Roy, who is new to his small Florida community, becomes involved in another boy's attempt to save a colony of burrowing owls from a proposed construction site.
Twelve-year-old Meggie learns that her father, who repairs and binds books for a living, can "read" fictional characters to life when one of those characters abducts them and tries to force him into service.
In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.
Nim is a young girl who inhabits an isolated island with her scientist father and communicates, via e-mail, with the reclusive author of the novel she has been reading.
After reluctantly kissing a frog, an awkward, fourteen-year-old princess suddenly finds herself a frog, too, and sets off with the prince to seek the means--and the self-confidence--to become human again.
Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson learns he is a demigod, the son of a mortal woman and Poseidon, god of the sea. His mother sends him to a summer camp for demigods where he and his new friends set out on a quest to prevent a war between the gods.
When I was 14, I walked into the Hazelwood Branch of the Carnegie Library on my way home from Louis Field with my basketball under my arm and changed my life.