New Children's Fiction

Although he is a very serious bear, Benjamin Bear has a funny way of doing things, like drying dishes on a rabbit's back or sharing his sweater without taking it off.

With World War I raging in Europe, eleven-year-old Anna is thrilled to learn that her cousin Tania is coming from Russia to stay with Anna's family on the lower East Side of New York, and although Tania is shy and withdrawn when she arrives, her love of cats helps her adjust to her new family.

Twelve-year-old Christopher "Kitto" Wheale, a clubfooted boy seemingly doomed to follow in the boring footsteps of his father as a cooper in seventeenth-century England, finds himself on a dangerous seafaring adventure with his newly discovered uncle, the infamous pirate William Quick.

Sixth-grader Peter Lee, in a desperate attempt to regain the popularity he had in elementary school, discovers that serving detention can win him important friends, much to the dismay of his over-achieving eighth-grade sister, Sunny.

A quirky and utterly logical seventh-grade girl named Emma-Jean Lazarus discovers some interesting results when she gets involved in the messy everyday problems of her peers.

When they agree to a summertime house swap with an unknown family in Paris, the four members of the Hitchcock family inadvertently get mixed up in a ring of international espionage.

Moving from Brooklyn to a rental house in the country strains the relationship between eleven-year-old identical twins Hannah and Anna Zimmer, a situation made worse by the ghost of a girl who is trapped in the house because of problems with her own sister eighty years before.

Nancy Drew becomes involved in a double mystery concerning a haunted bridge and jewel thieves.

Two fifth-grade girls, one of whom is the first black child in a middle-income suburb, play at being apprentice witches.

In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

Nancy receives a letter meant for a British heiress who has the same name and, in her attempts to contact the other young woman, faces danger from a man who operates a Lonely Hearts Club mail fraud.

Although mute, Delia quickly becomes part of the "family" at a most unusual orphanage, where classes include Fairy Tale Studies, a field trip may result in a monster sighting, and classmates include a hedgehog and a boy whose head is an onion.

Abandoned by his mother in an Acadia National Park campground, Jack tries to make his way back to Boston before anyone figures out what is going on, with only a small toy elephant for company.