Ramona's job is to be nice to fussy Mrs. Kemp, who watches her while her mother works.

Resolving to become the world's greatest stand-up comedian despite less-than-funny challenges in his life, wheelchair-bound middle school student Jamie Grimm hopes he will be fairly judged when he enters a local comedy contest.

It starts before you can even remember: You learn the rules for being a girl ... Marin has always been good at navigating these unspoken guidelines. A star student and editor of the school paper, she dreams of getting into Brown University. Marin's future seems bright--and her young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. Beckett, is always quick to admire her writing and talk books with her. But when Bex takes things too far and comes on to Marin, she's...

Banished! is how twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce laments her predicament when her father and Aunt Felicity ship her off to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy, the boarding school that her mother attended across the sea in Canada. Yet the sun has not yet risen on Flavia's first day in captivity when a gift lands at her feet. And Flavia being Flavia, a budding chemist and sleuth, that gift is a charred and mummified body which tumbles out of a bedroom chimney....

"A childhood spent in a dangerous cult left Sunday Night never with a bone-deep instinct for survival that's kept her alive into adulthood but left her mostly friendless. Forced into early retirement from the police force due to an injury, Sunnie retreats from an outside world she doesn't trust and sees little use for, until a wealthy woman contacts her with a plea: her teenage granddaughter has been missing since the day of a bombing near a Jewish...

Dara and Marie Durant have been dancers since they can remember. Now, they both teach in the family dance studio. When a suspicious accident occurs right before a big performance, the balance of sisterhood is threatened and family tensions rise. Ballet flows through their veins; Dara and Marie Durant were homeschooled and trained by their mother. Decades later the Durant School of Dance is theirs. The two sisters, together with Charlie, Dara's husband...

"From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for...

Forced to abandon Princess Elizabeth when Mary ascends the English throne, Rose sews elaborate gowns for Mary's upcoming coronation before violently escalating attacks on Protestants compel her to escape into her own time.

"Toni Murphy was eighteen when she and her boyfriend, Ryan, were wrongly convicted of the murder of her younger sister. Now she is thirty-four and back in her hometown, working every day to forge and adjust to a new life on the outside. She's doing everything in her power to avoid violating her parole and going back to prison. But nothing is making that easy--not Ryan, who is convinced he can figure out the truth; not her mother, who clearly doubts...

Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, journeys to the Abarat, an archipelago filled with strange wonders, where it is revealed to her that she has been there before, and that it is her responsibility to save the mysterious place from threatening evil forces.