In Gingersnap, Newbery Honor winner Patricia Reilly Giff returns to the Brooklyn of her childhood to tell the heartwarming story of a young girl during World War II.

Since her parents’ death in a car accident, Jayna has been under the care of her brother, Rob. But Rob is called up for duty, leaving Jayna with Celine, their landlady.

When a telegram arrives, the news is terrifying: Rob is missing in action. Unable to face a loveless future as a burden to Celine, Jayna decides to take matters into her own hands. With her pet turtle in a cat carrier, Jayna boards a bus from upstate New York to Brooklyn. She is following clues in her mother’s old recipe book, which tell of a bakery called Gingersnap. Could a grandmother she has never known live there?

Evoking the sights, sounds and tastes of neighborhoods from a time gone by, Gingersnap was a labor of love for Giff, whose inspirations included memories of her grandfather.

Readers are often introduced to WWII through stories of combat. Gingersnap offers an evocative picture of life on the home front.

Lyssa was raised in idyllic Austin, Texas, by a magical mother who starred in the local talent show and seemed to hang the stars without a stepladder. When her mother died, life became flat and monochromatic. News that their family home is set to be demolished gives Lyssa a mission—make it from her new digs in Washington State to Austin in time to save the house, riding her dilapidated two-wheeled scooter, Zip. No problem, right?

During her road trip—it's more than fair to call it an odyssey—Lyssa encounters a range of eccentric characters who push the bounds of magic realism into the surreal. First-time author Ellie Rollins humanizes this colorful landscape with precise description. Lyssa meets an unnaturally tall woman whose hair “was gray and wispy, like it had been fashioned from dandelion seeds and dental floss.” Growing up in show business, she's naturally unfazed by the craziness that unfolds while she desperately tries to get home, navigating through gender-flipped singers, a restaurant flood, burlesque mermaids—the list goes on. Watch out for the whirlpool in the Motel Charybdis' hot tub (just a friendly warning).

Zip is a genuine treat, a classic retold with freshness, humor and heart. Kids who are familiar with Homer’s Odyssey will be amazed at how the same story can translate into present-day life in the U.S., and those who haven't read it will enjoy the adventure and be well primed to tackle the source material later. Under all the mythology, there's also a moving story here about grief, love, loss and what makes a home a home. Don't let Zip pass you by.

Newbery-winning novelist Karen Cushman introduces her first male leading character in Will Sparrow’s Road, an engaging historical fiction adventure set in 1599, in Elizabethan England.

By all accounts, including his own, young Will Sparrow is a liar, a thief and a runaway. Will lives the only way he can—by his wits. It’s no wonder his motto has become: “I care for no one but myself . . . and nothing but my belly.”

Will’s father has sold him to an innkeeper in exchange for ale. But when the innkeeper threatens to sell Will off as a chimney sweep as a penalty for stealing a cold rabbit pie, Will knows the time has come to make his own way in the world. Along the way, he meets up with a troupe of “oddities and prodigies” who travel from fair to fair.

Cushman deftly weaves in Will’s adventures with fascinating details about Renaissance fairs of the time, which served as temporary markets for the sale of livestock, food and goods: “saddles and baskets and woolen cloth . . . candlesticks of pewter and brass, heaps of apple tarts, creamy cheeses, and plums.” Some young readers will recognize elements of the “Saturday markets” we have in cities and towns today, which combine farmers’ markets with hand-made goods and entertainment.

But readers will be less familiar with the odd members of Thomas Tidball’s band, which include a learned pig named Duchess, a wild cat-girl, a little man named Lancelot Fitzgeoffrey—and, eventually, Will himself. In this harsh world, where nothing is quite as it seems, Will must learn to sort friend from foe, and hope that, in the end, he can find a place to call home. Cushman’s lively account of his journey makes it a pleasure to follow along.

Imagine your mother disappearing, leaving you with someone you don’t know and don’t trust. Imagine being forced from your home, onto the streets of a busy city, left to find food and shelter, or to starve and freeze. Now imagine all of this taking place when you were only four years old. That is exactly what happens to Ivan in The Dogs of Winter, a new book by Bobbie Pyron, which is based on a true story. Left with nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, Ivan begins living on the streets of Moscow, Russia.

