Avi

Seven short stories that chart the turning points in the lives of seven protagonists in their middle years.

After his thievery conviction in 1724, Oliver Cromwell Pitts is sent from England across the Atlantic to America where he is enslaved on a tobacco farm, never giving up on finding his sister, Charity, brought to the colonies on a different ship.

Thorston, an alchemist who spent his life trying to decipher the secret to immortality contained in the Book Without Words, suddenly drops dead leaving his talking raven, Odo, and his servant Sybil to reap the rewards of his work.

Each member of the South Orange River seventh-grade soccer team has qualities of excellence, but not on the soccer field.

McKinley, a malamute, is torn between the domestic world of his human family and the wild world of Lupin, a wolf that is trying to recruit dogs to replenish the dwindling wolf pack.

When World War I descends upon a tiny Polish village, seven boys launch their own deadly battle for the right to be crowned king of the land.

In 1486 England, a penniless kitchen boy named Lambert Simnel is told by a mysterious friar that he, Lambert, is actually Prince Edward, the true King of England, setting him on a dangerous course to regain the throne. Based on a true story.

In Italy in 1491, Magnus the magician and his apprentice are summoned to the castle of Duke Claudio to determine if his daughter is indeed being haunted by a ghost.

In Providence, R.I., in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of eleven-year-old Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared and whose story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist.

Following the Revolution, an eleven-year-old boy becomes the captive of a ruthless man who has set up his own "nation, " supported by piracy, on a remote part of the New Jersey coast.