Central Kansas Library System

"Sophia's Aunt Stella comes to visit the family every year with her purple traveling case. When Sophia's dad offers to carry the case up the stairs to Stella's guest room, she adamantly refuses his offer and lugs it up the stairs herself. No one knows what is in the suitcase, but everyone is curious. Join Sophia in discovering what's inside Aunt Stella's purple traveling case."--

Clearing out the attic, Zoey opens the carved trunk and smiles as she picks up the small, leather-bound diary hiding inside. Curious, she leafs through the pages, and realizes this will change everything...

"It’s the summer before fifth grade, and for Ferris Wilkey, it is a summer of sheer pandemonium: Her little sister, Pinky, has vowed to become an outlaw. Uncle Ted has left Aunt Shirley and, to Ferris’s mother’s chagrin, is holed up in the Wilkey basement to paint a history of the world. And Charisse, Ferris’s grandmother, has started seeing a ghost at the threshold of her room, which seems like an alarming omen given that she is also feeling...

Rather than go to a spiritual retreat in Oregon with her mother and brother, eleven-year-old Frances insists on staying in Ohio with her odd aunt, but she soon begins to worry that the retreat may really be a cult.

The author writes about raising children late in life. "Liz Carpenter, a widow with grown children living . . . in Austin, Tex., agreed to her 79-year-old brother Tom's . . . deathbed request to rear his youngest children. It was 1991. . . . He had cared for the children, ages 14 and 11, and their 16-year-old sister since he was divorced by their mother. Now, with death requiring a shift of custody, the mother felt unequal to the task. . . . All three...

Traveling in Ireland with her journalist aunt and the charming Ryan, her aunt's godson, nineteen-year-old Maddie unearths the secret behind an Irish Republican Army bombing decades earlier, and the impact it has had on Ryan's and Aunt Sid's lives.

MacKenzie has dreamed of becoming a fashion designer all her life, and when she wins a scholarship for middle school at the Fashion Academy of Brooklyn she shines, but her unique style keeps her from fitting in until classmate JC gives her a makeover, hiding her natural-born talents.

How Tia Lola came to visit stay: Although ten-year-old Miguel is at first embarrassed by his colorful great aunt, Tia Lola, when she comes to Vermont from the Dominican Republic to stay with his mother, his sister, and him after his parents' divorce, he learns to love her. How Tia Lola learned to teach: Juanita and Miguel's great aunt, Tia Lola, comes from the Dominican Republic to help take care of them after their parents divorce, and soon she...

Twelve-year-old CJ believes her mom is dead and that she can only communicate with her through her aunt, who is a medium, but when CJ finds out that her mother is actually alive, she goes on a journey to find her.

When a dashing man from Mexico City brings Tia Dolores a ruby ring for Christmas, Josefina notices that things start going wrong and she decides to get to the bottom of the mystery.