However, Ivan is not alone for very long. First, he is adopted into a group of children living on the streets. Ivan and the other children spend their days begging for money, stealing food and trying to avoid both the militsiya (the police) and the gangs of Crow Boys. One day, though, Ivan stumbles into a small hollow behind a building and is surrounded by a pack of wild dogs. Through careful action (and a lot of food), Ivan slowly integrates into the pack and begins to live solely with the dogs. For the next two years, Ivan and his pack move to a number of different places, and finally to the woods outside of Moscow, continuously avoiding danger and capture. It is there that Ivan must confront who and what he really is.

The Dogs of Winter is an incredibly engaging and engrossing book. The fact that it is based on a true story only heightens the appeal of the writing. Pyron, a former librarian and author of two previous books, including A Dog's Way Home, is able to give incredible insight into the mind of a young child, communicating the character and emotions of both boy and dog without coming across as silly or trying too hard. Readers are left continuously on edge with fear and excitement as Ivan and his pack escape detection and do their best to survive with no one’s help but their own. Perfect for fans of animal, adventure or survival stories, The Dogs of Winter will pull young readers in from the first chapter and leave them fully absorbed in Ivan’s unique life.

Abby, a big girl with an even bigger heart, is tired of the “medium girls” who are medium smart and medium attractive. And she’s especially tired of their ringleader and bully, Kristen. In The Second Life of Abigail Walker by award-winning author Frances O’Roark Dowell, the sixth-grader walks away from their pettiness and discovers a rich world with unexpected friendships.

Abby takes solace in an abandoned field where she can draw and dream of houses she’d like to build. When Kristen and her followers threaten to locate her, Abby takes off deeper into the woods, where she finds a farm with 9-year-old Anders and his Iraqi war veteran father, Matt, who’s waiting for a space in the VA hospital. Suffering from what appears to be Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Matt has become obsessed with Lewis and Clark’s expedition and the numerous animal species the explorers encountered along the way.

Abby finds solace with this family that doesn’t judge her weight or watch how many pizza slices she slips onto her dinner plate. Soon she’s not just swapping lunch with her new Indian-American friends and getting to know the school’s computer expert but relying on them for research to help Matt with his animal project. Enhancing this realistic story is a layer of magic and folklore as the woods is also home to a fox that observes Abby’s situation. Intermittent chapters from the fox’s point of view reveal an unusual connection to Matt’s tour of duty.

Unlike most stories that tackle bullying or issues with weight, this touching tale doesn’t feature Abby trying to defend herself from the mean girls or trying to shed pounds. Instead, the spunky, resilient tween looks for and finds acceptance from those she cares about—including herself. That’s something all readers can relate to, no matter their size or popularity.

Benny’s life has always been different. Benny’s mom, Nola, is tired of living in small-town Missouri, and longs to be back in New Orleans. Benny’s dad, Calvin, grew up in Dennis Acres and could never imagine leaving it, and his “collectibles,” behind. In Homesick, the new novel by Kate Klise, these conflicting emotions become too much. After Benny’s dad loses his store, he has to move his entire inventory home. Furious, Benny’s mom demands that Calvin throw something—anything—away. When Calvin refuses, Benny’s mom walks out the door, leaving Benny and his dad behind.

Benny’s dad has always like to collect things—“irredeemables” from the repairman in town, electronic equipment that he believes will be part of a computer network that connects the entire country (Homesick takes place in 1983, before the Internet was widely used, or even known), and anything else he can find. After Nola leaves, though, Calvin begins to “collect” everything—used pizza boxes, truckloads from the dump and enough spare parts to actually build a working motorcycle. It fills the house that Benny and his dad live in, and then spills out onto the porch, and into the yard.

This mess would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but when Dennis Acres accidentally wins the title of “America’s Most Charming Small Town,” everyone realizes that Calvin’s mess needs to be cleaned up. Everyone that is, except for Calvin. Benny enlists the help of a number of memorable characters to devise a way to clean up and clear out his house. However, there is another force that no one sees coming that will change everything.

Homesick is a unique novel that offers both hilarious situations and heartwarming moments. There is a relatively small cast of characters, but each is presented carefully as having both flaws and redeemable characteristics. Klise, who lives in the Missouri Ozarks and has written several award-winning books for children, creates a community that invites you into its inner workings, and makes it easy to feel as if you know everyone in town. Her latest novel holds broad appeal for anyone who likes a good story and great characters. One warning, though: the ending will really blow you away!

