In 1925, fourteen-year-old Ida Bidson secretly takes over as the teacher when the one-room schoolhouse in her remote Colorado area closes unexpectedly.

On a stormy night in the Kingdom of Pergamontio, an insistent knocking brings Fabrizio, teh servant boy, tothe door. Outside stands a soldier summoning Fabrizio's master, Mangus the Magician, to the king's castle. Because Mangus has been under house arrest for confessing to being a magician, he cannot imagine why the king si calling for him.

"It's 1951, and twelve-year-old Pete Collison is a regular kid in Brooklyn, New York, who loves Sam Spade detective books and radio crime dramas. But when an FBI agent shows up at Pete's doorstep, accusing Pete's father of being a Communist, Pete is caught in a real-life mystery. Could there really be Commies in Pete's family?"--

"Thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle is excited to return home from her school in England to her family in Rhode Island in the summer of 1832. But when the two families she was supposed to travel with mysteriously cancel their trips, Charlotte finds herself the lone passenger on a long sea voyage with a cruel captain and a mutinous crew. Worse yet, soon after stepping aboard the ship, she becomes enmeshed in a conflict between them! What begins as an...

Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret.

Five original stories where strange changes occur, from a boy and a cat changing places and a young man learning the price of selfishness to an invisible princess finding herself.

Ragweed, a young country mouse, leaves his family and travels to the big city, where he finds excitement and danger and sees cats for the first time.

An outcast eight-year-old boy, orphaned by the Civil War, is taken in by the owner of a traveling medicine show and, despite the doubts of others, years later he confirms the man's faith in him.

Branded as traitors by the king's authorities, Crispin and his guardian, Bear, flee to coastal towns in fourteenth-century England, where they perform a musical juggling act and bond as a family after befriending a disfigured girl.

A hoot owl, Ocax, rules Dimwood Forest and promises to protect the mice as long as they ask his permission to move about. Poppy is a deer mouse under the owl's protection, but when her fiance is killed by Ocax she defies the owl and begins a journey to a new place. Poppy wants to find a place where her family can live away from Ocax, but she has to do it without Ocax catching her.