The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century. It's a lazy Mississippi River town, a place where a boy can learn magical cures for warts, turn a fence-painting job into a leisurely con game, get lost in a cave, escape to an island, or attend his own funeral. It's a time when hooky is punished with a simple swatting and pockets bulge with firecrackers and dead rats; a time...

Longing for the father she lost to the ocean and having no other way to say goodbye to him, Lily faces her fears and strikes out on her own for the sea.

"The exasperating Gingerbread Man, famous for leading a host of townsfolk and animals in a wild chase about the countryside, lives at 398.2 on the library shelves. But the Gingerbread Man is not the type of cookie that stays in one place for very long, and one day he just can't help himself. With a leap and a whoosh, he escapes the librarian's grasp, and the chase for the wily Gingerbread Man is on again!"--Dust jacket.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding...

Rollo the troll is tired of chores, but after spending time on the tundra with various animal families, from owls to moose, he realizes that he wants to be home for Christmas even if that means behaving himself.

Ben and Rose secretly wish their lives were different. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother's room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing. Set fifty years apart, these two independent stories -- Ben's told in words, Rose's...

Recounts the adventures of a young boy and an escaped slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.