Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

An unforgettable narrative collage told in poems Keesha has found a safe place to live, and other kids gravitate to her house when they just can’t make it on their own. They are Stephie – pregnant, trying to make the right decisions for herself and those she cares about; Jason – Stephie’s boyfriend, torn between his responsibility to Stephie and the baby and the promise of a college basketball career; Dontay –... (more)

Boxcar Children: Book 1

The Boxcar Children

by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Read by Phyllis Newman Two cassettes / 1 hour 54 minutes Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny, four orphaned brothers and sisters, suddenly appear in a small town. No one knows who these young wanderers are or where they have come from. Frightened to live with a grandfather they have never met, the children make a home for themselves in an abandoned red boxcar they discover in the woods. Henry, the oldest, goes to... (more)

Bird

by Rita Murphy

A GIRL EASILY carried off by the wind. An elderly widow whose husband died under strange circumstances. An isolated dwelling that breeds fear. Miranda has no recollection of where she came from—only that years ago, a gust of wind deposited her outside Bourne Manor. The Manor’s sole inhabitant, Wysteria Barrows, took Miranda in and promptly outfitted her with special boots—boots weighted with steel bars to keep... (more)

Blues for a Black Cat & Other Stories (French Modernist Library Series)

Blues for a Black Cat & Other Stories (French Modernist Library Series)

by Boris Vian

"<This collection> displays Vian's range from gallows humor to verbal fireworks, and happily serves to give visibility to this important writer."- Publishers Weekly. "Ultimately, Blues for a Black Cat is a collection of moral fables, albeit fables told in a cynical, mocking voice and set in a skewed version of the real world. Under the surface absurdity and verbal play, they offer serious indictments of... (more)

Only Revolutions: A Novel

by Mark Z. Danielewski

Sam: They were with us before Romeo & Juliet. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully: We’re allways sixteen. Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the Cold War, barrelling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a... (more)

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?Edward Packard

Choose Your Own Adventure - Bantam: Book 9

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

by Edward Packard

The reader, as a young detective, investigates a murder mystery. By choosing specific pages, the reader determines the outcome of the plot.

The Red Shoe

by Ursula Dubosarsky

Funny, tough-minded and tender, this is the story of Matilda and her two sisters growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1950s. Their father is mentally unstable and largely absent, their mother is possibly in the thrall of his brother, and a headline-making Russian spy defection is taking place next door. Punctuated by the headlines of the times, The Red Shoe depicts how the large events of the world can... (more)

The Hallo-wiener

by Dav Pilkey

Oscar is short, like all dachshunds, and all the other dogs make fun of him. On Halloween he takes more ridicule than ever in his hot-dog costume, but one brave act makes him a Grade-A hero.

The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

by Richard Peck

It's Halloween, 1914. Teenage psychic Blossom Culp sneaks into the house where the rest of her class is having a party-and that's when everything goes haywire. Suddenly Blossom is hurled into a time warp. Her psychic powers have found a way to send her into the future-our time. But will they be able to send her back?

Pollyanna

by Marian Leighton, Marc D. Falkoff, Eleanor H. Porter

Pollyanna's eternal optimism has made her one of the most beloved characters in American literature. First published in 1913, her story spawned the formation of "Glad" clubs all over the country, devoted to playing Pollyanna's famous game. Pollyanna has since sold over one million copies, been translated into several languages, and has become both a Broadway play and a Disney motion picture.

American Born Chinese

by Gene Luen Yang

A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he’s the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative... (more)

Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn

by Sarah Miller

What if you could see inside the head of the guy you love? Know his every thought? Feel his every dream and fantasy? The mystery girl who’s Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn can. She tells us the intoxicating story of her beloved Gideon, an adorably clueless boy who flukes his way into New England’s fanciest prep school. Gideon's naïve compared to the wolves at Midvale Academy, especially Cullen and... (more)

Bengal Nights: A NovelMircea Eliade

Bengal Nights: A Novel

by Mircea Eliade

Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman á clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Offered the hospitality of a senior... (more)

Dictee

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Dictee is the best-known work of the versatile and important artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951Ð1982). A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictee is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The element that unites... (more)

A Color of His Own

by Leo Lionni

The charming story of a chameleon searching for his own color, who ends up finding a true friend. Elephants are gray. Pigs are pink. Only the chameleon has no color of his own. He is purple like the heather, yellow like a lemon, even black and orange striped like a tiger! Then one day a chameleon has an idea to remain one color forever by staying on the greenest leaf he can find. But in the autumn, the leaf... (more)

Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison, Durthy Washington

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison... (more)

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Gallagher Girls: Book 1

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

by Ally Carter

Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, a fairly typical all-girls school-that is, if every school taught advanced martial arts in PE and the latest in chemical warfare in science, and students received extra credit for breaking CIA codes in computer class. The Gallagher Academy might claim to be a school for geniuses but it's really a school for spies. Even... (more)

Different Seasons

by Stephen King

Four mesmerizing novellas, including the ones that inspired the movies The Shawshank Redemption , Apt Pupil , and Stand by Me .

Candide (A Norton Critical Edition)

by Voltaire, Robert Martin Adams

Robert M. Adams’s superlative revised translation of Candide provides the basis for this widely adopted Norton Critical Edition. The accompanying apparatus has been revised in accordance with recent biographical and critical materials. The Backgrounds and Criticism sections provide important essays that shed light on major critical issues relevant to Candide and to the intellectual climate of the period. In... (more)

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by Jerry Spinelli

by Helen Frost