Orphans Home

Heidi is the story of a five-year-old orphan who goes to live with her grandfather in the mountains. Everyone in the village is afraid of him, but Heidi soon wins his heart. She loves her life and her friendship with the young goatherd, Peter. But one terrible day her aunt takes her to the city to help take care of a sickly child, Clara. Heidi can't bear to be away from her grandfather and finally, she brings Clara back to her Alpine home, where a miracle of healing occurs. Retold from the original by Sally Grindley.

The author uses his well-known style to ask young listeners serious questions that sharpen their critical thinking skills and lead to real understanding of complex issues. What Is a Family? tackles difficult questions regarding the fast-changing face of contemporary families. Values of an ideal family and the problems that occur in real families are all open for discussion.

Teal is a young farm girl being raised by her father, her only surviving parent. When she loses him, she soon finds herself adopted by a manipulative family with ulterior motives - the land and fortune Teal will inherit from her father. Teal’s new family members bully and ridicule her, and her classmates at school do the same. Still, she never responds with anger, instead saying, “You can make fun if you may; I was born this way.”

Some families look alike, some don't. Some families are formed through birth, and some families are formed by adoption. But as the little girl in this heartwarming book makes clear, being a family isn't about who you look like or where you were born - it's about the love that binds you together. Adoptive families are sure to delight in the special story of the narrator's adoption - from her parents' excited preparations and long journey by airplane to meet her, to their life together as a family. A reassuring look at how one little girl came into her parents' world - and made them a family forever.

Mooning about, Larky Mavis trips on three peanuts. She eats two of them, but when she sees what is in the third peanut, she can only laugh and say, "I won’t eat you!" The villagers can’t agree on exactly what Larky Mavis has found, but they soon have to admit that something strange and wonderful is happening in this delightful, contemporary fairy tale from Brock Cole, the award-winning author of Buttons.

Nobody wants to adopt the Shluffmuffin twins. Wally's feet stink something awful, and Cheyenne is allergic to everything. Then why are the Mandible sisters so eager to take them home? And what sort of old maids would choose to live in a place called Dripping Fang Forest, where zombies wander the woods singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and 10-foot-long glowing slugs want to suck the feet right off your ankles?