Central Kansas Library System

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard proudly return to their home in the Boston Public Garden with their eight offspring.

Having no one to help her with her problems, a widowed mouse visits the rats whose former imprisonment in a laboratory made them wise and long lived. Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse with four small children, is faced with a terrible problem. She must move her family to their summer quarters immediately, or face almost certain death. But her youngest son, Timothy, lies ill with pneumonia and must not be moved. Fortunately, she encounters the rats of NIMH,...

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. in a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and...

Juno MacGuff is sixteen years old. After a one-time sexual encounter with her best friend Paulie, she learns that she's pregnant. Juno and Paulie like each other, but not enough to start a family, complete with a child. Paulie leaves all the decisions about the baby to Juno. During her pregnancy, which she treats with care but detachment, her relationships develop.

Dre Parker finds himself in China after his mother's latest career move. He and classmate Mei Ying immediately fall for each other, but cultural differences make this friendship impossible. Even worse, his feelings make an enemy of class bully, Cheng who is quite adept at kung fu. Dre turns to maintenance man Mr. Han, who is secretly a kung fu master and learns that kung fu is not about punches and parries, but maturity and calm. However, Dre realizes...

The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go. When a desperate woman finds herself on a date with a rugged man she has nothing...

Although separated by continents and decades, Josef, a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany; Isabel, a Cuban girl trying to escape the riots and unrest plaguing her country in 1994; and Mahmoud, a Syrian boy in 2015 whose homeland is torn apart by violence and destruction, embark on harrowing journeys in search of refuge, discovering shocking connections that tie their stories together.

"An otherworldly fairy tale, set against the backdrop of Cold War-era America circa 1962. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa is trapped in a life of isolation. Elisa's life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda discover a secret classified experiment"--Container.