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.

When he moves from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island, Kenny discovers that his new house is haunted by the spirit of a black slave boy who asks Kenny to return with him to the early nineteenth century and prevent his murder by slave traders.

In 1724 England, twelve-year-old Oliver Cromwell Pitts embarks on a journey from his seaside home in Melcombe Regis to London to find his father and his older sister, a journey filled with thieves, adventurers, and treachery.

Becky and her brother use some ingenious clues to identify the person who stole five children's books from the town's library.

Falsely accused of plotting to overthrow King Claudio, scholarly Mangus the magician, along with his street-smart servant boy, Fabrizio, face deadly consequences unless they can track down the real traitor by the stroke of midnight.

In 1880, Noah's aunt teaches the reluctant nine-year-old how to read as they explore the Colorado prairie together, Noah pushing Aunt Dora in her wheelchair.

"A wolf and bird must fight the starving time and find food, while a human boy learns to hunt"--

Patryk and Jurek are as much friends as rivals in the small Russian-occupied Polish village where they live. When, in August 1914, Patryk finds an old button on the forest floor, Jurek becomes wildly jealous. Not long after, World War I comes to Poland, bringing one invading army after another to the village. Jurek devises an exciting dare among the seven boys in their pack: whoever steals the best military button will be Button King. The boys agree....

When the first mate of the freight boat Neptune falls ill, it is up to Abigail, the captain's daughter, to steer the ship up the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York City.

The doomed flight of two young indentured servants from their unkind master brings together an unlikely assortment of people in a mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania town.