Family Life Science

It's Maddy's turn to have a bayou summer. At first she misses life back home in the city, but soon she grows to love everything about her new surroundings - the glimmering fireflies, the glorious landscape, and something else, deep within the water, that only Maddy sees.

“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself.

Brooklyn Stevens sits in a pool of her own blood, tied up and gagged. No one outside of these dank basement walls knows she’s here. No one can hear her scream. A terrifying tale in the tradition of Carrie and The Exorcist.

After Daniel's young sister disappears in the woods, he starts to believe the myth about a witch and her terrifying hog who take little girls and keep them for 50 years....

The town of Spindrift is frequented by all kinds of Shadow Mages and charlatans. It's also home to the Orphanage School, where Finlay lives with Glim, Taya, and Eli. Just outside town is the painfully posh Brathelthwaite Boarding School, home to Honey Bee, Hamish, and Victor, Duke of Ainsley. When the two schools compete at the Spindrift Tournament, the stakes are high, tensions are higher, and some people are out to win at any cost. Before long, the orphans and the boarding school kids are at each other's throats.

In their eighth adventure, sisters Sabrina and Daphne Grimm must face their gravest mission yet. The Everafter War is over, and the sisters find themselves trapped in the Book of Everafter—a place where fairy tale characters can affect their own destinies. While trying to save their baby brother, Sabrina and Daphne begin changing events in the story to suit their needs.

When Mary Lennox was uprooted from her home in India and sent to live with her mysterious uncle, Mr. Craven, at gloomy Misselthwaite Manor, a very contrary Mary assumed the worst. But after exploring the grounds, she discovered that it just takes a little bit of magic to help gardens and friendships bloom.

This rollicking adventure for children comes from the pen of award-winning illustrator and author Chris Gall. Davey Martin just blasted off to Mars with his family and his robot dog Polaris. He thought it would be a great place to have adventures, but actually, it's kind of boring. What will he do? This book is sure to encourage children to be curious about their world.

Ever since Angus was a wee baby monster, living below the surface of Loch Ness, his parents tried to teach him to be a proper monster. But as Angus grows bigger, he gets sloppy. "Puggy-nit" shells (peanuts) are piling up; his "grottie" (dirty) laundry is in a heap; "tatties" (potatoes) litter the floor. It's a mountain of a mess! And as Angus's trash heap grows, pushing him away from the comforts of home, a surprising Loch Ness sighting of his own awaits on the surface of the lake....

Sylvester is a rock collector. One day he finds a magic pebble that makes wishes come true. He rushes home to share his good fortune with his parents. On the way, he’s frightened by a hungry lion and quickly asks the pebble to turn him into a rock, so the lion can’t eat him. It works - but there sits Sylvester on Strawberry Hill with no way to hold the pebble to wish himself back into a donkey. Seasons come and go as Sylvester’s parents desperately search for him....

In 1952, April is seven years old and adores her big sister, Annabel. But Annabel is failing her math class and desperately needs help with a tough math problem. April decides to write to Albert Einstein, asking him to give a hand.

People fear death (apparently just a tiny bit less than public speaking). We don't know how to talk about it, especially to children, and we're afraid to bring it up for fear of making people sadder. Yet children, especially, have questions, and this incredibly gentle and surprisingly light story is full of both comfort and vividly imagined answers. The first one gives the story its title: A boy hears the voice of his sister calling him one day, a sister he's never met because she died before he was born. The sister in the faded photograph on the wall.

This is a story of the days of chivalry in England and of young Myles Falworth, son of a lord unjustly disgraced for treason, who was forced to make his fortune as best he might in the days when men seemed made of iron. How he entered the service of a powerful lord, rose to knighthood, defeated his father's old enemy in thrilling combat, and at last won the friendship of the king is told against a background of the dangerous times of the 14th century that makes them live again.

It’s grocery shopping day, and Gabe’s father has made a shopping list. Gabe has a list of his own, and it’s nothing like Dad’s. What will they bring home?

Kelly keeps hearing the drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet. She soon discovers her brother Jack hasn’t been shutting the water off tight. It is up to her to teach him how to save water and about how the water cycle works.

Ever since her sister Kasey was institutionalized, then seeing Lydia Small die a horrible, violent death, Alexis just wants things to go back to the way they were before all of it happened. But normal people don't see decaying bodies haunting photographs. Normal people don't have to deal with regular intrusions from Lydia's angry ghost, sometimes escalating to terrifying attacks. At first it seems that Lydia wants revenge on Alexis alone.

Considered by Time magazine to be one of the best fantasy books of all time, Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It follows a tribe of children on their magical adventures during a summer in the English countryside. When a strange, furry creature appears in front of the children and offers a wish a day, the children take advantage of the creature's abilities and discover that their wishes have many unforeseen - and often quite funny - consequences.

Marty's mountain means more to him than meatballs, magic, and movies. But does it matter more than Mom?

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

America’s high divorce rate is well known, but little attention has been paid to the flip side: couples who creatively (sometimes clandestinely) manage to build marriages that last longer than we ever thought possible. What’s the secret? To find out, best-selling journalist Iris Krasnow interviewed more than 200 wives whose marriages have survived for 15-70 years.