Frank Carlson Library

At the end of World War II, Jack Baker, a landlocked Kansas boy, is suddenly uprooted after his mother's death and placed in a boy's boarding school in Maine. There, Jack encounters Early Auden, the strangest of boys, who reads the number pi as a story and collects clippings about the sightings of a great black bear in the nearby mountains. Newcomer Jack feels lost yet can't help being drawn to Early, who won't believe what everyone accepts to be...

Traces the story of a boy who moves across the country to rural northern California, where his efforts to adjust are challenged by a fast-moving firestorm that places family homes and lives at risk.

Oscar Starling never wanted to come to Chicago. But then Oscar finds himself not just in the heart of the big city but in the middle of a terrible fire! No one knows exactly how it began, but one thing is clear: Chicago is like a giant powder keg about to explode. An army of firemen is trying to help, but this fire is a ferocious beast that wants to devour everything in its path, including Oscar! Will Oscar survive one of the most famous and devastating...

The battlefield was soaked in blood. Screams of injured soldiers rang through the air. Eleven-year-old Nathaniel Knox knelt behind a rock, his gun clutched in his shaking hands. Nate had been heading to New York City to find his father. But now he was trapped in a terrible gunfight between American and British troops. -- But King George was like a snake with America gripped in his fangs - and he didn't want to let go. So now it was war - brutal, bloody...

"Hattie Jacobs and her family join the Great Exodus of 1879 in search of a better life in Kansas"--

"Iris opens her eyes to hard truths and the power of her voice when her father dies of AIDS in 1987"-- 1987. Iris tries to act normal at school, going through the motions and joking around with her friends, but it feels like she'll never laugh again. How can she, when her dad is dying of a virus that is off-limits to talk about? When she knows that soon all she will have left of her kind, loving dad are memories, photos, and a binder full of the...

In 1912, thirteen-year-old Noelle and her parents are aboard the Titanic, when she is awoken to a sinking ship and must evacuate to a lifeboat with her mother, but first she has to find and help her new friend, Pauline, who is in steerage.

Cash, Fitch, and Bird Thomas are three siblings in seventh grade together in Park, Delaware. In 1986, as the country waits expectantly for the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, they each struggle with their own personal anxieties. Cash, who loves basketball but has a newly broken wrist, is in danger of failing seventh grade for the second time. Fitch spends every afternoon playing Major Havoc at the arcade on Main. And Bird, his twelve-year-old...

Told in two voices, two outcasts in an Iron Age village befriend each other, as disabled, orphaned Varick helps Estrild achieve her dream of becoming the first female warrior. Inspired by the Windeby bog body.

When her brother Rob, a Navy cook, goes missing in action during World War II, Jayna, desperate for family, leaves upstate New York and their cranky landlady, accompanied by a turtle and a ghost, to seek their grandmother, who Rob believes may live in Brooklyn. Includes soup recipes.