Renowned, award-winning author Avi pens a stark, unflinching tale of ordinary boys living in wartime as tensions — and desperations — mount among them.Twelve-year-old Patryk knows little of the world beyond his tiny Polish village; the Russians have occupied the land for as long as anyone can remember, but otherwise life is unremarkable. Patryk and his friends entertain themselves by coming up with dares — some more harmful than others — until the Germans drop a bo...

Jimmy is sure that his dog Abby is special. After all, it was Abby who (with the help of Jimmy & friends) helped nab the criminal Barnaby Bratford and shut down Barnaby's babysitting service, a front for robbing the nice folks of Quietville. Jimmy's parents, on the other hand, are starting to feel like Abby is one destructive little dog (she chewed up Mom's entire shoe collection!) and they insist on enrolling Abby in obedience training. The only problem is that the longer Abby's in class,...

Slip behind the Iron Curtain into a world of smoke, secrets, and lies in this stunning novel where someone is always listening and nothing is as it seems.Noah Keller has a pretty normal life, until one wild afternoon when his parents pick him up from school and head straight for the airport, telling him on the ride that his name isn’t really Noah and he didn’t really just turn eleven in March. And he can’t even ask them why—not because of his Astonishing Stutter, b...

From the author of Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to Not Reading comes a humorous new series about a boy whose new dog may or may not be a crime-fighting vampire.Jimmy Bishop loves doing 3 things:Laughing at funny dog videos online,watching his favorite show (Stop! Police!) on TV,and reading his favorite vampire book (Fang Goodness) over and over.His self-involved older sister and workaholic M...

“The Job of the Wasp is a madcap mystery, a macabre coming-of-age story and an unearthly fantasy—but it feels like childhood, like the world, like life.” —Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates and All The Dirty PartsA new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the He...

Fourteen-year-old March Wong knows everything there is to know about trees. They are his passion and his obsession, even after his recent falls—and despite the state’s threat to take him away from his mother if she can’t keep him from getting hurt. But the young autistic boy cannot resist the captivating pull of the Pacific Northwest’s lush forests just outside his back door.One day, March is devastated to learn that the Eagle Tree—a monolithic Ponderosa Pine near his home in Olymp...

Lauren Myracle brings her signature frank, funny, and insightful writing to this novel of a teenage boy’s coming-of-age.Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the king lobster who intimidates the other male lobsters, gets all the lady lobsters, and wins at life. At least not according to anyone in his freshman seminar. But Paul has found a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls and, just maybe, caught the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Guitierrez. Life as a shar...

In spare, understated prose heightened by a keen lyricism, a debut author will take your breath away.A new state, a new city, a new high school. Mike’s father has already found a new evangelical church for the family to attend, even if Mike and his plainspoken little sister, Toby, don’t want to go. Dad wants Mike to ditch art for sports, to toughen up, but there’s something uneasy behind his demands. Then Mike meets Sean, the new kid, and “hey” becomes games of bas...

In this thrilling adventure by bestselling author Oliver Pötzsch, thirteen-year-old Lukas has been trained as a swordsman by his father, a nobleman who was once a famed Musketeer. When the threat of war and accusations of witchcraft spread across the land, Lukas’s life is forever changed. He flees his home and vows to find his missing sister.Surviving as an outcast, Lukas encounters thieves and mercenaries, a strange astrologer, and a master swordsman. He also meets three other fen...

A harsh winter is coming. With it, a dark and pitiless magic…Lukas wants only two things: to rebuild his castle home in time to make it through the coming winter and to reconnect with the sister who was stolen from him in a plot against his family.But then an astrologer appears with foreboding news: his old adversary, Inquisitor Waldemar von Schönborn, has stolen three royal artifacts, which are required to coronate a new German emperor. With these valuable...

From New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde comes an unforgettable story of courage and finding forgiveness in an unforgiving wilderness.Seventeen-year-old Ethan Underwood is totally unprepared to search for his father in the Blythe River National Wilderness. Not only is he small, scrawny, and skittish but he’s barely speaking to the man after a traumatic betrayal. Yet when his father vanishes from their remote cabin and rangers abandon the ...

The Face on the Milk Carton meets The Impossible Knife of Memory in this ripped-from-the-headlines novel that explores the power of being an ally—and a friend—when a kidnapped boy returns to his hometown.Sam Walsh had been missing for three years. His older sister, Beth, thought he was dead. His childhood friend Josh thought it was all his fault. They were the last two people to see him alive.Until now. Because Sam has been found, and he’s...