Central Kansas Library System

Ramona Quimby is seven and a half - "right now", as she likes to say. With her rapid growing come many changes, including new pajamas so cozy that Ramona wears them under her clothes to school. But even though Ramona's getting bigger, she sometimes feels left out of the more grown-up relationship between her older sister, Beezus, and their busy working mom. Mrs. Quimby tells friends she "couldn't get along without Beezus", but does this mean she doesn't...

Tallahassee Higgins enjoys the vagabond lifestyle she lives with her free-spirited mother, but when Mother goes to Los Angeles to try her luck in TV and movies, Tallahassee is placed with her uncle whose conventional suburban lifestyle makes her question her mother's values--and her own.

Ten-year-old Tracy, who lives in a children's home because her mother was forced to give her up, dreams of getting a good foster family where she can be happy until her mother comes back for her.

Bullied and shamed her whole life for being fat, twelve-year-old Ellie finally gains the confidence to stand up for herself, with the help of some wonderful new allies.--

On the night of the blue moon when mermaids are said to gather on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, ten-year-old Keeper sets out in a small boat, with her dog BD and a seagull named Captain, determined to find her mother, a mermaid, as Keeper has always believed, who left long ago to return to the sea.

A year after her mother has deserted the family, eleven-year-old Shelby goes to stay with her, deep in the Louisiana bayou, where they both confront old hurts and regrets.

The making of "Show ways," or quilts which once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves, is a tradition passed from mother to daughter in the author's family.

"Eleven-year-old Anthoni Gillis is not the kind of kid who believes in fairies, unicorns, or even the word "maybe." She's more of a comic-books girl. So when her mom brings her to Thunder Lake for a summer at the Showboat Resort, she doesn't believe the local rumors about the Boulay Mermaid. Anthoni has bigger fish to fry. She's always wanted a True Blue Friend. But it's been hard to find one, since for the past five years she's been bouncing from...

After losing her mom. Willa is grieving and having a hard time living with her dad and his new family on an island off the coast of Washington State. Her dad tries to cheer her up by taking her whale watching, something Willa's mom used to do. While all the passengers are on one side of the boat, Will encounters a humpback whale on the opposite side. Willa feels so lonely that she starts to talk to the whale--and the whale talks back! The whale, named...

Penelope is an imaginative girl, whose every day has been rigidly scheduled by her mother--until one day she falls through a hole in her calendar and lands in the Realm of Possibility, where she discovers that it, too, is stuck in a track of time, and only she can save it.