Cynthia DeFelice

Hindered by a fight with her friend Dub and a series of mysterious fires, eleven-year-old Allie investigates a fire that happened seventeen years earlier.

Erik is preparing for his first-ever hunting trip when he learns that his parents are being deployed to Iraq. A few days later, Erik is shipped off to North Dakota to live with Big Darrell and Oma, grandparents he barely knows. When Erik rescues a dog that's been stuck by a porcupine, Big Darrell says Erik can't keep him. But Erik has already named her Quill and can't bear to give her up. He decides to run away, taking the dog and a shotgun, certain...

September 1840 marks five months since twelve-year-old Nathan Fowler's life-threatening encounter with Weasel, the heartless man who stalked Nathan like a wild animal through the forest. Nathan hasn't been the same since, wary of every new person he meets - including the visiting peddler Orrin Beckwith. When Beckwith shows Nate and his family a handbill advertising a show with a "white Injun," a man without a tongue, Nathan is sure the man is his...

One day while running on the trail near his house in upstate New York, Owen McGuire meets a girl with startling green eyes and bloody cuts all over her body who seems to be utterly alone. Her name is Campion, after the wildflower that is an alien species in the area-alien meaning "from someplace else"-and Campion claims to come from someplace else entirely, a planet called Home. She plans to signal her parents to come pick her up in their spaceship....

Allie Nichols, "Ghost Magnet," has only just finished sixth grade, but already she's grappled with her fair share of adventure: three ghosts have sought her help in less than two months. Now that summer has finally arrived, Allie is ready for a break. Too bad ghosts don't know about summer vacation. When a new spirit causes Allie to babble incomprehensibly at rehearsals for her town's first pageant, she and her best friend, Dub, know they have another...

Nelly May Nimble and her twelve brothers and sisters live with their parents in a tiny cottage in the Bottoms, where there's never enough food to feed so many hungry mouths. Nelly May decides that she is old enough to earn her keep and takes a job as Lord Ignasius Pinkwinkle's new housekeeper and cook. Along with her many chores, Lord Pinkwinkle also expects Nelly May to learn his own special language. So Nelly May gets to work, using a wet scooperooty...

When twelve-year-old Eric's parents are deployed to Iraq, he goes to live with grandparents he hardly knows in a small town in North Dakota, but his grandfather's hostility and the threat of losing the dog he has rescued are too much and Eric runs away.

While coping with his parents' separation, eleven-year-old Skeet spends most of Spring Break in his skiff on a Florida river, where he finds a manatee shot to death and begins looking for the killer.

Hindered by a fight with her friend Dub and a series of mysterious fires, eleven-year-old Allie investigates the fire seventeen years earlier which claimed the lives of the husband and infant son of a school cafeteria worker, as well as the handsome young man whose ghost asks Allie for help.

"A middle-grade summer adventure about two boys who build an awesome fort and tangle with two older bullies"--