Weird Life

In honor of Presidents’ Day, A.J. and Andrea from Ella Mentry will compete against their Dirk School rivals in the ultimate Presidents’ Day Challenge! The winning school will get bragging rights, a free trip to an amusement park, and a top-secret prize. The only problem is that A.J. doesn’t know anything about US presidents, unless it involves their use of toilets! Will A.J. and Andrea be able to work together as a team and bring home the win?

Mary Katherine Backstrom shares heartbreaking and hilarious stories of how God uses each "mess" in our lives to bring us closer to him. She shows us that it's okay to celebrate exactly where we are right now - holy hot mess and all.

Award-winning author Dan Gutman delivers the fourth amusing tale from his popular My Weird School series. Even for an art teacher, Ms. Hannah is pretty strange. She wears dresses made out of potholders and collects garbage instead of throwing it out—so her students can use it in their artwork. And now, she’s making A.J. be partners with smelly Andrea. This is going to be the worst art class ever!

It's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day—moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, surprising us by breaking up our routines and reminding us that there's more to life than the everyday.

Mat Devine, lead singer of the band Kill Hannah, inadvertently began his own popular advice column after Fuse TV asked him to blog about his life on tour. Mat's humorous and touching column, aptly titled "The Raccoon Society", gained a lot of traction as his fans sought advice on serious issues such as alcoholism, bullying, and self-mutilation, while also touching upon lighter subjects like dealing with siblings, fashion, and going to prom.

Sam has retreated to her late father’s rental house, a safe place to commune with the animals in the greenbelt out back, tend to her garden, and keep her secrets. Her sense of security slowly returns - until an aggressive neighbor from the other side of the ravine fells a tree on her property. How little he regards nature. Or understands its darkness. How little he knows Sam.

Briarcliff Mansion and the land it occupies are owned by Emory University, which refers to it as its "Briarcliff Campus." Fortune and Folly, in part, illuminates the largely lost story of how the mansion, and the entire surrounding neighborhood, got its name. But in order to understand the mansion, we have to understand the man who built it. Briarcliff Mansion once belonged to a man named Asa Candler, Jr.—also known as Buddie. The second son and namesake of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler, Buddie was a wealthy real estate developer of great successes and greater failures.

Daisy has been working on invisibilizing herself—ever since living with her mother’s violent ex-boyfriend, and now to avoid the school bullies who are targeting her. She keeps a low profile, eating lunch with the librarian instead of in the Lunchroom of Terror and secretly counting whenever she’s anxious.But things are looking up. A new boy has befriended her and seems able to stand up to the bullies, and the stray cat she’s been feeding is starting to almost trust her.

Hoping to ditch two months of chicken coops, kale, and her parents’ antiscreen rules, Mac MacLeod sets out to win a citywide food cart scavenger hunt and the money she needs for the summer coding camp of her dreams. But Mac discovers more than just clues during her cross-city sprint - like how her weird parents might not be the worst thing compared to the circumstances of those around her.

Dad's working on his cool dance moves for the local talent search, while Weir's trying out for the school soccer team! Will Weir score a goal, or fall flat?

Woody wants to get un-weird - and fast! And he'll find help in the most unlikely of places. Woody is forever worried about being different. He thinks himself weird and a bit of a wuss, and two bullies, Della and Casey, make sure he doesn't forget that. It doesn't help that his mum is slightly bonkers. She dresses up as a sheep for a living - mostly for her job as a children's entertainer. And not to mention the fact that she forces Woody to wear old granny jumpers that she finds down the local charity shop.

Something must be done. Vlad Luxor continues to rule the Timeless Province with a cruel hand, and now he's screaming about Inners and Outers, Others and Us. Then when the meanest boy in school is turned into the stinkiest, weirdest creature ever, Henry, Jo, Apollo, and Pirate Girl are asked to do the impossible. Breaking this spell will force them to go on their most dangerous, frightening adventure yet - through the Wilds, the Forest of Knives, and a lodge in the woods belonging to the most terrible bully of all...Vlad Luxor himself.

When he first started seeing ghosts, Max mistakenly assumed everyone else could see them, too. Now, after years of being blamed for the pranks of mischievous spirits, Max is determined to do whatever it takes to make himself normal. But when he’s sent to spend the summer with his eccentric grandfather, Ramhart, being normal becomes impossible. Here in Glimmerville, bakeries sell enchanted pies, the lake is infested with mermaids, the town’s beloved ghosts roam free, and Ramhart himself is celebrated as the world’s most famous monster hunter.

The first book in the Huggabie Falls trilogy - the funniest, craziest, weirdest series ever written, so far. Kipp Kindle and his friends Tobias Treachery and Cymphany Chan live in Huggabie Falls, the weirdest town on Earth. Weird things happen all the time - that’s normal. But when an extremely weird thing happens Kipp and his friends know that something is wrong. They embark on a fast-paced, action-packed, hilarious adventure to find out what is making everything turn normal and to return the weirdness to Huggabie Falls.

I’m fascinated with ancient history because there are continuous new discoveries which push back the dawn of civilization by thousands of years. In the last couple of decades, the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey pushed back man-made structures to the time period of 9,000-11,000 BC, thousands of years before the next known civilizations existed.

Growing up, Dr Camilla Pang loved patterns and ordering things. She was obsessed with Disney, infatuated by Stephen Hawking and the language she only really understood was science. Diagnosed with autism age eight, Camilla felt like an outsider - and kids often like nothing better than to gang up on outsiders. This is the story of how Camilla used science as her sidekick for navigating the world - allowing her to translate ideas she could understand (like gravity and light waves) onto things she couldn't (like people, how long to smile for and when someone needed a hug).

Join Wallace Forbes as he encounters the enigmatic insomniac Alfred Kramer on a train journey like no other. Alfred, with his strange appearance and terrifying dreams, will take you on a mesmerizing ride through time and ancestors. Experience the suspense, excitement, and fear as Alfred unveils the secrets of his Kappa-ray device, allowing him to relive the experiences of his ancestors in his haunting dreams.

Maddie thought trying to survive the last day of the puberty unit at school was going to be her biggest challenge until the question dropped from the sky like an atomic bomb hitting the lunch table. “Maddie, have you had your period yet?” Maddie always resorted to humor with a dash of sass to get through every awkward moment, but suddenly being clueless and braless wasn’t so funny. Chill Out & Stop Making This Weird takes you on a pubescent girl's heartfelt and humorous journey as she realistically navigates the complexities of puberty.

Sammy Feral is a lucky boy. His family runs a zoo, where he spends his time cheerfully hanging out with (to name just a few) orangutans, crocodiles, and snakes. But his good luck has just run out - the entire Feral family has been infected with a mysterious virus that causes them to turn into werewolves. Now his mom, dad, and sisters are howling at the moon, craving raw meat, and worst of all, trying to infect Sammy! Worse, it seems there is an evil professor trying to take over the Feral Zoo - could he have anything to do with the werewolf virus?

Did you know soap can burn? It can, my pretties. It can and it does. Fortunately, it cleans up so easily! But yes, the house didn’t smell as “wonderful” as it did “wonder what that smell is” for a couple of weeks. In good news, I found out I can literally leave my crockpot turned on low for weeks without it catching fire, so that’s a handy fact to know. Part how-to, part memoir, My Life as a Kitchen Witch was a surprise hit for fiction writer Red Tash.