While drawing pictures of the animals she sees on her trip to Australia, a young girl named Ally meets Pauline, an aborigine woman and fellow artist, from whom Ally learns that art is not always created with just paper and paints, and that mistakes are actually happy accidents.

Spending the summer in Venice with his family turns confusing for Percy when he meets a beautiful, politically radical Venetian girl who wants him to help sabotage his father's engineering project in order to drive tourists out of the city.

When four siblings wish on a star, each gets only a fraction of what he or she wanted, but when they combine their wishes, they just might get a whole new pet.

When her father suddenly dies while on a business trip leaving her alone on an Italian highway, eleven-year-old Jackie worries what will happen when she is picked up by two men with unknown motives.

In a novel based on Chinese Cinderella tales, fourteen-year-old stepchild Xing-Xing endures a life of neglect and servitude, as her stepmother cruelly mutilates her own child's feet so that she alone might marry well.

Tired of his mother's overprotectiveness and intrigued by the life of African American explorer Matthew Henson, twelve-year-old Alvin travels north and spends a season with a trapper near the Arctic Circle.

When the owner of Hotel Jungle decides to take all of his guests on a cruise, the local baboon population moves in and takes over, much to the surprise of a newly-arrived family on vacation.

"Fish Girl, a young mermaid living in a boardwalk aquarium, has never interacted with anyone beyond the walls of her tank until a chance encounter with an ordinary girl, Livia. Their growing friendship inspires Fish Girl's longing for freedom, independence, and a life beyond the aquarium tank"--

Sly uses her detective skills to help her friends solve mysteries that all involve some kind of code.

Corkscrew the pig is celebrating his birthday, but as his owners and their friends form various groups to play games, they leave out Corkscrew and his new friend, Pirate the parrot, who make it clear they want to join in the fun.