When the state of Maine threatens to shut down their island's one-room schoolhouse because of dwindling enrollment, eleven-year-old Tess, a strong believer in luck, and her family take in a trumpet-playing foster child, to increase the school's population.

When her blind dog slips his collar, twelve-year old Lily meets Salma Santiago, a young Hispanic girl whose migrant family are in Maine for the blueberry-picking season, and, based partly on their mutual love of dogs, the two forge a friendship while painting bee boxes for Lily's grandfather--but as the Blueberry Queen pageant approaches Lily and Salma are confronted with some of the hard truths of prejudice and migrant life.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm Eleven-year-old Rebecca is leaving Sunnybrook Farm to live with her spinster aunts and become the educated daughter her family needs. Her aunts resent her father, who left behind nothing for his wife and seven children but a forty-eight-dollar mortgage. When Rebecca climbs out of the stagecoach with her pink parasol, wide-eyed and nervous about her new life, she is quickly met with the strict rules of Aunt Miranda, who has...

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...

"Emily has dreams of drowning. Night after night, she's being sucked under--until the third night. She realizes it's not just a dream. It's really happening to someone--or something. On the rocky shore outside her house, Emily finds a large dog. He's barely alive, but she's determined to save him. She can feel his pain--and his determination to live. The dog is brought to the vet. And with Emily's help, he starts to improve. But is the bond...

Nine-year-old Julian almost died when he was born and he believes that he has a special connection to the universe because of that, and he wants to make his two moms and his sister (who turned into a black hole of discontentment when she turned fourteen) happy because he is convinced that soon he will die and travel to the dog star--but now they have moved to Maine and he resolves to also use his "uni-sense" ability to help Mr. X, their neighbor,...

A refugee from Cambodia, Dara's beloved grandmother is grief-stricken when she learns her brother has died, and it is up to Dara to try and heal her.

"Quinnie's teacher has disappeared. Quinnie suspects a kidnapping but her mom, even though she's the sheriff of their small Maine town, disagrees. So Quinnie teams with her glamorous new neighbor to investigate the mystery"--

In 1743, thirteen-year-old Marguerite Ledoux travels to Maine as the indentured servant of a family that regards her as little better than the Indians that threaten them, but her strength, quick thinking and courage surprise them all.

The way twelve-year-old Ked Eakins of Norton, Maine, sees it his life has been stolen from him, piece by piece; first by kyphosis, a spinal abnormality which has made him a social outcast at school and a target for the school bully, by his friends who have recently abandoned him, by his mother who left for the West Coast taking the insurance which might have saved him with her, and by his father who is a gambling addict who has lost the rent money--but...