In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past.

The battlefield was soaked in blood. Screams of injured soldiers rang through the air. Eleven-year-old Nathaniel Knox knelt behind a rock, his gun clutched in his shaking hands. Nate had been heading to New York City to find his father. But now he was trapped in a terrible gunfight between American and British troops. -- But King George was like a snake with America gripped in his fangs - and he didn't want to let go. So now it was war - brutal, bloody...

Ten-year-old Beans Curry, a member of the Keepsies, the best marble playing gang in Depression-era Key West, Florida, engages in various schemes to earn money while "New Dealers" from Washington, D.C., arrive to turn run down Key West into a tourist resort.

"In the summer of 1965, Sophie's family becomes the first African Americans to move into their upper middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. When riots erupt in nearby Watts, she learns that life and her own place in it are a lot more complicated than they had seemed"--

"Jack and Annie travel back in time to 1925 Nome, Alaska, where they meet Balto, the famous sled dog, and help save the town from illness"--

Four years after Alfie Summerfield's father left London to become a soldier in World War I he has not returned but Alfie, now nine, is shining shoes at King's Cross Station when he happens to learn that his father is at a nearby hospital being treated for shell shock.

"In this nail-biting transatlantic mystery, threat of mass violence looms over Elizabeth II's coronation--can Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto crack the case and save the crown?"-- As Elizabeth II's coronation looms, DI Edgar Stephens is busy investigating the death of a local fortuneteller and his old pal, the magician Max Mephisto, is rehearsing for his television debut, a Coronation Day variety show. Upon hearing...

"Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago--and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with P.O. box addresses in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for...

"Sunny Lancaster is a winner. Wih-winner. As the best runner in the 1600 meter, Sunny can beat anyone by, well, a mile. But for Sunny, winning is boring. Buh-boring. Truth is, Sunny doesn't like running. Never has. What Sunny really loves ... is dancing. The boom-bap-bap of dance routines beats the chick chick chick of track meets any day. Sunny loves his team, though, so he can't quit, but he also can't be on a track team and not run. And he definitely...

"When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That's a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town,...