Frank Carlson Library

Four students, each with their own individual stories, develop a special bond and attract the attention of their teacher, a paraplegic, who chooses them to represent their sixth-grade class in the Academic Bowl competition.

After spending her life with her mentally retarded mother and agoraphobic neighbor, twelve-year-old Heidi sets out from Reno, Nevada, to New York to find out who she is. Living with her mentally disabled mother who only knows just over twenty words, young Heidi has learned to live in her special world until a new word is suddenly used and repeated by her mother; causing Heidi to think it might be a key to a secret past about which she knows so little....

When Franny Stein, self-styled mad scientist, creates a robot to show her school friends the joys of science, she ends up learning something from them instead. There's nothing better in the world than being a mad scientist-at least according to Franny. And she's absolutely convinced that, if given the opportunity to be one, every kid in her class would feel the same way. So she's making it her mission to help her classmates discover their own inner...

When Woodrow's mother suddenly disappears, he moves to his grandparents' home in a small Virginia town where he befriends his cousin and together they find the strength to face the terrible losses and fears in their lives. Woodrow's cousin, Gypsy, lives next door, and the two children find they have much in common. But unlike Woodrow, who has accepted his mother's disappearance, Gypsy can't get over her father's death. That's when Woodrow tells Gypsy...

Upon leaving an oppressive summer camp, twelve-year-old Margaret Rose Kane spearheads a campaign to preserve three unique towers her great-uncles have been building in their backyard for more than forty years.

Gabe has looked forward to another six glorious weeks at the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment, but when a wildfire closes the nearby camp that Zack, Gabe's stepbrother, was supposed to attend, the Nerd Camp faces a "cool-kid invasion" that could mean big trouble.

"In My Hands began as one non-Jew's challenge to any who would deny the Holocaust. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, it has become a profound document of an individual's heroism in the face of the greatest evil mankind has known. In the fall of 1939 the Nazis invaded Irene Gut's beloved Poland, ending her training as a nurse and thrusting the sixteen-year-old Catholic girl into a world of horrors that somehow gave her the strength to accomplish what...