Malcolm is a runt of a rat, enough so that he's mistaken for a mouse and brought from the Pet Emporium to Mr. Binney's fifth-grade classroom. Once there he befriends some students and also discovers the Midnight Academy, an after-hours gathering of all the class pets who work together to keep the school's “nutters,” or kids, safe. The Academy's disdain for rats keeps Malcolm in hiding about who he really is, and suspicious of Honey Bunny, a rabbit with a giant chip on his shoulder. The Academy claims “a critter reveals his true self at midnight,” when the faculty and students aren't around. When the school is faced with a crisis, will Malcolm step forward?

Malcolm at Midnight is an interesting mash-up of a middle-grade novel. First-time author W.H. Beck combines many beloved themes—intelligent animals, secret clubs, middle school melodrama—into a fine-tuned noir mystery. Snip the cat is evil enough to star in an animal remake of Cape Fear, yet the story of his youth makes him sympathetic (to a degree). And the plot against the school is genuinely creepy and similar to things kids may have heard about on the news. That said, the book also has a winning sense of humor—the story is told in the form of a note left for Mr. Binney by an anonymous student, and is lavishly footnoted with side commentary, including definitions of classroom vocabulary words. Beck finds comic relief in the scariest moments, as when Malcolm is scooped up by a barn owl—instead of becoming a rat-kebab, he manages to help the owl: “In nature, a friendship like this is usually permanently damaged by one friend eating the other.”

Brian Lies’ illustrations bring both the action and the quieter moments to life. Malcolm at Midnight is ultimately a story about identity and inclusion, but kids will get that message along with a spoonful of adventure, a smart whodunit and several laughs. This one's a winner.

Lemony Snicket does not want you to read his new book. In fact, he doesn’t want anyone to read it. And really, why should he want you to read it? It’s not like he knows you, or probably even wants to know you. Come to think of it, why would you want to read this book anyway?

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”is the first book in Lemony Snicket’s new All the Wrong Questions series. It gives the reader details of young Snicket’s childhood, complete with his unusual education at the hands of a mysterious organization. You may be asking: “What mysterious organization? What kind of unusual education?” If you are, then you are asking the wrong questions.

As a child, Lemony Snicket asked the wrong questions quite often. In fact, this new autobiographical series will focus on the four most important wrong questions he asked. The first wrong question—“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”—comes soon after he begins his apprenticeship with the stern, mysterious and dangerously inept S. Theodora Markson. What does the “S” stand for? Silly reader, you’ve asked the wrong question again.

Young Snicket and Ms. Markson travel by car to the deserted Stain’d-by-the-Sea, a seaside town that is no longer by the sea, with a forest of seaweed rather than trees. There, they are introduced to Mrs. Murphy Sallis, who wishes to hire the pair to recover her stolen statue of the Bombinating Beast. It isn’t long, however, until Snicket discovers that what was thought stolen was never stolen at all, and that no one in this desolate little town is who they seem to be.

Filled with mystery, double- and triple-crosses, intrigue and Snicket’s distinctive brand of deadpan humor, literary jokes, sneaky book suggestions and snarky asides, “Who Could It Be at This Hour?” is a wonderfully disorienting ride through the childhood of one of today’s most mysterious and misunderstood authors (otherwise known as Daniel Handler). Like Snicket’s debut, A Series of Unfortunate Events (which has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide), this book contains elements of both the realistic and fantastical, offering just enough to keep the reader from ever truly knowing what will happen next.

Adding to the book’s appeal are the wonderful, ominous and foretelling illustrations by Seth, an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator. On the cover, at the beginning of each chapter and scattered throughout the book, Seth’s masterful illustrations give subtle yet important clues to the reader.

Now that you know the wrong questions to ask, it’s time to learn the correct one. That question, obviously, is “Even though Lemony Snicket really doesn’t want me to read his book, should I?” And the answer, of course, is a definitive YES!

Step back into the glorious days of childhood with Ellen Bryan Obed’s lovely, lyrical tribute, Twelve Kinds of Ice, a book whose 64 pages can be easily devoured in one sitting and enjoyed by both children and adults.

Who knew there were so many types of ice, starting with “The First Ice,” a fragile sheet that appeared in a barn bucket when Obed was a girl growing up on the family farm in Maine. “The Second Ice” was a bit thicker, becoming a plaything that could be held, admired, then shattered into shiny shards. In each short chapter, excitement builds as the author remembers how she, her siblings and friends began each season by skating on a neighbor’s field, then on a frozen stream, and later in the middle of a lake, accelerating “to silver speeds at which legs, clouds and sun, wind and cold, raced together.”

