I am Lavina Cumming

This is a touching and heartwarming tale of a young country girl sent to live in a city, far away from home. By Susan Lowell, the story begins on a small ranch on prairie, with a little girl watching her father prepare to send her to California. Lavina is ten years old and loves her family, but her father wants her to grow up to be a lady. Her mother dead and with no sisters, he decides to send her to live with his sister in the hopes that she will grow up educated and respectable. After arriving, she discovers that her cousin, her "playmate", is a spoiled brat and her aunt is prim and proper. The only thing she likes about California is her school, where she excels and makes many good friends. But when her town is ripped apart by the San Francisco earthquake, will she and her family finally be able to come together? Or will more than buildings be torn apart?

Pippi Longstocking

This is a short, fun read that's really entertaining. Written by Astrid Lindgren, it's about a young girl (Pippi) who has been left a house and a whole trunk of pirate gold by her father, a wandering captain on the high seas. After tons of adventures aboard her fathers ship with his hearty crew, her father is suddenly washed overboard and disappears into the briny blue. She has utter faith that he will return, but until then she is sent home to wait his re-arrivial in relative dullness. But life where Pippi Longstocking is anything but dull... in no time at all, she and her monkey Mr. Nilsson get into oodles of adventures with their new found friends Tommy and Annika, who are fairly normal children. From her first (disastrous) day at school to beating the circus strongman with a flick of her wrist, life with Pippi is an adventure from the get go!

Guineveres Gift

This novel by Nancy McKenzie is a brief look into the life of the famous Queen Guinevere's life as a child. Orphaned at an early age, Guinevere is sent to Gwynedd, where her mother's sister and husband reign. There she befriends her mischievous cousin, Elaine, who lands Guinevere in hot water more then once because of her grand schemes. In this book, a new man comes to town around Guinevere's thirteenth birthday, with a evil plot hiding behind a charming smile. When the king is gone, the kingdom is run by Queen Alyse, who doesn't particularly like Guinevere simply because she reminds her of her dead older sister. Alyse bans Guinevere from the stables, where she spends most of her free time, but not before the girl overhears some dangerous information while out riding - and makes a friend who she never should have met.  Now, armed with information and enough determination to bring the Kings Army to its knees, she must bravely battle the invaders and save Elaine from kidnapping thieves all while trying to discover the real reason why she was sent to Gwynedd. Was it for her protection...or to keep her in the dark of her future?

Cryptid Hunters

By Roland Smith, this book is, from the beginning, packed with enough adventure and exciement to last life time. The main characters, twins by the name of Marty and Grace, are thrown into a whirlwind life when their parents go missing in a helicopter crash and they are sent from their cushy boarding school to their possibly insane uncle who lives on a private island off the coast of Washington. Uncle Wolfe turns out to be a really nice, if busy guy, but when his nemesis Dr. Blackwood, a multibillionaire hunter of types heads to the Congo to poach a dinosaur (the same that killed Wolfes wife), he must leave immediately to try and get to it first. But the twins don't want to leave their newly found interesting uncle and so try to sneak onboard the flight to stay, bu they end up falling from the plane. Very klutzy, but they survive with the help of a parachute and end up treking through the dangerous jungle to try and find a treehouse where Wolfe once lived with his late wife. Blackwoods there now though, so the twins live in the jungle takes a turn from dangerous to definatly lefe threatening as both parties search desperately to find the dinosaur and survive.

The Witches

This classic by Ronald Dahl is time honored and very interesting. It's about this young boy, an orphan, who lives with his grandmother, a old lady with a fondness for cigars and stories. She warns her grandson about the witches, women who hate children and have magical powers to turn them into things to send them away or kill them. His grandmother falls ill, and is sent away to recover with him at a sea side hotel. When he is exploring he finds a convention of witches under the name of Protctors of Children, or something like that. He hears an evil plan discussed and approved to eliminate thousands upon thousands of Brithish children and only he and his grandmother can stop it!