietnam. Who knows what wounds his missions have given him? But Doug has his own mission, too, and it begins when he first sees the plates of John James Audubon's...

With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner's--want to change into a tourist spot.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery but possessed a mind and a vision that knew no bounds. So Tall Within traces her life from her painful childhood through her remarkable emancipation to her incredible leadership in the movement for rights for both women and African Americans.

As the years pass and his small village grows, Ethan watches for the fulfillment of the prophecy that someone born looking like the Great Stone Face up on the mountain will be the greatest, noblest person of his time.

While serving as a British Fencible to maintain the peace in eighteenth-century Ireland, Anson finds that his sympathy for a hedge master, a teacher devoted to teaching Irish children their forbidden language and culture, places him in conflict with the law of King George II.

Dragged into the political turmoil of a presidential election year, fourteen-year-old Cooper Jewett, who runs a New Hampshire dairy farm since his grandfather's death, stands up for himself and makes it clear whose first boy he really is.

"Herc Beal knows who he's named after--a mythical hero--but he's no superhero. He's the smallest kid in his class. So when his homeroom teacher at his new middle school gives him the assignment of duplicating the mythical Hercules's amazing feats in real life, he's skeptical. After all, there are no Nemean Lions on Cape Cod, and not a single Hydra in sight. Missing his parents terribly and wishing his older brother wasn't working all the time, Herc...