The icing on this icy cake was the family’s annual ice rink, known as “Bryan Gardens,” which was built with boards and filled with a garden hose. “It was our Boston Garden,” Obed writes, “our Maple Leaf Gardens, our Montreal Forum. . . . It had just about everything that the great arenas had except a roof. But Bryan Gardens had the sky, and to us, that was the best roof of all.”

Barbara McClintock’s enchanting illustrations bring this winter kingdom to life, her graceful lines showing the skaters’ wonderful whirls and spins atop the many kinds of ice. She catches the thrilling runs of skaters heading downhill, zigzagging through an apple orchard on the magical day that a heavy crust of ice on snow turns the world into a rink. McClintock’s final spread is a whimsical creation, showing how these dreamy thrills live on throughout the year, after all the ice has melted.

Warm up some hot chocolate and cookies, light a fire and gather ’round on a cozy winter eve to read aloud Twelve Kinds of Ice. Then be sure to have everyone’s skates sharpened for your own outing.

He looked the same: the same space alien pajamas, the same holey socks, the same way of descending the stairs on his rump. But Liza knows this boy in front of her at breakfast is not her brother Patrick. He’s too quiet, too polite, and his eyes are strangely vacant.

Liza knows what has happened: the spindlers. The spiderlike creatures have stolen her brother’s soul and taken it to their underground lairs, leaving his body to crumble to dust and release thousands of new spindlers to wreak havoc on unsuspecting humans. Liza’s a willful girl, so she sets off through a hole in the basement wall and, like a famous soul sister named Alice, falls into a strange new wonderland of a world. Teaming up with a rat named Mirabella, Liza meets troglods, nids, the Lumer-Lumpen, the lovely nocturni and the awful scawgs.

Readers will be right there with Liza on her odyssey, who proves her strength and resourcefulness at every turn in the fascinating world below. Oliver has crafted a thoroughly engaging, fast-paced novel that will remind fans of Suzanne Collins’ Gregor the ­Overlander (2004). Besides an exciting story full of terrible and marvelous creatures, this is an ode to the power of stories and the attachments to home. Young readers will be as caught up in the story Oliver spins as souls are trapped in the spindler queen’s web.

Blue, all three pounds of her, was discovered in a copper kettle in December 1941 and adopted by the generous and caring Hannah Spooner. Now Blue is going into fifth grade and spends many of her waking hours wondering about her birth mother. Was she Amelia Earhart? A movie star? Why did she desert Blue?

Set in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont against the faint backdrop of the Korean War, True Colors is a gentle page-turner, filled with secrets, mystery and history. Blue’s farm life is simple, if difficult: There are weeds to be pulled and cows to be milked. Blue is in charge of delivering the breads from Hannah’s small bakery and listening to the stories each recipient tells.

Blue is on the verge of puberty, but her best friend, Nadine, seems to have already grown up. It’s a confusing time, made more confusing by other changes. Why is Nadine’s father absent this summer? Why are the farm animals disappearing?

Natalie Kinsey-Warnock envelopes the reader in the world of the early 1950s, where divorce is a terrible scandal, being in trouble means making difficult choices and family secrets are respected by the community as private.

Blue’s 10-year-old voice is especially effective here. She has a lot to think about, but she sees the world clearly through her young eyes. True Colors is a real keeper.

Like troubled, dream-filled sleep, there’s a delightfully mysterious quality to Grace Lin’s new novel, Starry River of the Sky. More a companion than a sequel to her Newbery Honor novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, this is a meditation on home, forgiveness and what it means to be in balance in the world. These are not easy ideas for anyone, but Lin invites young readers to think beyond the page.

The reader is lulled into the tale of Rendi. At first he is a cranky runaway, fleeing his materialistic magistrate father. Later he learns to consider needs greater than his own and to become not only the hero of his life, but the hero of the Village of Clear Sky. The villagers all suffer from the missing moon and worry about the innkeeper’s absent son. Rendi fills in for the missing boy by working as a chore boy at the inn. When a mysterious woman takes up residence there, things slowly begin to change. Her storytelling, and the stories she teases from Rendi, change everything.

Like the earlier novel, much of the story is told through Chinese folktales that are woven together to reveal a mystery. Slowly, through these stories, we see Rendi examine his circumstance, take great risks to save the village, endure painful goodbyes, forgive his father and realize his need for home.

I found myself folding over page corners and flipping back to reread sections as the meaning of the story was slowly revealed. Savoring a book like this reminds me of what I like most about reading: diving deep into a new place and finding personal connections in the most unlikely of characters. Lin has written another book that is truly for all ages.