When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.

After sixty years of living in the upstate New York town of Thomaston, Louis Charles and his wife of forty years, Sarah, prepare for a trip to Italy to visit Louis' childhood friend, an artist who had fled his hometown many years earlier.

On his first visit to the city, an excited puppy sees tall buildings, hears loud buses, and tries to say hello to everyone he meets.

A busy backhoe loader describes all the items it hauls off a lot and all the fun it has getting dirty while doing so.

When friends Jack and Jill are injured in a sledding accident, their family and friends rally around them to help in their recovery.

Papa will not allow Clara to learn to read-he says that 'Farm people like us do not have time to read." But when the traveling bookwagon, with persuasive Miss Mary at the reins, arrives at their farm, Papa realizes he must change his mind. Based on the true story of America's first 'bookmobile.'

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.

All her life, Mitchell had eaten lustily and mindlessly. Food was her babysitter, her best friend, her confidant, and it provided a refuge from her fractured family. But when she stepped on the scale on her twentieth birthday and it registered a shocking 268 pounds, she knew she had to change the way she thought about food and herself: her life was at stake. She tells us how she discovered balance in an off-kilter world, finding beauty in acceptance...

When almost-sixth-grader Alex, a video game fanatic, is forced on a "playdate" with his neighbor Herbert, an inventor, the two travel to the twenty-second century and face off against aliens, who are not as beneficent as most people think.

Sent to live with relatives on their farm because of his unhappy home life, an eleven-year-old city boy meets his distant cousin Harris and is given an introduction to a whole new world.