Children Realistic Fiction

A classic coming-of-age story which has held generations of fans spellbound. Rusty, a 16-year-old Anglo-Indian boy, is orphaned, and has to live with his English guardian in the claustrophobic European part in Dehra Dun. Unhappy with the strict ways of his guardian, Rusty runs away from home to live with his Indian friends. Plunging for the first time into the dream-bright world of the bazaar, Hindu festivals and other aspects of Indian life, Rusty is enchanted...and is lost forever to the prim proprieties of the European community.

An incident near the desolate Chhinnamasta temple on the rocky riverbank of Rajrappa leads to the death of Mahesh Chowdhury, the head of a Hazaribagh family. Adding to the mystery are a set of coded diaries, a valuable stamp collection that is missing, and a tiger that is roaming the streets of Hazaribagh. One of Feluda’s most intriguing adventures, this shows the master sleuth at his best.

A lineman with something to prove. A vendetta against a baseball legend. The rise of a real-life NHL all-star. The luckiest grapefruit in sports history. Open up The Sports Pages, the third volume in the Guys Read Library of Great Reading, and you're in for all of this and more. From fiction to nonfiction, from baseball to mixed martial arts and everything in between, these are 10 stories about the rush of victory and the crush of defeat on and off the field. Compiled by kid-lit all-star Jon Scieszka, Guys Read: The Sports Pages is a thrilling collection of brand-new short stories.

Second-grader Freddy Dissel has that left-out kind of feeling. Life seems lonely when you're the middle kid in the family. Freddy feels like "the peanut butter part of a sandwich", squeezed between an older brother and little sister. But now, for the first time, it's Freddy's chance to show everyone, including himself, just how special he is!

Charlotte Andrews is perfectly fine being quiet - in fact, she prefers it. When she doesn't speak, people can't make fun of her stutter. But when she witnesses bullying on the school bus and doesn't say anything, her silence comes between her and her best friend. As if that wasn't bad enough, her parents signed her up for musical theater. Charlotte doesn't want to speak onstage, but at least she doesn't stutter when she sings. Then, just as she starts to find her voice, the arts program is cut. Charlotte can't stay silent anymore.

Ida B. Applewood is a fourth grader like no other, living a life like no other, with a voice like no other, and a family like no other, and her story will resonate long after this audiobook has ended. How does Ida B. cope when outside forces, life, really, attempt to derail her and her family and her future? She enters her Black Period, and it is not pretty.

A girl discovers a connection between her home in the Philippines and her new home in the U.S. through a special garden in this middle grade novel that celebrates nourishment and growth. Twelve-year-old Isabel is the new kid in her San Francisco middle school. It’s the first time in many years that she’ll be living with her mother again. Mama's job in the US allowed Isabel and her grandparents to live more comfortably in the Philippines, but now Isabel doesn't really know her own mother anymore.

When a teacher asks her class what one thing they would save in an emergency, some students know the answer right away. Others come to their decisions more slowly. And some change their minds when they hear their classmates’ responses. A lively dialog ignites as the students discover unexpected facets of one another - and themselves. With her ear for authentic dialog and knowledge of tweens’ priorities and emotions, Linda Sue Park brings the varied voices of an inclusive classroom to life through carefully honed, engaging, and instantly accessible verse.

Zeke Stahls is not the best kid in the world. Some days he struggles just to be good. He'd rather be pulling pranks than doing extra credit, and he's too busy performing experiments on his little brother, Nate, or tormenting his older sister, Jackie, to volunteer for charity. Which is why Zeke and his entire family are shocked when they receive word that he has been selected as a contestant in an online competition to find the World's Greatest Kid.

Twelve-year-old Stick Lawson lives on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, where life moves steady as the tides, and mysteries abound as long as you look really hard for them. Stick and her friends Rain and Neb are good at looking hard. They call themselves the Dime Novel Kids. And the only thing Stick wants more than a paying case for them to solve is the respect that comes with it.

Digging for peat in the mountain with his Uncle Tally, Fergus finds the body of a child, and it looks like she’s been murdered. As Fergus tries to make sense of the mad world around him - his brother on hunger-strike in prison, his growing feelings for Cora, his parents arguing over the Troubles, and him in it up to the neck, blackmailed into acting as courier to God knows what - a little voice comes to him in his dreams, and the mystery of the bog child unfurls.

Mysteries follow super-sleuth Cam Jansen everywhere she goes...even to the community hobby show. Cam and Eric are checking out a sports-memorabilia booth when a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth disappears. Can Cam catch the thief and recover the Babe's ball?

When the Brighton Bears suit up on game day, 12-year-old Tommy Gallagher is the toughest kid on the football field. And the bravest. After all, his father Patrick is a Boston firefighter - one of Boston's bravest. Tommy's dad taught him everything he knows about football - and life. Yet even Tommy isn't strong enough for what happens when the sirens ring and, for the first time, they're racing away from the fire. "First man in; last man out" had always been his dad's motto, yet he never said anything about leaving in an ambulance.

Autumn is looking forward to summer vacation. She and her best friend plan on going to all the best ice cream places their stomachs can handle—and in NYC, the possibilities can’t get any sweeter. Linnea is still not over the fact that her dad has found love after her parents' divorce. Luckily, she can take out all her feelings on the tennis courts for a winning summer. But then Autumn and Linnea discover the news: their parents are getting married. Devastated, the two of them come up with an idea: if they can split up their parents, their lives can go back to normal.

Skye Nickson’s world changed forever when her dad went on the run with her brother, Finn. It’s been four years without Finn’s jokes, four years without her father’s old soul music, and four years of Skye filling in as Rent-a-Finn on his MIA birthdays for their mom. Finn’s birthday is always difficult, but at least Skye has her best friends, Reece and Jax, to lean on, even if Reece has started acting too cool for them. But this year is different because after Finn’s birthday, they get a call that he’s finally been found.

A necklace. A bugle. A lion statue. What do they have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing unless you’re Tildy, Leon, or Nell. These items matter an awful lot to them. Not because of what they are, but what—and who—they represent. Anatomy of Lost Things shares the crisscrossing stories of Tildy, Leon, and Nell, of the impossible losses they’ve each recently faced, and the unexpected histories of their prized objects.

What Elisa, Lucia, and Alice see–and judge–of each other from the outside is drastically different from how each girl feels inside. They attend the same classes in the same New York City middle school, but no one knows that Elisa is trying to navigate the bewildering asylum process having just arrived from El Salvador; or that Lucia, who also speaks Spanish and brims with self-confidence, is caught in the middle of her parents’ heartbreaking divorce; or that Alice, who appears to be a rebel in combat boots, carries the burden of her mother’s progressing cancer.

As a member of the Vipers Swim Team, Julia Nam's always in the pool. Mountainview Community Center is like her second home, not only because swimming at the aquatic center is her favorite thing in the world, but also because her parents run the center's sushi café. Julia would much rather be in the pool than sitting behind the counter of Sushi on the Go! watching other people swim.

Isaiah ""Ice"" Abernathy has always worshiped his older brother, Seth. For years they’ve been not just brothers but best friends—and as Seth starts his senior year, Ice is eager to spend as much time with his brother as he can, making memories before Seth goes to college.

When her grandmother comes off the airplane in Houston from Pakistan, Mahnoor knows that having Dadi move in is going to disrupt everything about her life. She doesn’t have time to be Dadi’s unofficial babysitter—her journalism teacher has announced that their big assignment will be to film a documentary, which feels more like storytelling than what Maha would call “journalism.”